Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is a very long book but the essential theory is very simple: dreams are thoughts. While dreaming, we are thinking about stuff, in exactly the same way as we do when awake. The difference is that the original thoughts rarely appear as such, they are transformed into weird images.Only emotions survived unaltered. A thought about how you're angry at your boss for not giving you a raise might become a dream where you're a cop angrily chasing a bank robber, but not into one where you're a bank robber happily counting his loot. By interpreting the meaning of dreams, the psychoanalyst could work out what the patient really felt or wanted.
The problem of course is that it's easy to make up "interpretations" that follows this rule, whatever the dream. If you did dream that you were happily counting your cash after failing to get a raise, Freud could simply say that your dream was wish-fulfilment - you were dreaming of what you wanted to happen, getting the raise.
But hang on, maybe you didn't want the raise, and you were happy not to get it, because it supported your desire to quit that crappy job and find a better one...
Despite all that, since reading Freud I've found myself paying more attention to my dreams (once you start it's hard to stop) and I've found that his rule does ring true: emotions in dreams are "real", and sometimes they can be important reminders of what you really feel about something.
Most of my dreams have no emotions: I see and hear stuff, but feel very little. But sometimes, maybe one time in ten, they are accompanied by emotions, often very strong ones. These always seem linked to the content of the dream, rather than just being random brain activity: I can't think of a dream in which I was scared of something that I wouldn't normally be scared of, for example.
Generally my dreams have little to do with my real life, but those that do are often the most emotional ones, and it's these that I think provide insights. For example, I've had several dreams in the past six months about running; in every case, they were very happy ones.
Until several months ago I was a keen runner but I've let this slip and got out of shape since. While awake, I've regretted this, a bit, but it wasn't until I reflected on my dreams that I realized how important running was to me and how much I regret giving it up.
While awake, we're always thinking about things on multiple levels: we don't just want X, we think "I want X" (not the same thing), and then we go on to wonder "But should I want X?", "Why do I want X?", "What about Y, would that be better?", etc. Thoughts get piled up on top of one another: it's all very cluttered.
In a dream, most of the layers go silent, and the underlying feeling comes closer to the surface. The principle is the same, in many ways, as this.
But how do I know that feelings in dreams are the "real" ones? In most respects, dreams are less real than waking stuff: we dream about all kinds of crazy stuff. And even if we accept that dreams offer a window into our "underlying" feelings, who's to say that deeper is better or more real?
Well, "buried" feelings matter whenever they're not really buried. If a desire was somehow "repressed" to the point of having no influence at all, it might as well not exist. But my feelings about running were not unconscious as such - I was aware of them before I had these dreams - but I was "repressing" them, not in any mysterious sense, but just in terms of telling myself that it wasn't a big deal, I'd start again soon, I didn't have time, etc.
The problem was that this "repression" was annoying, it was causing long-term frustration etc. In dreams, all of these mild emotions spanning several months were compressed into powerful feelings for the duration of the dream (a few minutes, although the dreams "felt like" they lasted hours).Overall, I don't think it's possible or useful to interpret dreams as metaphorical representations in a Freudian sense (a train going into a tunnel = sex, or whatever). I suspect that dreams are more or less random activity in the visual and memory areas of the brain. But that doesn't mean they're meaningless: they're activity in your brain, so they can tell you about what you think and feel.
10 comments:
Your thoughts on this are very Jungian. Jung says dreams (the unconscious in general in fact) have a compensatory function – if your conscious view about something becomes too one-sided (like when you were neglecting running), the unconscious brings it up.
Like you Jung stresses the importance of the subject and his life situation, he says dreams are a spontaneous manifestation of the current state of your unconscious expressed symbolically, rather than distorted by your mind's "censorship".
Nice post up until you had to take it all away with that "random activity" nonsense in the "visual and memory" brain centers. What hooey! Neurononsense at its extreme. I have noticed that you seem to have a very ambivalent attitude towards Freud and his ilk. Every once in a while you post something where you acknowledge some value in, say, Freud's work, and then you seem to have the need to very quickly "undo" it or take it all back with some neurologizing nonsense, as if to re-establish your bona fides as a neuroscientist. You need to dream more.And running more might be a good idea as well.
I very much agree with anonymous about your ambivalent feelings on Freud... freud is certainly one of the most powerful thinkers of the last century, and we should read his works ( some of them) at least to have very interesting things to think about...
And you balance the "random"stuff with something crucial: it's your brain, and your life experience, and the "randomness"is relative to it.
I've probably said it before on here, but I find the 'expectation fulfilment' theory of dreams to be very compelling. In this theory describes the prime function of "dreams is to metaphorically act out undischarged emotional arousals (expectations) that were not acted out during the previous day. By dreaming we complete the arousal/dearousal circuit so as to wake up with an unstressed autonomic nervous system and our instincts intact."
However, many functions of the body fulfil a number of roles. Given this, I don't think it's out of the question to believe that there are many reasons for why we dream.
You've just strengthened my resolve to read The Interpretation of Dreams. I own it, but it's been sitting on my nightstand unread because it's long and I already know Freud's prose can be awfully turgid. Plus I know a lot of it is bunk, so I'm never sure how worthwhile it is to read him. He had a massive impact on psychology and Western culture, so there's definitely value in reading him for historical reasons, and he did have some valuable insights: he just buried them deep in a lot of unfalsifiable crap about unconscious desires and sexual symbolism.
Lindsay:
You don't have to read the whole book. Only chapters 6 and 7 are necessary to read. The rest is fluff. I agree about sexual symbolism to a point (though advertising agencies certainly make their money off using such symbols in ads. But your skepticism about unconscious desires is shocking.
..you mean like Forrest Gump. RUN NEO RUN!! :)
Anon get over yourself.
I remember learning Freud, Jung etc in psych. It was obvious the lecturer hated it, she made it clear it was crap from the beginning. As the weeks rolled on she wore hot leather pants, that seductive look.. oedipus complex, defecating and pleasure.. all she had to do was whip it and my gosh, oolala.. morbid fetishes.
Lindsay: I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. The prose is actually pretty good - I was pleasantly surprised - and while quite a lot of it is non-essential, I wouldn't call any of it "fluff", except maybe the first section where he reviews previous theories of dreams, which is, of course, now out of date.
In particular I would definitely read his very first analysis ("Irma's Injection") which was one of his own dreams.
I can't imagine not using dreams both to guide me personally and professionally (as a psychologist).
While Freud helped bring attention to the dream, his theories about them are quite outdated. Jung does much better at getting to the heart of dreams; he was even able to discriminate between dreams indicating physical and psychological ones. (For some of the scientific studies about dreams, check out the International Association for the Study of Dreams: http://www.asdreams.org/.) Thanks for the post.
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