Freudian
Psychology of Dream Analysis
Dream analysis has always been a very mysterious study of the dreams. In
the ancient times, the societies of Greece and Egypt assigned special
status to the dream analyzer as they believed that only those blessed
with special powers could do so. With the advent of science into our
lives, we have been able to understand what the dreams are and what do
dreams mean. One need not be blessed but a little degree of psychology
would certainly help in unraveling the mysteries of the mind. According
to the definition of dreams, it is a sequence of events that a person
visualizes while being asleep. Here are a few schools of thought on the
psychology of dream interpretations and its meanings.
Freudian dream analysis:
According to the father of psychoanalysis named Sigmund Freud, dreams
were a manifestation of the dreamer’s inner desires and wishes. He was
of the opinion that the ‘day residue’ or the unfulfilled wishes of a
person presented itself in the form of dreams. To illustrate his point,
he cites the examples of children. According to the dream analysis
psychology, a child tends to mumble all his fears, wishes etc while he
is fast asleep. The situation is same with the adults but there is a
small difference. In fact with adults, the situation is quite
complicated as their dreams contain both the true meaning and the
projected meaning; the former hidden within the latter. Therefore, to
understand the meaning of dreams, one has to analyze a lot as these are
subjected to a lot of distortion making it impossible for us to get the
dream meaning. According to Sigmund Freud dream analysis, apart from the
true meaning of a dream, there are egos of people and suppressed yet
strong inner desires of a person. All this together manifests in a dream
and according to Freud dreams are “a disguised fulfillment of repressed
wishes”. He is of the opinion that since these desires are suppressed
within a person, hence if they are expressed in any other form, the
sleep might be disturbed. So to say, meaning of a dream is to express
those unfulfilled wishes along with the reticent feelings of a person’s
mind.
Operations to understand dream meaning:
To understand a dream, Sigmund Freud used the following operations as a
handiwork to extract the true meaning from the disguised meanings.
• Condensation – A single dream can mean a lot. In other words, the
dream meanings can vary as the time of a particular dream is brief or
laconic in nature. Therefore, he observes that often more than one dream
may be condensed to form a particular sequence of event in a dream.
• Displacement – In order to not raise suspicions of the conscious mind,
the emotional importance of the real meaning of a dream is torn away
and attached to something else. In simpler words, this means that what
we see and what the dream actually is are two very distinct entities.
• Representation – According to dream analysis freud, a particular
thought does not occur merely as a thought. In fact, the dream
containing those thoughts is manifested in the mind with images. These
visual pictures occur in continuation of each other making them look as
if it is one dream. Often, one finds that there were many different
unconnected elements in the dream. This is because it is not one dream
but a multitude of dreams wherein the mind is moving back and forth.
• Symbolism – The significance of a symbol in a dream is that it
represents a person, idea, place or even an action.
Complications in dream analysis:
Complicating the entire course of actions further is a dreamer’s
recollection of the dream. Sometimes, he is not able to represent the
whole of his dreams leaving significant portions of the dream untold.
This affects the dream reading to a very large extent. This is called
‘secondary elaboration’ where the missing gaps are filled in by the
dreamer or are left blank. According to Freud, in this way, the whole
dream and meaning of dreams becomes distorted and it gets difficult to
comprehend the true meaning. For example, if a person dreams of tornado
then the meaning could be vastly different from each other. The dreamer
may tell you just the main part but it could have several sub parts as
well. Therefore, according to the dream analysis tornado, the dreamer is
caught up in a problematic situation and wants a way out. Understand
that this is different in every dream and meanings are never certain and
are unique in nature.
According to Sigmund Freud dreams which are full of anxieties and
nightmares are failed representation of dreams. Upon doing nightmare
analysis, Freud discovered that the conscious mind is aware of the mind
inner desires. Therefore, it suppresses the desires and wishes of the
mind. The only exceptions are the traumatic dreams that are often seen
by the people and the meanings of which are difficult to find out.
According to Freud, the dreams are “the royal road to knowledge of
unconscious activities of the mind”.
Today, if you want to know ‘what my dreams mean’, all you have to do is
to visit a site claiming to have an online dream analysis. Write in your
dream and it will be analyzed by the software supporting it. This will
provide you with instant answers to what dreams mean. Alternately, you
could also buy dream analysis books so that you can always know about
the true meaning and dreams interpretation. Getting your dreams analyzed
is no big deal nowadays. Visiting a website to ‘interpret my dream’ is
easy but you may not get elaborate results. This means that the answers
provided would be according to the free dream dictionary online and not a
detailed analysis of your dream. But before you get your free dream
analysis done, remember to ease off your mind or unwind yourself
regularly. Dreams occur to the people whose minds are already
preoccupied with a lot of unsolved agendas.