Moddie, always trying to understand the confusing dreams. I read all the comments and was thinking of Freud that he wrote about the interpretation of dreams. He has a book called "The interpretation of dreams," if you want to delve into the subject more, read this book, Freud can help you. I found interesting post here summarizing what he said and I hope that helps you to better understand the dreams:
"Considered the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) revolutionizes the study of dreams with his work The Interpretation Of Dreams. Freud begins to analyze dreams in order to understand aspects of personality as they relate to pathology. He believes that nothing you do occurs by chance; every action and thought is motivated by your unconscious at some level. In order to live in a civilized society, you have a tendency to hold back our urges and repress our impulses. However, these urges and impulses must be released in some way; they have a way of coming to the surface in disguised forms.
One way these urges and impulses are released is through your dreams. Because the content of the unconscious may be extremely disturbing or harmful, Freud believes that the unconscious expresses itself in a symbolic language.
Freud categorizes aspects of the mind into three parts:
Id - centered around primal impulses, pleasures, desires, unchecked urges and wish fulfillment.
Ego - concerned with the conscious, the rational, the moral and the self-aware aspect of the mind.
Superego - the censor for the id, which is also responsible for enforcing the moral codes of the ego.
When you are awake, the impulses and desires of the id are suppressed by the superego. Through dreams, you are able to get a glimpse into your unconscious or the id. Because your guards are down during the dream state, your unconscious has the opportunity to act out and express the hidden desires of the id. However, the desires of the id can, at times, be so disturbing and even psychologically harmful that a "censor" comes into play and translates the id's disturbing content into a more acceptable symbolic form. This helps to preserve sleep and prevent you from waking up shocked at the images. As a result, confusing and cryptic dream images occur.
According to Freud, the reason you struggle to remember your dreams, is because the superego is at work. It is doing its job by protecting the conscious mind from the disturbing images and desires conjured by the unconscious.
Freudian Dream Tools:
According to Freud, dreams always have a manifest and latent content. The manifest content is what the dream seems to be saying. It is often bizarre and nonsensical. The latent content is what the dream is really trying to say. Dreams give us a look into our unconscious. Freud believes that we can chip through the dream's manifest content to reveal the underlying significance and its latent by utilizing the technique of "free association". Using this technique, you start with one dream symbol and then follow with what automatically comes to your mind first. You continue in this manner and see where it leads.
To further help in interpreting the cryptic images of our dreams, Freud classified the images into the following five processes:
1. Displacement
This occurs when the desire for one thing or person is symbolized by something or someone else.
2. Projection
This happens when the dreamer propels their own desires and wants onto another person.
3. Symbolization
This is characterized when the dreamer's repressed urges or suppressed desires are acted out metaphorically.
4. Condensation
This is the process in which the dreamer hides their feelings or urges by contracting it or underplaying it into a brief dream image or event. Thus the meaning of this dream imagery may not be apparent or obvious.
5. Rationalization
This is regarded as the final stage of dreamwork. The dreaming mind organizes an incoherent dream into one that is more comprehensible and logical. This is also known as secondary revision.
Freud is particularly preoccupied with sexual content in dreams. He believes that sex is the root cause of what occurs in your dreams. According to Freud, every long slender or elongated object (i.e. knife, cigar, gun, etc) represents the phallus, while any cavity or receptacle (bowl, cave, tunnel, etc) denotes the female genitalia."
Freud's book:
"The real dream is the road that leads to unconscious, Freud wrote in his masterpiece "The Interpretation of Dreams." The book took two years (1898 and 1899) to be written and to Freud built the main foundations of psychoanalytic theory, as is the whole point of support for the further development of his work. For Freud, the essence of the dream is the realization of a repressed infantile wish. It was from this principle he developed the foundations of the psychoanalytic method.
Before Freud, dreams were seen as the only symbols, premonições were analyzed as events or divine. Freud, by the analysis of dreams, showed the existence of the unconscious and had become something like the junk science of thought, where the dreams, in a revealing of the human personality. The dreams show a clear preference for impressions of the days immediately preceding. Have access to the most primitive impressions of our childhood and even details are emerging this time of our life that, once again, appear to be trivial and that in our state of wakefulness, we have fallen into oblivion long ago.
For a dream is interpreted we need not try to understand it at once, in its entirety, because due to be formed in the unconscious there is only affection and fragments of reality, just very confusing at first. We should divide it into parts according to the context of the patient and let it slowly without deciphering adopt a Cartesian criterion, because the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in different people or in different situations.
The dream is precisely the phenomenon of mental life in which the normal processes of the unconscious mind are revealed in a very clear and accessible study. In the Freudian conception, the dream is a product of the activity of the unconscious, which always has a sense intentional, namely the implementation or the attempt to achieve - more or less disguised, in a repressed tendency. Thus, the dreams reveal the true nature of man, although not all nature, and are a way of making the hidden interior of the mind available to our knowledge.
The dream and hysterical to begin psychoanalysis, give you, with Freud, the initial blast. In Theory of Fields, of course, also thinks the dream. Awake, our actions, ideas, feelings, find themselves along the lines of force that, in sleep, emerge as a dream episode. Our identity, with their "selves" in dialogue or dispute, is composed of plots that best value in dreams. The characters of these plots also populate our reality, sneak between the objects of everyday life, represented by a friend, a person we awaken the passion in ourselves. Dream after dream are present, until one of these allows us to interpret its meaning and awakening in the dream that we were immersed.
The dream may let us play we see the rose - and still be dreaming. There is a criterion to determine whether we are dreaming or awake, and this is the criterion of the purely empirical fact agree. All that between sleeping and waking experience is illusory when, at the wake, we see that lying in bed. During sleep, we dream by the images real images through our mental habit (which can not be sleeping) to assume the existence of an external method with which we set a contrast with our ego.
Therefore, the interpretation of dreams reveal, above all, mental content, thoughts, information and experiences that were suppressed or repressed, excluded from consciousness by the activities of defense of ego and superego and sent to the unconscious. The part of the id which was prevented access to consciousness, is precisely the one involved in the origin of neuroses. Therefore, the interest of Freud by dreams originated in the fact that they represent normal processes, with which all are familiar, but that exemplify processes active in the formation of neurotic symptoms. Comes the dream, usually, in a congested area of the interlacing of fields, from which follows that its content expressing rules pertaining to different subjects simultaneously psychic, why not have a latent sense only, but a network of emotional meanings, the dream is when a diagnosis of excellence, identifies the subject.
It is absurd to ask for explanations and associations to a dream that patient, ie treating the dream as a separate episode and isolável phenomenon. Do this when you feel appropriate, but remember that the way in which the dream was narrated and the entire set of ideas that surround, even and especially if you do not seem connected, associations are also, potentially. With the dreamer, the dream analyst tie, leaving it to take the lighting that makes the dream, without haste, hoping that the precipitation inseminate you the ideas, to operate at the same pace the field dream.
The dream is a defense to sleep, so you can add that the dream open, the visual story of lives that night and is today is the opportunity to get out of a dream, the deaf undercurrent of issues that the dream comes, which conceal the logic presiding vigil until they can show in an episode consists of gaining status consciousness. According to Freud, there is no basis in fact that dreams have the power to guess the future and dreams no moral feelings.
As there is a strong tendency to forget a dream, a work of resistance, and thus lost almost all, the function of the analyst is also in remembrance. He has the function to keep the dream afloat for a longer time than it would spontaneously and monitor its movement and spread of new concentration, and is not an easy task, because we operate in resistance."
Wow, Lily and Moddie!!! I didn't even realize what I was writing as I was writing it! I was just writing the different interpretations I was getting. Of course I was very tired and burnt out, but now looking at it ... Wow! Just wow! Powerful!
