Freud

Freud’s highly influential work gave meaning to dreams. He placed great value on the importance of dreams and regarded them as ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. That is, they were a means by which a person could access the treasure that was said to be found in the unconscious part of the mind. Dreams were seen as a way to fulfil wishes (including those from childhood) hidden away in our unconscious. For Freud, dreams do not predict the future. Rather they reveal something about the dreamer’s past.

Material entering dreams from our unconscious is distorted in order to get past censorship. As such our dreams are full of symbols. A Freudian psychoanalyst will work with the client to help interpret the dream and understand what is going on. To work through a dream, it is broken into segments and free association is used.  With free association, the client lets their mind wander and talks freely about segments of the dream. In order to reach the dream’s deeper meaning it is important to remove the day residues. Day residues are those things that happened in your day and your mind is processing through your dream. Freud believed that if a client keeps working on a dream with a therapist, the client will eventually be taken back to childhood.

Freud regarded dreams as a means of helping people deal with traumas they have experienced in their lives. With a trauma, the shield that protects the psyche from attacks by the external world would have been breached. So when a person relived the trauma again in their dreams, he saw this as a means of alerting the person to put up defences so that they are protected from the traumatic event happening again.

Although interesting and thought-provoking, there has been  very little scientific support for Freud’s ideas.

Jung challenged some of Freud’s ideas about dreams. He believed that they are not wish fulfilments. Nor is the dream a disguise. Rather the dream contains parts of the self that we are neglecting. He believed that analysis can reveal these parts to aid self-actualisation, but it was not essential. Dreams were also said to reveal the collective unconscious. Within the collective unconscious lie the memories inherited from our ancestral past.

For Jung, the unconscious mind is not concerned with order, which he felt explained why our dreams are generally so disordered. Also, the psyche creates symbols which are represented in our dreams. These symbols however, do not have one meaning that can be easily explained or looked up in a book. They are totally bound up with the individual and it is up to them to give them meaning.

Jung further believed that dreams could be prophetic. He believed such dreams were messages sent from our unconscious to guide us. Jung felt the unconscious may be able to anticipate events which it would then transmit to us through our dreams. Such dreams are generally ones that are unusual or unexpected.

The neuropsychoanalyst Solms suggests that our dreams and motivations are linked. This idea is similar to that claimed by Freud. The mechanisms that get us going in the world are the same ones that generate our dreams. According to Solms, dreams are generated from the same part of the brain as that which generates desire and motivation.

To explain dreams, Evans and Newman focus on the brain and its functioning. The brain is comparable to a computer and as such its system must be updated to ensure good functioning. The process takes place at night and involves removing old, unwanted information and putting new and important information into storage. Dreams are the result of the moving around and processing of this information. Our brain must handle a wealth of information, which is said to explain why dreams often seem bizarre. The dreams we recall are just some of what we remember of the vast amount of information that is scanned and processed.

For Hobson, there is no hidden meaning to our dreams, there are no symbols and they have no psychological function. They are certainly not prophetic. Dreams are simply a product of the brain firing random neurons. As such, they will be influenced by all we have experienced, seen and felt, in our past and present.