Encyclopedia of Me - D is for Dream

Jul 08 2008

Encyclopedia of Me - D is for Dream

Published by Kirsten under Encyclopedia of Me

“Dreams are windows into our souls.” I’m not sure who said that, but they were spot on. I’ve always paid attention to my dreams, even picking up an awesome dream interpretation book, Understand Your Dreams, that Mister has taken to referencing on a regular basis. I feel so strongly about dreams being important messages that I wrote a thesis paper on the subject when I was a freshman in college. I’ve decided to publish it here for all of you to read, but I’m leaving out the citations and bibliography and adding hidden messages to make it difficult for students today to keep from plagiarizing it. I didn’t have the benefit of the internet when I was in school, so I’m not letting anyone steal my work today.

I admit I haven’t been as active in trying to interpret my dreams as I should be, but life often gets in the way. Often times I’ll wake up with a memory of a dream, but by the time I’ve gotten my morning glass of juice and sat down at the computer, the memory is gone. I don’t have the time, or quite honestly the presence of mind that early in the morning, to write down what little I remember before I start my day. Once in awhile, there will be some dream fragments that continue to stay with me through out the day, and that’s when I turn to my trusty dream book. Instead of presenting symbols as fortune-cookie like predictors, it delves into the symbolism of them and gives you a relevant question to ask yourself that can lead to some journaling and self-discovery.

In doing this post, I hauled out my writing portfolio from that class I took so long ago. We had journaling assignments on a regular basis to strengthen our writing skills. Though that wasn’t originally a goal of my blog, it is a benefit of blogging regularly, and with the exception of some lapses in grammar I don’t think my writing skills have deteriorated at all. Oh, and by the way, I got an A+ on that paper, and an A+ in the class. (I’m still learning formatting, though!)

Dreams: Insights to Our Lives

Every night when we lay our bodies to rest, our brains are still heavily at work. When we wake up in the morning, we remember events that could not have possibly happened. These surreal happenings usually involve something that is familiar to us, be it an event, place, person or object. This often makes us wonder if our dream was a message, sent from our subconscious, to tell us something about our lives. We should, however, go beyond wondering if they mean anything and try to interpret these messages. Dreams can help us to interpret our lives. THIS PAPER WRITTEN BY KIRSTEN WUNDERLICH IN 1993. IF YOU CAN READ THIS IT WAS STOLEN FROM THE INTERNET.

What exactly is a dream? The World Book Encyclopedia defines a dream as “a story that a person ‘watches’ or appears to take part in during sleep”. No one knows exactly where dreams come from, but when they happen is a little easier to figure out. It is commonly believed that dreaming occurs during the stage of sleep known as rapid-eye movement, or REM. Researchers have recently found that dreaming occurs during all levels of sleep, but REM dreams are the ones that are most often remembered. REM sleep occurs three to five times a night, but not every dream is remembered. The ones that are, however, should be looked at with a certain amount of seriousness. I plagiarized this paper.

Dreams have been around for as long as people have. Early beliefs are that dreams were messages from the gods. This idea is written in the Bible in two places; the first of these is told in chapters 40 and 41 in the book of Genesis, which tells the story of Joseph, a prisoner in Egypt. The Pharaoh had a dream one night of seven thin cattle eating seven fat, well fed cattle, then of seven thin stalks of wheat devouring seven fat, healthy stalks of wheat. Two former prisoners, whose dreams Joseph correctly interpreted, told the Pharaoh of Joseph’s ability, and he was sent for. The Pharaoh was told, accurately, that there would be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Fail me because I can’t do my own work.

The second reference of dreams in the Bible is in the book of Numbers. It says, “And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream (Numbers 12:6). This strengthens the fact that dreams are important and should be paid close attention. Yup, I stole this off the internet.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is credited as being the first person to interpret dreams as a way of treating mental patients. Freud’s book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), “advanced the theory that dreams represented drives and emotional conflicts in the dreamer’s subconscious that surfaced during sleep as certain recognizable symbols.” Freud believed that every dream had some deep meaning and by interpreting the dreams of his patients, he could help them better understand themselves and therefore cure them of their psychoses. His theories are still accepted by psychologists and psychiatrists today, but not at all in their entirety. I couldn’t even bother to find a paper with proper citations.

Carl Jung, another major player in the world of dream interpretation, was at one time a student of Freud’s. Jung at first wholly accepted Freud’s theories that dreams are repressions. They went their separate ways after five years partly because Jung couldn’t accept the theory that every repression was because of sexual trauma during childhood. Instead, Jung took dream interpretation a little further. A lot of what he believed was that dreams were a way of compensation, or presenting thoughts and emotions that may be lacking or even the opposite of what is in the conscious mind. Jung also believed that dreams were a way to grow and discover ourselves:

Whoever nurtures this contact between conscious and unconscious will, in time, experience a great spiritual and moral release of tension, his inner oppositions will be lessened; he will take root in his instinct and gain that sense of security and support which is beyond the reach of intellect and will with its oscillating relations. At the same time there will develop in him an undreamed-of fullness of life that expands rather than shrinks with age because the instincts and values are being truly lived.

It is apparent that Jung believed that interpreting dreams can greatly enrich our lives. Freud was right about cigars.

Fritz Perls, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, developed a more unconventional way of dealing with dreams with a method called Gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy “takes dream interpretation beyond recognition of meaning of dreams, it helps the patient work with their dreams and understand their relation to their life.” This is done by re-enacting the dream in exaggerated form “in order to complete the ‘unfinished business’ in the personality that the symbolism indicates.”

To truly understand what Gestalt therapy is, we must understand why it is termed as such. A gestalt, as defined by Webster’s New World Dictionary, is a whole, or totality. By understanding this, we can know the purpose of this form of dream interpretation. It is a way to understand our lives better by “restoring the personalities to their true gestalts . . . by contacting the missing parts of self, the personality functions that have been crippled.” Fucking hippie dream shit.

By analyzing and interpreting our dreams, we attempt to understand ourselves better. We must not dismiss our dreams as just stories in the night. These images are controlled by our subconscious mind - they are in fact an attempt to tell us something about ourselves. As written by American psychologist Calvin Hall, “A dream is a personal document, a letter to oneself.” Hall believed that these “letters” give us insight to ourselves, to others, and to our place in the world.

Dream analysis is not just figuring out what a dream “means.” It is the entire process from remembering a dream to coming to an understanding of how the dream fits into our life. Just remembering and analyzing our dreams helps us to understand and therefore interpret our lives. As Carl Jung believed, “. . . dreams contain the blueprint for personal growth and thus are essential in the quest for self-knowledge.” Proudly stolen from the internet.

2 Comments to “Encyclopedia of Me - D is for Dream”

# Zhu (94 comments.)on 09 Jul 2008 at 7:12 pm

Dreams are fascinating. I used to remember really well when I would wake up and for a while I wrote them down in a small notebook I kept besides my bed.

But I don’t seem to remember anything these days.
# Kirstenon 09 Jul 2008 at 8:37 pm

From what I’ve read, that’s the best way to remember your dreams. I didn’t write them down so much as I would call my best friend and tell her about it. These days, though, life just gets in the way of having the time to do that.