Dream Interpretation Essays - Freudian Psychology, Psychotherapy

Dream Interpretation There are many facts that are unknown about dreams and their meanings. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have tried to understand the meaning of dreams. They have all been fascinated by the fact that the content of dreams may have meanings relating to one's life. Are dreams just thoughts in people's minds, or are dreams in fact representations of different areas in people's lives? Dreams represent many different areas of one's life in physical, emotional, and mental ways. Dreams can relay to people facts about their lives that they are not even aware of. There are also many ways that dreams can help cure different physical, emotional, and mental problems in one's life. This paper will discuss dreams and their meanings, and ways of interpreting a dream using such methods as hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis therapy that can help a person in physical, mental, and emotional ways. The first fact that will be discussed is what dreams are and how they work for people in allowing the person to discover more about himself. Dreams can be defined as "a conscious series of images that occur during sleep" (Collier's, vol. 8). Dreams are usually very vivid in color and imagery. They reveal to the dreamer different wishes, concerns, and worries that he or she has. Dreams usually reflect every part of who the dreamer is. The content of the person's dream is usually made up according to how old the dreamer is and how educated the he or she is (Collier's, vol. 8). Dreams are not planned out or thought up. The unconscious part of the mind brings out bits and pieces of information in the dreamer's mind and places them together. According to Encarta, dreams are almost always visual. Forty to fifty percent of dreams have some form of communication present in them and a very small percentage of dreams give the dreamer the ability to use his or her five senses (Encarta). Dreams allow one to take a closer look into his mind and himself in a quest for self-discovery. Dreams can be used to solve all different types of problems. In Sigmund Freud's book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud states: "As regards the dream, all the troubles of waking life are transferred by it to the sleeping state [...]" (Freud 113). They relay things about a person that the person may not be able to see. Sigmund Freud says that certain images in dreams sometimes have significant meanings relating to the person's life. Different objects in the dream may serve as a symbol (Kalb 77). Symbols in dreams usually mean something much deeper than simply being an object that just happens to be in the dream. They represent different areas of one's life that deal with one's physical, mental, and emotional being. These symbols will relay information about one's life if these symbols are interpreted. Dreams are "a private language, known only to ourselves" (Cartwright 5). Dreams have the ability to relieve all people of their everyday problems in life. They have a way of setting one free from reality, which includes all of one's problems. Dreams help one to overcome these stresses and help people to get on with their lives. Sigmund Freud states, "The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these" (qtd. in Burdach 474). This statement means that though a certain experience in a person's life can never happen again, dreams allow the person to relive those memories, and they can also allow the person to overcome the stresses of other memories that bother him or her. Memories that continue to stay in people's minds from their childhood are very often included somehow in the dream. No memory that a person has once experienced will ever be lost because it is stored within the person's mind and kept there. A person's conscious mind is the mind that he uses when he is awake and aware of what he is doing. The conscious mind has the ability to make distinctions between reality and the fantasy world. A person is able to think in a reasonable manner and have a higher order thinking along the lines of placement of time and space. A person, in this state of mind, has complete control over everything he or she does including speaking, thinking, and the way that he or she acts around people. A person can evaluate what is reality and what is not reality while