What does the founder of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud) say on dreams?
Dreams are psychic phenomena. Dreams are beneficial to sleep, they prevent us from waking by the stimuli that is presented in the dream. Excessive anxiety for instance won’t allow us to sleep nor dream. The following is based on Introduction to psychoanalysis.
There can be 2 kinds of stimuli to dreams:
- External – Music, environment…
- Internal – Somatic stimuli, such as body condition
The dream doesn’t simply reproduce the stimuli, but elaborate – play upon it – replace it.
The dreamer himself only is to tell the meaning of the dream. The dreamer does know what his dream meant but doesn’t know that he knows, therefore believes he doesn’t know. Same as in hypnotic experiences.
The dream as a whole is a distorted substitute for something subconscious. The subconscious in our dream leads us back to the infantile stage – When you dream, you are an infant.
Freud developed a method for discerning the message of the dream:
- What the dream say is not our concern, you look for the unconscious.
- Awaking the substitute form is the objective
- Wait until the hidden unconscious appear by itself
Then, resistance is met. If resistance is slight, it means you are very close. If it’s heavy, you have a long journey ahead.
Every time a dream is completely comprehensible to us, it proves to be a hallucinated wish-fulfillment.
In dreams there is distortion. The distortion is the product of “Dreamwork”. It is a mental functioning of which the dream is the conscious symptom. In other words, there is content to your dream, but that content is distorted by the dream itself. The resistance to the interpretation done by the “Dream censor”.
Sometimes the dream censor fails to do his job, and you awake with anxiety.
The censored wishes which have attained to a distorted expression in the dream are expressions of a boundless reckless egoism. Personal ego occurs in every dream and plays a major role. The ego in the dreams is freed from ethical and moral constraints.
There are also a “Daydreams” – Phantasies, one is not seeing but thinking. The raw material for poetic production. If one is not careful, they may develop into long stories. The theme of these daydreams is usually ambition or eroticism.