Psychology of Dreams PDF

ANALYSIS OF DREAMS PSY104  G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF "'Meaning' has to do with coherence and with systematic relations to other variables, and in that regard, dreams do have meaning. Furthermore, they are very "revealing" of what is on our minds. We have shown that 75 to 100 drea...

ANALYSIS OF DREAMS PSY104  G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF "'Meaning' has to do with coherence and with systematic relations to other variables, and in that regard, dreams do have meaning. Furthermore, they are very "revealing" of what is on our minds. We have shown that 75 to 100 dreams from a person give us a very good psychological portrait of that individual. Give us 1000 dreams over a couple of decades and we can give you a profile of the person's mind that is almost as individualized and accurate as her or his fingerprints." FREUD: DREAMS AS THE ROAD TO THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND Freud: Dreams as the Road to the Unconscious Mind In his book "The Interpretation of Dreams," Sigmund Freud suggested that the content of dreams is related to wish-fulfillment. Freud believed that the manifest content of a dream, or the actual imagery and events of the dream, served to disguise the latent content or the unconscious wishes of the dreamer. Freud also described four elements of this process that he referred to as "dream work":  Condensation – Many different ideas and concepts are represented within the span of a single dream. Information is condensed into a single thought or image. Displacement – This element of dream work disguises the emotional meaning of the latent content by confusing the important and insignificant parts of the dream. Symbolization – This operation also censors the repressed ideas contained in the dream by including objects that are meant to symbolize the latent content of the dream. Secondary Revision – During this final stage of the dreaming process, Freud suggested that the bizarre elements of the dream are reorganized in order to make the dream comprehensible, thus generating the manifest content of the dream.  JUNG: ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS While Carl Jung shared some commonalities with Freud, he felt that dreams were more than an expression of repressed wishes. Jung suggested that dreams revealed both the personal and collective unconscious and believed that dreams serve to compensate for parts of the psyche that are underdeveloped in waking life. In contradiction to Jung's assertions, however, later research by Hall revealed that the traits people exhibit while they awake are the same as those expressed in dreams. Jung also suggested that archetypes such as the anima, the shadow, and the animus are often represented symbolic objects or figures in dreams.4 These symbols, he believed, represented attitudes that are repressed by the conscious mind. Unlike Freud, who often suggested that specific symbols represent specific unconscious thoughts, Jung believed that dreams can be highly personal and that interpreting these dreams involved knowing a great deal about the individual dreamer. HALL: DREAMS AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS Calvin S. Hall proposed that dreams are part of a cognitive process in which dreams serve as "conceptions" of elements of our personal lives.5 Hall looked for themes and patterns by analyzing thousands of dream diaries from participants, eventually creating a quantitative coding system that divided what's in our dreams into a number of categories. According to Hall’s theory, interpreting dreams requires knowing: the actions of the dreamer within the dream the objects and figures in the dream the interactions between the dreamer and the characters in the dream the dream’s setting, transitions, and outcome The ultimate goal of this dream interpretation is not to understand the dream, however, but to understand the dreamer. A DREAM'S MEANING MIGHT DEPEND ON YOUR BIASES Researchers Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton have studied the dreams of over 1,000 individuals from the United States, India, and South Korea.7 What they discovered is that few of the college students who participated in the research believed that their dreams were simply the brain's response to random stimulation. Instead, most endorsed Freud's notion that dreams reveal unconscious wishes and urges.