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 in
this state of
mind. Treatment such as hypnotherapy and psychoanalytic therapy
cannot be
given during this state of mind because the person is fully aware of
what is
going on around him and also fully aware of how he is acting and what he
is
saying. When a person falls asleep or is almost asleep, then he or she
leaves
the conscious mind and drifts into the unconscious mind (Beck). Alex
Lukeman
explains that people’s conscious minds are very much related to
the
unconscious part of people’s minds (Lukeman 61). All thoughts that a
person
thinks while he or she is conscious comes from the person’s
unconscious (Lukeman
61). During dreaming, the mind travels from the
conscious to the unconscious.
Dreaming allows the unconscious part of the
mind to relay all information to the
person that sometimes that the person
does not even know exists. Lukeman
explains that one’s unconscious mind does
not deal with issues such as
morality, ethics, or cultural essentials
(Lukeman 62). People often feel scared
of just the thought of the
unconscious. People do not like the thought of having
something not
completely under their control. Through analyzing a patient’s
unconscious
mind, a therapist is able to see all of the patient’s choices that
he makes
during his life and also his health. The Freudian theory deals with the
issue
that the unconscious involves memories or events that are from the
person’s
childhood (Encarta). Bad childhood memories that affect the person in
present
day may even be relayed through the unconscious. Through some kind
of
therapy, a person may become aware of his problems and different things
that are
bothering him or her (Beck). Dreams have a way of telling the person
about
sickness and disease that he or she is experiencing at the moment or
will be
experiencing. Dreams are sometimes trying to tell a person that he
need to stop
doing something or start doing something for his own well being
(Garfield). In
Alex Lukeman’s book, What Your Dreams Can Teach You,
Lukeman states "If we
pay attention, our dreaming consciousness will forewarn
and advise us about
health of our bodies and the course of any disease
process with which we are
involved (Lukeman 4). Dreams tell people when
something is not right in their
bodies. Shakespeare even states that sleep
and dreams are "nature’s soft
nurse" (qtd. In. Cartwright 5). Most people,
however, would rather not know
what their dreams are trying to tell them.
Some people have a certain fear about
dreams because dreams are part of the
unconscious. People do not like not being
in complete control of their
thoughts and actions. They feel that if they have a
dream about something
like death, there will be death in the near future. Most
of the time, when
dealing with dreams like this, people would rather not find
out what the
dream means (Lukeman 67). Psychoanalytic Therapy is a treatment
that
psychologists use for helping people to overcome mental, physical
and
emotional torment. It is often called the "the talking cure"
(Beck).
Psychoanalysis can be described as a "specific method of
investigating
unconscious mental processes and to a form of psychotherapy"
(Encarta).
Psychoanalytic therapy is mainly based on the idea that how
people act, their
thoughts and their attitudes and how they are arranged by
the unconscious
portion of the person’s mind and are not within one’s usual
conscious
control. Psychoanalytic therapy is performed by the patient lying
on a couch
allowing him or her to totally relax. The psychoanalytic therapist
beings
talking to the patient. The therapist invites the patient to talk
about his or
her past, angers, fears, and fantasies. This form of talking
helps the patient
gain control of his life by confessing to the therapist his
or her needs,
motivations in life, wishes and memories. Sometimes there are
difficulties in
the progress of a person’s ability to talk about what is
bothering him or her.
This difficulty of making progress is called
resistance. An example of
resistance is when the patient becomes unable to
talk to the therapist any
longer, or stops communicating feelings, or does
not want to talk about certain
topics. Transference is another problem that
sometimes occurs through the course
of the therapy. This problem occurs when
the patient feels certain strong
emotions towards the therapist. Certain
emotions can be either a strong feeling
of love, or a strong feeling of hate
(Antrobus). Psychoanalytic Therapy is
successful for the patient as soon as
the patient is comfortable with himself in
relation to his feelings, and
having a relatively good sense of being able to
feel feelings without the
urge to act them out. As soon as the patient can relay
all of his feelings to
the therapist without any resistance, the therapy is
completed. However,
achieving complete recovery takes a person’s lifetime.
There is always
some area where the person is weak and needs to overcome
different problems
that are holding the person back from having the fullest life
possible
(Beck). Through diligent work, however, a person may be able to return
to his
normal, healthy state of mind and life. Hypnotherapy is another form
of
therapy that uses the subconscious and dreaming to understand and analyze
what
the patient’s problem could be. Using hypnosis, a psychiatrist is able
to look
into the subconscious where emotions that the patient has
experienced, the
patient’s memories, and the patient’s imagination are held.
The subconscious
also holds the feelings that one has relating to the
person’s place that they
hold in the world. This type of therapy can, in
time, help the patient to
conquer all of his or her fears, emotional
problems, and physical problems such
as a type of pain control. In the
seventeen hundreds and early eighteen
hundreds, hypnosis was used very often
as an anesthetic during surgery. The
patient would not have any other type of
anesthetic in his or her body. Donald
Jackson states: "Since World War
II, it has slipped quietly and discreetly
into the clinical mainstream, to
the point where the America Medical
Association, many HMOs and even
Medicare now recognize it" (Jackson 128). A
patient has to develop his
hypnotic skills in order for the best results
possible using hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis will help the patient live a much fuller
life with new confidence in
himself and the world, and will also improve
concentration and management
skills. The use of this type of therapy can
actually spark one’s interest and
potential in various activities one engages
oneself in that one finds
interesting. Hypnosis has also been used during major
surgery as an
anesthetic with no other anesthetics present. Donald Jackson tells
us that
psychiatrists, medical doctors, psychologists, and other people who
have
tried it have used hypnotherapy for two centuries to treat people with
different
sicknesses and pain (Jackson 127-128). Hypnotherapy can give a
patient that is
in very bad pain, relief that lasts for a long time. Hypnosis
has been reported
to give many people that have been through it feelings of
happiness and total
bliss (Churchill). There are many misinterpretations that
people pick up that
are related to hypnosis. Many people believe that the
patient is "under a
spell" and will do anything that the hypnotist says to
do. Instead of the
patient losing control, the person gains more control of
his or her life and
himself than he had ever experienced before. During
hypnosis, a patient is well
aware of what is taking place. Hypnosis is simply
allowing the patient to have
the ability of great concentration on one
subject. Hypnosis is an everyday
occurrence in everyone’s lives. People
experience hypnosis in reading a book,
in the state of mind right before
sleep, and while watching a movie or
television show. Each time one
experiences hypnosis, the more in depth the
concentration is for the patient.
Though deeper concentration sounds more
therapeutic for the patient, it is
not. The deeper the hypnotic state, the more
likely it is that one will
experience loss of consciousness and hallucinations.
Hypnosis skills
allow the patient to completely relax. Hypnosis slows down all
parts of the
body, including the nervous system, respiratory system and the
patient’s
brain waves (Churchill). Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D. has studied
dreams for 35
years. She states that "Dreams give us a chance to face
situations from real
life while our bodies are totally at ease" (Williams 99).
Dreams deal
mostly with things that one has experienced in the past, or at the
present
time of the dream. They help one to solve problems that he or she is
dealing
with. Dr. Cartwright calls dreaming one’s "internal therapist"
(Williams 99).
People who have certain phobias have been known to treat their
phobia by
themselves without any psychiatric help just through the wondrous act
of
dreaming. Dreams help people to overcome obstacles and help the people
learn
more about themselves and the lives that they live (Williams 99).
Dream
interpretation has helped hundreds of people to overcome their lifelong
problems
as well as daily problems. Through therapies such as hypnosis and
psychoanalytic
therapy, people who have suffered great emotional, mental, and
physical stress
have moved on to live happier, fuller lives. Dreams do, in
fact, represent many
different areas of people’s lives in physical,
emotional, and mental ways.
Dreams can relay things to a person about his
or her life that he or she are not
even aware of. Interpreting one’s dream is
a method of self-discovery that
lets one in on parts of his or her life that
he or she never could have
imagined. Dreams can help cure different physical,
emotional, and mental
problems in one’s life. People have depended on dreams
to guide them in their
actions and also for self-discovery for hundreds of
years. People will continue
to depend on their dreams as a means of guidance,
just as their ancestors have
done for years to
come.
Bibliography
Antrobus, John. Dream Theory 1997: Toward a
Computational Neurocognitive
Model. 16 Feb. 2000
. Beck, Henry W. What
is Psychoanalytic Therapy?
. Cartwright, Rosalind, and Lynne Lamberg. Crisis
Dreaming: Using Your Dreams to
Solve Your Problems. Harper Collins
Publishers: New York, 1992. Churchill,
Randal. "The Transformational
Nature of Hypnotherapy." Become the Dream: The
Transforming Power of
Hypnotic Dreamwork. Transforming Press, 1997. 16 Feb. 2000
. "Dream."
Collier’s Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. 1984. "Dreaming." Microsoft
Encarta 96
Encyclopedia. Microsoft Corporation. Funk & Wagnall’s
Corporation.
CD-ROM. 1996 ed. 1993-1995. ---. "Psychoanalysis." Microsoft
Encarta 96
Encyclopedia. Microsoft Corporation. Funk & Wagnall’s
Corporation.
CD-ROM. 1996 ed. 1993-1995. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of
Dreams.
New York: Macmillan Company, 1923. Freud, Sigmund. Modern
Critical
Interpretations: The Interpretation of Dreams. Ed. Harold Bloom.
New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Garfield, Patricia. The Healing
Power of Dreams.
Simon & Schuster: New York, 1981. Jackson, Donald
Dale. "Hypnotism: You
Will Feel No Pain." Smithsonian Mar. 1999: 126-140.
Kalb, Claudia. "What
Dreams Are Made of." Newsweek Nov. 8, 1999. 77.
Lukeman, Alex. What Your
Dreams Can Teach You. St. Paul, Minnesota:
Llewellyn Publications, 1990.
Williams, Gurney. "What do your dreams
mean?" McCall’s Aug. 1998: 98-101.
Works Consulted Green, Philip.
Hypnotherapy. 8 Mar 2000.
. Thornton, Stephen. The Theory of the Unconscious.
Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. 8 Mar 2000.