Freud And Dreams Essay Example For Students

Freud And Dreams Essay Dreams have been objects of boundless fascination and mystery for humankind since the beginning of time. These nocturnal vivid images seem to arise from some source other than our ordinary conscious mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our own personal identity which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of `otherness in the dream images that carries a sense of the strange and eerie. The bizarre and nonsensical characters and plots in dreams point to deeper meanings and contain rational and insightful comments on our waking situations and emotional experiences. The ancients thought that dreams were messages from the gods. The cornerstone of Sigmund Freuds infamous psychoanalysis, is the interpretation of dreams. Freud called dream-interpretation the via reggia, or the royal road to the unconscious, and it is his theory of dreams that has best stood the test of time, over a period of more than seventy years (Many of Freuds other theories have been disputed in recent years). Freud reportedly admired Aristotles assertion that dreaming is the activity of the mind during sleep (Fine, 1973). It was perhaps the use of the term activity that Freud most appreciated in this brief definition for, as his understanding of the dynamics of dreaming increased, so did the impression of ceaseless mental activity differing in quality from that of ordinary waking life (Fine, 1973). In fact, the quality of mental activity during sleep differed so radically from what we take to be the essence of mental functioning that Freud coined the term Kingdom of the Illogical to describe that realm of the human psyche. We dream every single night whether it stays with us or not. It is a time when our minds bring together material which is kept apart during out waking hours (Anonymous, 1991). As Erik Craig said while we dream we entertain a wider range of human possibilities then when awake; the open house of dreaming is less guarded (Craig, 1992). Superficially, we are all convinced that we know just what a dream is. But the most cursory investigation into the dreams essence suggests that after describing it as a mental something which we have while sleeping, and perhaps, in accord with experiments currently being carried out in connection with the physiological accompaniments of dreaming, such as Rapid-Eye Movements (REM), the various stages and depths of dream activity as reflected in changing rates of our vital signs (pulse-rate, heart-beat, brain-waves), and the time of the night when various kinds of dreams occur, we come up against what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the Ding-An-Sich (thing-in-itself), and find ourselves unable to penetrate further into the hidden nature of this universal human experience (Fromm, 1980). It has been objected on more than one occasion that we in fact have no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them as they actually occurred. In the first place, what we remember of a dream and what we exercise our interpretative arts upon has been mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory. Which seems incapable of retaining a dream and may have lost precisely the most important parts of its content. It quite frequently happens that when we seek to turn our attention to one of our dreams, we find ourselves regretting the fact that we can remember nothing but a single fragment, which itself has much uncertainty. Secondly, there is every reason to suspect that our memory of dreams is not only fragmentary but inaccurate and falsified. On the one hand it may be doubted whether what we dreamt was really as hazy as our recollection of it, and on the other hand it may also be doubted whether in attempting to reproduce it we do not fill in what was never there, or what was forgotten (Freud, pg. 512). Dream accounts are public verbalization and as public performances, dream accounts resemble the anecdotes people use to give meaning to their experience, to entertain friends and to give or get a form of satisfaction ( Erdelyi, 35 ). In order to verbalize the memory of a dream that there are at least three steps one must take. First putting a recollected dream into words requires labeling categories, and labeling categories involves interpretation. Next since the dream is multimodal, putting them into words requires the collapsing of visual and auditory imagery into words. Solar Energy EssaySometimes the capitalist is himself the entrepreneur, and indeed in the case of the dreams, an unconscious wish is stirred up by daytime activity and proceeds to construct a dream. ( Palombo, M. D, 1986 ) The view that dreams carry on the occupations and interests of waking life has been confirmed by the discovery of the concealed dream-thoughts. These are only concerned with what seems important to us and interests us greatly. Dreams are never occupied with minor details. But the contrary view has also been accepted, that dreams pick up things left over from the previous day. Thus it was concluded that two fundamentally different kinds of psychical processes are concerned in the formation of dreams. One of these produces perfectly rational thoughts, of no less than normal thinking, while the other treats these thoughts in a manner, which is bewildering and irrational. Referring to Freuds quote stated in the beginning, by analyzing dreams one can take a step forward in our understanding of the composition of that most mysterious of all instruments. Only a small step forward will enable us to proceed further with its analysis. (Freud, pg. 589 608 ) The unconscious is the true psychical reality, in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented, as is the communications of our sense organ. There is of course no question that dreams give us knowledge for the future. But it would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not false. (Freud, pg. 662) By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But the future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been molded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. ( Palombo, M. D, 1986 )Although there has been some descriptive study of the incidence and character of feeling in REM dreaming, there has been no investigation of the appropriateness of dream feelings to accompany dream imagery. It has been suggested that, the generation of affect in dreaming may not be as reliable as the generation of other forms of dream imagery. Dream affect generally seems to be consistent with the larger narrative context of the dreams. (David Foulkes Brenda Sullivan, 1988) Research by Cohen and Wolfe has shown that a simple distraction in the morning had a strong negative effect on dream recall. The study concerned a variable relatively neglected in dream research, the level of interest the subjects have about their dreams. One finding was that interest in dreams appeared to vary with sex: woman reported that they more frequently speculated their dreams and discussed them with other people than did men. These differences could reflect a greater tendency for woman to pay more attention to their emotional life and inner self. (Paul R. Robbins Roland H. Tanck, 1988)) One assumes naturally that the past events incorporated in his patients dream imagery may be defensive substitutions for other more objectionable events of the past. Through its relation to the dream, the screen memory, like the day residue, provides access to the associative structures of memory in, which are embedded the wishes and events, whose repression lies at the core of the neurotic process. ( Palombo M. D, 1986 ) But dreams do not consist solely of illusions, If for instance, one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary- but fear is real. ( Freud, pg. 74 ) Affects in dreams cannot be judged in the same way as the remainder of their content, and we are faced by the problem of what part of the psychical processes occurring in dreams is to be regarded as real. That is to say, as a claim to be classed among the psychical processes of waking life. (Freud, pg. 74 ) The theory of the hidden meaning of dreams might have come to a conclusion merely by following linguistic usage. It is true that common language sometimes speaks of dreams with contempt. But, on the whole, ordinary usage treats dreams above all as the blessed fulfillers of wishes . If ever we find our expectations surpassed by the event, we exclaim, I should never have imagined such a thing even in my wildest dreams ! ( Freud pg. 132-133 )