Unconscious Dreaming
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There are many facts that are unknown about the mind. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have tried to understand how it works. We have learned that the mind has a number of different levels of processing. Before Sigmund Freud “nearly all the previous research and theorizing of psychologists had dealt with conscious, such as perception, memory, judgment, and learning” (Hunt185). Freud brought forth a number of theories that dealt with “the unconscious and its crucial role in human behavior”(Hunt 185). The unconscious is a storage area for information that is not being used. It is also the home of “powerful primitive drives and forbidden wishes that constantly generated pressure on the conscious mind”(Hunt 185). As this area of the mind can only be understood through speculation, I will look to dream interpretation and psychoanalysis as keys to unlocking this area of psychology
What are dreams? Are they simply random brain activity, or are they our mind trying to tell us something? Dreams represent many different areas of ones life in physical, emotional, and mental ways. “When we sleep we do much more than just rest our weary bones; we tap into our subconscious mind (Ullman and Zimmerman 1979). The subconscious has much to offer about oneself. “The average human being spends one third of their life in sleep and during each sleep approximately two hours is spent dreaming”(Ullman and Zimmerman 1979). These dreams are important because they are the voice of our subconscious. Dreams can relay to people facts about their lives that they are not even aware of. There are also many ways that dreams can help cure different physical, emotional, and mental problems in ones life. I will look at dreams, their meanings, and possible ways of interpreting them using such methods as hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Dreams can be defined as “a conscious series of images that occur during sleep” (Colliers, 1984). Dreams are usually very vivid in color and imagery. They are said to reveal to the dreamer different wishes, concerns, and worries that he or she has. Dreams may reflect every part of who the dreamer is. The content of dreams depends on “how old the dreamer is and how educated the he or she is” (Colliers, 1984). We have no control over that which we dream about, but we do know that they are influenced by situations in our lives. An example of how a dream can be influenced by our lives is as follows. I had a dream that I was surfing in Hawaii a couple of nights after I returned from Honolulu in 1990. My dream about surfing stemmed from when we were there, we went to the Pipeline, on the north shore of Oahu. The dream itself was weird. I was on my board and I fell off. The weird part was that when I was in the water I started sinking, I decided to try to swim to the surface. I figured that the water was much deeper than I thought, so I kept swimming. I started to run out of breath and I began to panic. I woke up from the dream and found that my sheet was in my mouth blocking my intake of air. This shows how physiological needs can manifest themselves in our dreams.
An individuals unconscious mind combines bits and pieces of information and places them together. Dreams are almost always visual. “Forty to fifty percent of dreams have some form of communication present in them and a very small percentage of dreams give the dreamer the ability to use his or her five senses”(Encarta). Dreams allow one to take a closer look into their mind in a quest for self-discovery. In ancient Greece dreams were believed to be messages from the gods. Hippocrates and Aristotle believed that dreams contained physiological information that may be cause of future illnesses. Dreams can be used to solve a number of different types of problems. In The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud he states “As regards the dream, all the troubles of waking life are transferred by it to the sleeping state” (Freud 113). They relay things about a person that the person may not be able to see. Freud says that certain images in dreams sometimes have significannot
meanings relating to the persons life. Freud called dream interpretation “the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious in mental life”(Hunt 178)
Much of what is in our dreams is not straightforward or easy to understand. “Different objects in the dream may serve as a symbol”(Kalb 77). We may have to look much deeper into ourselves if we hope to understand what has come to us by way of dreaming. Dreams represent different areas of ones life that deal with ones physical, mental, and emotional being. The subconscious mind cannot speak directly to the conscious mind, but they do communicate through symbolism. These symbols can relay information about ones life if these symbols are interpreted. Dreams are “a private language, known only to ourselves” (Cartwright 5). “Youll never see an object in dream that you havent seen in your daily life”(Ullman and Zimmerman 1979) “Within the subconscious lie different types of things such as suppressed emotions, creativity, and basic human instinct”(Ullman and Zimmerman 1979). The conscious part of the mind works when people are awake and is the part of the mind that handles things that people can understand. Dreams can offer an escape to individuals who need relief from their everyday problems. They have a way of setting one free from reality, which includes all of ones problems. Dreams help one to overcome these stresses and help people to get on with their lives. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states “The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these”. Although an individual can not relive the same moment, dreams allow us to recreate those experiences. Our feelings about the event may manifest in our dreams and allow us to handle a situation the way we wanted to, not necessarily the way it happened. As we have learned, the capacity of long term memory seems to be limitless. Although we may not think about a situation on a regular basis, memories of that moment are within us and therefore become possible subjects of dreams.
Dreams have both a metaphysical and a physical existence. The metaphysical is the imagery within the dream and their relation to the subconscious. The physical aspect is the chemical reactions occur within the brain during dreams. The tie between physical and metaphysical cannot be established but it safe to say that one does exist. Thoughts are not physical in nature, we cant touch or see them, but in order for them to occur the brain must go through chemical and hormonal changes. “The dream uses