Have you ever tried to understand your dreams, reveal the hidden message your subconscious is trying to make you see? Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. (Dictionary. com) Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, said that nothing occurs by chance. In fact, every action and thought is motivated by our subconscious. Still, to live in a civilized society, we tend to repress our urges and our impulses. However, these urges and impulses must be released in some manner; one of them are dreams.
I therefore agree with Sigmund Freud in his statement: “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. ” Dreams are the unspoken words of our minds, words that can and will affect our lives, for the best or the worst. Joseph Heller, American author and dramatist, once said: “I want to keep my dreams even the bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long. ” Why do we dream? Dreams are a secret outlet for repressed desires. Freud used dream analysis to interpret the underlying language of dreams, which is very different from normal conscious thinking.
To support his research, he categorized aspects of the mind into three parts: Id, Ego, and Super-ego. The Id is defined as the oldest part of the mind from which the other structures are derived. It is a sense of psyche that causes us to act on impulse; to follow our primary instincts and ignore the consequences. The Id is based on the “pleasure principle” – it doesn’t care about anything but its own satisfaction. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes this part of our mind as the following: “It contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth. …] It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctive needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle”. The Ego is that part of the psyche representing consciousness. It employs secondary process that is reason, common sense. This self-aware aspect of the mind allows us to understand that other people have needs, and that acting impulsively can be harmful. As for the Super-ego, it is the censor of the Id.
It enforces the moral codes of the Ego – tells us the difference between the wrong and the right- and is formed as the child gradually acquires cultural and ethical ideas, at the age of five. This third division of mind is described by Freud as follows: “The long period of childhood, during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents, leaves behind it as a precipitate the formation in his ego of a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name of super-ego. ” When awake, the desires and impulses of the Id are suppressed by the Super-ego.
Since our guards are down when asleep, the unconscious or the Id has the opportunity to act out and express its hidden desires. However, those may be psychologically harmful at times, which is why a “censor” translates the Id’s disturbing content into a more acceptable symbolic form: dreams. Therefore, as Freud said, dreams are a way to express the unconscious emotions arising from the Id – otherwise we would be constantly disturbed by them in our sleep and soon wake up. Also, the reason we struggle to remember our dreams, is because the Super-ego is at work.
It is doing its job by protecting the conscious mind from the disturbances conjured by the unconscious. So, answering the question above, why do we dream? We dream to protect our sleep. Dreams are also very helpful in retrieving long-lost memories. Repression is one of the most haunting concepts in psychology (Loftus, 1993). Something shocking happens, and the mind pushes it into some inaccessible corner of the unconscious, the Id. There, it sleeps for years, or even decades, or even forever-isolated from the rest of mental life.
However, the memory may be retrieved, when one is ready to recall and deal with the trauma. When emerging to consciousness, it may take the form of dreams, sending images of the repressed memory. Over the years, there has been a rise in reported memories of childhood sexual abuse that were repressed for many years. Also, those people just recovering traumatic memories are suing alleged perpetrators for events that happened twenty, thirty or even forty years ago. Elizabeth F. Loftus, American psychologist, talks about repressed memories in her article The Reality of Repressed Memories .
She shows several cases regarding repression. One of those blatant examples occurred in 1990, when a landmark case went to trial in Redwood City, California. George Franklin Sr. , fifty-one years old, is accused for a murder that happened over twenty years ago, the murder of the eight year-old girl, Susan Kay Nason, on September 22nd, 1969. Eileen, Franklin’s daughter and Susan’s best friend, only eight years old as well when the murder took place, is surprisingly the one providing the major evidence of her father’s confliction to the case.
Since she had experienced an unbearable trauma watching her best friend sexually assaulted and murdered by her father, Eileen’s memory of witnessing both the assault and the murder was repressed for over twenty years. A series of flashbacks and very disturbing dreams gave Eileen back the images of the rising memory, such as the look of betrayal in Susan’s eyes right before the murder, and Franklin sexually assaulting Suzan in the back of a van. Later, more fragments would return until Eileen has a rich and detailed memory of the past events.
She saw her father with his hands raised above his head with a rock in them. She remembers screaming, walking back to where Susan lay, covered with blood. Eileen’s memory report is then believed by several members of her family, her therapist, and more importantly by the San Mateo County district attorney’s office, who decides to prosecute Franklin. Impressed by Eileen’s confident detailed memory, the jury convicted George Franklin of murder, and found him guilty in first degree, on November 30th, 1990, twenty one years later.
In other cases, one won’t even recall the dream, for it is still too disturbing. The manifestations of his memory will make him wake up at places related to those dreams he can’t recall, his repressed memories failing to show entirely. It is the case of Clay Evans, a character in the One Tree Hill television series. Clay is married to a woman named Sara. The two of them were leading a beautiful and promising life when one day, unexpectedly, while Sara was preparing some drinks for her husband, she falls and dies from heart attack. Traumatized, Clay follows Sara’s parents’ advice and goes to a therapist.
Still, not being able to deal with the shocking event, he decides to run away, disappear. He drowns himself in work and disconnects from his past: Sara’s family, the therapist, their old house, everything that ever reminded him of his wife. A few years later, Clay is the victim of a wandering problem: he would dream of something and end up waking up in different places all over town: a swimming pool, a park, and a basketball court. Clay then decides to face his problem and goes back to the same therapist he’d seen after Sara’s death, at Browden Rehab, where he meets a small boy: Logan.
The therapist will gradually explain to Clay that he might have suppressed a bad memory after Sara’s death, the thing that reminded him the most of her, so strongly he had forgotten about it. After several sessions, the image in Clay’s dreams, his long-lost memory finally comes back to him: it is a baby’s room. The image gets clearer and he can read over the cradle: Logan. He had repressed the memory of his own son, for it reminded him too much about his beloved wife. That is what explains the different locations where Clay woke up during his wandering.
In fact, all of these places are where one usually takes his children to play with them and have fun together. Therefore, I believe, based on the two examples above, and since dreaming is the only state where the unconscious feels free to express everything it contains, such as the trauma that will only come to the surface when one is ready to face it, that dreams, though their main function is protecting one’s sleep, have a great role in retrieving long-lost memories and overcoming traumatic events. Finally, dreams are sometimes mistaken for reality. It is the case of Mal in the Inception movie.
She’s a dream stealer who knew that in order to wake up from a dream, one needed to die. Therefore, when she wakes up one day from one of her dreams, she doesn’t realize she was back to reality. She thought she was still sleeping, dreaming. Her husband, Cobb, tries to convince her that what she thought wasn’t true, but she wouldn’t listen. She gives up on everything, the love of her life, her children, and her family in order to “reunite with her reality”. She jumps from a hotel room, begging Cobb to follow her, trying to convince him that his children aren’t his real children, that they’re part of the dream.
She deliberately kills herself and her only mistake was believing her reality is a dream. There are many cases like this one, where we can’t separate dreams and reality. How can one know they’re really awake, instead of dreaming that they are? This question has been an unsolved riddle for centuries. As an example, Zhuangzi, a Chinese scholar in the fourth century B. C. and one of the first skeptical philosophers, stated in a famous poem that he did not know whether he was Zhuangzi who dreamt that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamt that he was Zhuangzi.
Other people nowadays, mistake events that happened in dreams for reality. A guy posted online: “Is this a normal thing? It’s been happening for the last couple of years, but recently I’ve noticed it happening more often. I have a dream in which, for example I have a conversation with someone I know, but don’t remember it the morning as a dream…. and then at some point days later I remember the dream as an actual event which I believe really happen. I’ve often confronted people for things they never actually said or did – sometimes I find out/work out whole days lodged in my memory which never happened at all.
At first I thought it was quite interesting but now I’m starting to wonder just how much of my life really did happen…. It’s like I’m losing my grip on reality… ” (sciforums. com). We have to therefore be careful about not being carried too far away in dreams, for they might take the toll on us and make us forget who we really are, and what is real. In order to enjoy dreams to the fullest and not be haunted by the thought that dreams are harmful, lucid dreaming is the best answer. It is a concept where one has the ability to become consciously aware they are dreaming in their own dreams.
For some, this has only happened once or twice by accident. Others have never experienced a lucid dream. But there are some individuals to whom the art of lucid dreaming has become a science. They study the methods of inducing lucid dreams and practice their skills in the dream world. Once the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming, not only can they control the content of their dream, but they can control themselves as well, granting themselves the ability of flying or having superhuman strength. This way, the nightmares can be controlled, and one can finally recognize dreams from reality.
In conclusion, dreams are the field where the subconscious feels free to talk and express itself. Though it has its advantages since dreaming is our key to sleeping and retrieving long-lost memories, it can also be harmful if it takes the toll on us and makes us forget who we really are, and where we belong. Dreams will always be one of psychology’s most amazing mysteries. “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach. ” (Jung)
