Dream psychology and what dreams really mean is a highly misunderstood topic. I’d like to blame Freud for the confusion but he did say, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. Most people seem to have forgotten that. Not all dreams have meaning, no matter who tells you the do.
People have long been fascinated with dreams and determining their meaning. In the old days, dreams were considered to be important messages from the gods. Even today, dreams are thought to say something about the future or reveal desires and fears. This fascination with dream interpretation has given way to dream psychology, which attempts to examine the thoughts and behavior of individuals through dream analysis. Dreams still largely remain a mystery and our understanding of them is as muddled as our dreams themselves.
Freudian dream analysis aimed to examine underlying unconscious processes in the psyche through dream interpretation. Sigmund Freud saw dreams as manifestations of unfulfilled desires – the inappropriate desires of the id were constantly suppressed by the moral superego so that they weren’t acted out consciously, and these unconscious desires would act out in a person’s dreams. These days, Freud’s ideas are largely debunked but sometimes we still worry about the fact that our dreams might say something about who we really are.
Carl Jung also contributed to dream psychology by building off of Freud’s idea of the unconscious, though he rejected the idea of dreams being wish fulfillment. Jung believed there was a collective unconsciousness that encompassed all of humanity’s experiences, which was made up of archetypes that organized thought and behavior. These archetypes were represented as dream symbols. Understanding dream symbols would lead to a greater understanding of the unconscious. However, these symbols didn’t have clear definitions-what they meant would depend on the person’s situation. Jung believed that dreams held esoteric truths, but they couldn’t necessarily determine conscious truth since they had their own ‘dream language.’
More recently, dream psychology is more cognitive and biological. Dreams are highly associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the sleep stage in which the brain functions most as if it were awake. There are several theories of the function that dreams might fulfill, particularly dealing with memory and learning. Dreams have been hypothesized to stimulate long term memory, establish stronger connections between semantic memories (memories involving conscious knowledge of the world), to get rid of unnecessary memories, or to act as rehearsal for thought processes. The abundance of dream hypotheses shows that we still don’t know that much about dreams and their function.
In the end, dreams are an interesting phenomenon and dream psychology research will continue as long as our interest lasts. Though, while dreams might be important, they shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Dreams are a natural process of the brain and while they might be composed of our thoughts, they don’t necessarily have to dictate our behavior.
