Essay About Dream Images And Dreams

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. This technique of dream-interpretation allowed him to penetrate (Fine, 1973).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. Finally since dreams are dramatizations narrating a dream

is what linguist call a performance or demonstration and the rule, “What you see is what you get “, cannot apply, since only one party can see. (Dentan, PH.D, 1988)

In the case of dream accounts, it is the context, which is vital. After all, since meaning is context, they are by definition meaningless. David Foulke, who wrote the book Dreaming: A Cognitive Psychoanalysis Analysis, correctly states ” that dreams dont mean anything “. But people make meaning, ” as bees make honey compulsively

and continuously, until it satisfies their dreams and their lives “. (Dentan PH.D, 1988 ).In analyzing the dreams of Freuds patients he would sometimes use a certain test. If the first account of the patients dream were too hard to follow he would ask them to repeat it. In by doing so the patient rarely uses the same words. But the parts of the dream, which he describes in different terms, are by fact, the weak spots in the dream. By Freud asking to repeat the dream the patient realizes that he will go to great lengths to interpret it. Under the pressure of the resistance he hastily covers the weak spots in the dreams disguise by replacing any expression that threaten to betray its meaning by other less revealing ones (Freud, pg.515 ).

It will no doubt surprise anyone to be told that dreams are nothing other than fulfillments of wishes. According to Aristotles accurate definition,” a dream is thinking that persists in the state of sleep.” Since than our daytime thinking produces psychical acts, such as, judgement, denials, expectations, intentions and so on. The

theory of dreams being wish fulfillment has been divided into two groups. Some dreams appear openly as wish fulfillment, and others in which the wish fulfillment was unrecognizable and often disguised. Others disagree and feel that dreams are nothing more than random memories that the mind sifts through (Globus, 1991).

The next question is where the wishes that come true