Freud and Dreams
Freud and DreamsFreud and Dreams
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 our own personal identity, which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of another side of a person that has yet to be explored. 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 cornerstone of Sigmund Freud’s 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 Freud’s other theories have been disputed in recent years). Freud suggested that dreaming is an excellent chance for our inner fears and desires to come to surface and present themselves clearly - or perhaps less clearly sometimes - before us. Everybody, at some point or another, must have had some experience with dreams that supports this argument.
Freud supposedly admired Aristotle’s assertion that dreaming is the activity of the mind during sleep. 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. 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.
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, the many people that do remember their dreams are mostly 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...
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