Dream / Psychology

INTRODUCTION

Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness wherein a person is asleep but experiences visual , auditory , or tactile sensations and perceptions which are believed to be symbolic in nature . The experience of this imagined sensations and perceptions during sleep is called a dream Dreams are believed to be figurative in nature and needed to be interpreted since they usually contain bizarre images and events . But some theories , like activation-synthesis hypothesis and cognitive theory of dreams , suggest that dream interpretation is not needed because dream content holds useless and meaningless information

p The activation-synthesis theory of dreams shows that the random neural firings of the pons to the brain cortex cause a person to imagine several things and experience symbolic images we call dreams . Moreover this theory added that the brain signals involved in our dreams reflect our memories , feelings , ideas , bodily states and actual physical environment . On the other hand , the cognitive theory of dreams says that dreaming is a mental activity or sequence of thoughts during sleep to stimulate thinking and prevent loss of information in our memory (Plotnik , 1999 . Though these two theories on dreams provided a reasonable explanation why people dream , the psychoanalytic theories (Freudian Dream Analysis and Jungian Dream Analysis ) still prevailed since people have continually sought meaning in their dreams FREUDIAN DREAM ANALYSIS

Sigmund Freud considered dreams as the royal road to the unconscious and his dream analysis is one of his most important therapeutic techniques in bringing out unconscious materials of the human mind that can be worked through . Thereby , the main of objective of the technique is the dreamwork or the transformation of the dream 's manifest content (subjective and conscious ) to the more meaningful latent content (real and hidden . According to Freud , dreams are the id 's wish fulfillments in the absence of the ego and superego 's restrictions . They are also the id 's attempts to push its needs , desires and conflicts to the conscious level to prevent the development of a neurosis . However , the censors of the human mind do not allow the direct revelation of the unconscious materials pushed into the conscious level in to protect the individual from the horrible and threatening meaning of those materials . These censors can distort one 's affect by inhibiting or reversing emotions during a dream to prevent the realization of genuine unconscious feelings towards other people . They also disguise unconscious materials into harmless and acceptable symbols through the processes of condensation (reduction of the unconscious material 's intensity so it can mean several things at the same time ) and displacement (replacement of an unconscious material with an idea vaguely related to it . These processes commonly represent ideas and thoughts as visual images and symbols . However , the unconscious portion of the superego sometimes does not allow the leakage of unconscious material into the conscious level despite the censorship done . Freud believed that this causes a clash between the id and the superego , thus resulting in anxiety-provoking and fear-generating nightmares . But...