Dreams are emotions, thoughts and the images shaped by them, which are faced when asleep. Numerous theories on dream interpretations exist but the real purpose of dreams is still unknown. Dreams are closely related with human psychology. A human being spends about six years in dreaming which is around two hours every night. Dreaming has fascinated humankind since the dawn of recorded history. As dreaming is so vivid, so complex and so emotional it has inspired religious movements, artistic representation and introspective scientific theories. Judaeo-Christians thought that God communicated his intentions via certain prophets to his human subjects. Religious reformers such as Emmanuel Swedenburg were able to meet God’s angels in dreams. Western artists, such as Giotto, used dreaming as a vehicle for the pictorial representation of prophetic inspiration. The best known of all dream investigators would be Sigmund freud, who set out the base his theory of the mind on brain science, he constructed his project ‘dynamic unconscious’. Here’s an essence of what psychology of dream says about why people have dreams and how to interpret them.
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Why do we dream?
Many theories have been proposed, no single agreement has emerged. Though we spend an enormous amount of time in a dreaming state, but researchers do not yet understand the purpose of dreams may seem unsolved. Science is still unraveling the exact purpose and function of sleep itself. Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being.
Sigmund freud, in his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote that dreams are “disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.” He also described two different components of dreams: manifest content and latent content. Manifest content is made up of the actual images, thoughts and content contained within the dream, while the latent content represents the hidden psychological meaning of the dream. Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams suggested that dreams were a representation of unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations.
Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we’re all poets. That’s because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story.
Freud essentially called dreams those poems we tell ourselves at night in order to experience our unconscious wishes as real.
What does a dream refer to?
Dreams are the expressions of one’s unconscious wishes. Bad dreams allow the brain to gain control over the feelings developing from distressful experiences of your life. A dream expresses something that cannot be expressed outright. Dreams involve one’s repressed emotions that are fantasized during the sleep. Dreams are a side effect of the cleaning-up operations of the brain.
Dreams give a person an opportunity to organize his/her thought. It’s a way to modify one’s mental schema. The psychology of dreams is usually about the enhancement of mental schemas, it’s about increasing one’s social abilities.
Dream interpretations can be done in different ways, the association between objects dreamt and their meanings is personal. The indication by a particular dream and the association with the elements of his dream depends totally on the dreamer. We should write down our dream, analyze each element of the dream and understand how it is related to us. It is important to understand what you associate with the particular thing you dreamed of. The thought or emotion that you have in relation to a certain color, object or a person in your dream, is your clue to interpret the dream.
Your brain meets with millions of inputs each day. Some are minor sensory details like the colour of a passing car, others are far more complex, like the big presentation you’re putting together for your class. During sleep, the brain works to dig through all of this information and decides what to hang on to and what to forget.
Our sense of psychological reality. Whether normal dreaming or a psychotic symptom; is set by the strength of percepts and feelings as well as by our thoughts about them. Internally generated perceptions and emotions are two formal features of dreams and they are key features.
Factors which lead to pleasant and unpleasant dreams.
We have a complicated network of neurons and synapses, whose communication is provided by many kind of neurotransmitters. Your daily emotions and even your total lifetime emotions are stored in your memory and are released through your dreams.
Dreams including nightmares is interpreted by many ways according to your hormonal status, and according to your fear, worries and even according to what you have eaten during the day, hence forming pleasant or unpleasant dreams. Your health conditions may affect your dreams as well.
Dreams arise from the subconscious mind and are affected by many factors, including hormonal cycles, biochemistry, emotions, waking experiences, memories, relationships and subtle impressions unnoticed by the waking mind.
Dreams are related to your state of mind. When you’re going through a lot of stress or having anxiety, it’s natural to experience unpleasant dreams. Bad dreams mostly result from a bad state of mind. When your state of mind is not depressed, you experience pleasant dreams. When you are feeling good about life, it reflects in your dreams as well.
Unpleasant dreams also known as nightmares are often the result of your life’s unpleasant experiences, traumas, upsets, pains, strains, and sufferings. And same goes for pleasant dreams; they are often resulting of your life’s happy and joyful moments.
Recurring dreams
Dreams that occur repeatedly are recurring dreams. There are some set of images of people or places which keep occurring in the dream again and again. People with post-traumatic stress disorders have recurring dreams of the disturbing events. These recurring dreams may carry a message about something you are not noticing properly. Some of the frequently experienced recurring dreams are; falling from a height (may mean you feel a lack of support), missing an exam (may mean that you are afraid of exams) and being unable to move (may point towards that in real life you are in a situation you are not being able to get out of)
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Most dreams contain messages that aid to teach you something about yourself. Soon after you wake up to go to your daily routine, you tend to quickly forget what you dreamt about. The message in recurring dreams may be so important and powerful that it refuses to go away. The frequent reappearance of such dreams forces you to pay attention and confront the dream. It is desperately trying to tell you something. Such dreams are often nightmarish or frightening, which also helps you to take notice and pay attention to them.
Recurring dreams are very common and are often triggered by a certain life situation, transitional phase in your life or a problem that keeps coming back over and over. These dreams may return daily, once a week, or once a month. Whatever the frequency is, there is little variation in the dream content itself. These dreams may be highlighting a fear, personal weakness, or your failure to cope with something in your life. Which might be your past or present.
The recurring patterns in your dreams disclose some of the most valuable information about yourself. It may be a conflict, a situation or matter in your life that remains unresolved or unsettled for some time. Some urgent underlying message in your unconscious is demanding to be understood again and again.
Some of the most recurring dreams reported are. Chased, falling, lost, flying, wet dreams, and trapped.
Lucid Dreaming
When a person is completely aware of what he is seeing is a dream, it’s called lucid dreaming. In a lucid dream, the person dreaming can easily exercise some amount of control on the content of the dream and his role in it. On some days you might have woken up with a feeling that you had a dream, you could recall the dream clearly and you were completely aware of what was happening in the dream. Perhaps you were lucid dreaming.
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