Perhaps all of us pondered on how to interpret our dreams. This question was also a subject of a study by Sigmund Freud. The
basic idea of this theory is that a dream is closely connected to the
ideas, desires, which occupied our mind before a dream has occurred.
According to Freud, “Dreaming represents a functioning of mind. It is
fulfillment of a wish. It can be included in the overall chain of
psychological perceptions accompanying us during waking moments. This
process is a result of a highly complex intellectual activity". To
decipher the meaning of dreams, Freud used the method of decryption.
After he was told about the general content of dreams, Freud would begin
inquiring about individual elements of this dream with the same
question asking the dreamer: what comes to mind in relation to this
element when the dreamer thinks about it? The person was asked to report
any thoughts that would come to mind. A thought that appears in
connection with a dream is nothing random, it is associated with the
dream subject. Freud identifies the explicit and the latent content of a dream. With
the explicit content, a dream represents an event in which people are
faced with fulfillment of their desires in symbolic form, in other
words, hallucinatory experience.The latent content can be divided into several categories:
- When a dream is conscious or preconscious;
- When a dream is unconscious.
The contents of the unconscious, as opposed to the contents of the
preconscious, are not realized at will by a person. What comes into a
dream from the preconscious and what comes out of the unconscious will
differ as follows: if spiritual life is reflected in a dream, it affects
all feelings, desires, and senses experienced by a person, whereas
unconscious dreams contain only hidden desires since they are a domain
for secret desires. According
to Freud's theory, unconscious desires are feelings unacceptable in
respect to "ethical, aesthetic, and social norms." These desires are
self-centered.
They include:
• sexual desires (including those prohibited by ethical and social norms, such as incest);
•
hatred, purely negative motivational patterns ("the desire for revenge
and death, directed to people close in life and loved ones: parents,
siblings, spouse, own children, which is nothing out of ordinary. These
rejected by the censorship desires are said to arise from the gates of
hell; in a woken state, no censorship against these visions does not
seem to be harsh enough ").
Freud
believed that in order for a hidden dream to become more substantive,
it must undergo some special decoding, or "dream processing", which
consists of the following components:
The
first one is condensation. The dream is shortened. One character in a
dream may be a representation of several people in real life. The
second component is transition. Important human thoughts can become
something appearing insignificant in dreams, and vice versa. Deformation is the third element in interpreting our dreams.
The
fourth component in dream deciphering is reconstruction. Dreams do not
dwell on known principles of the waking state. The content of dreams
must undergo transformation to translate their content. During the
process of dreaming, the connections which exist between the elements
when being awake are lost: thoughts are transformed into images,
abstract elements become concrete.
Based
on these points, the next, fifth component, the dream symbolism comes
to play. Dreaming uses symbols to turn the latent thoughts and
perceptions into symbols.
Finally,
the last component of this is cycling. If a dream is a product of
unconscious activity, it is also very close to the conscious activity
in the waking state when we try to use reprocessing, or cycling, to
justify our dreams using common logic.
All
these processes have a goal to give our dreams some degree of
disconnect in order to conceal their real meaning within their hidden
content. Freud's
theory is interesting and surprisingly coherent, but it is not an
absolute answer, but merely an attempt to unravel the mystery of dreams.
This theory is relevant and in demand even today, thus the study of
dreams lives on.
2021-01-03