Dreams are as familiar to us as anything else that has
happened to us in the past 24 hours.
Dreams are as strange to us the weirdest, most
incomprehensible movie we have ever seen.
To Dream is to aspire to something great - something fantastic that we would like to become.
When Sigmund Freud was working to understand how the mind
worked, he used dreams as the portal to the hidden workings of the mind or, as
he put it, “Dreams are the Royal Road to the unconscious.”
He meant that the unconscious mind is something that we can’t,
by definition, see at work. If
consciousness is the eye that we use to observe the world and the workings of
our mind, it does not “see” the unconscious.
But it does see dreams – the weird movies that we unconsciously construct
and play for ourselves night after night.
And, he reasoned, if we understand how the dream is constructed, we will
understand something about the part of our minds that we can’t see.
People have often tried to connect meaning to dreams. There have long been books describing what
this or that symbol in a dream “means”.
Freud agreed that dreams use symbols to communicate to us, but he
proposed that we use idiosyncratic symbols – each of us makes up our own sets
of symbols –and that we use the symbols to hide the meaning of our dreams. He promised, though, that if we can crack the
code, we can understand the logic of a dream.
Why do we code our dreams?
Freud proposed that dreams are intended to keep us asleep. To do this, they grant the wishes to the
parts of ourselves that want something – and would wake us up to get it. In kids who are hungry, he observed, they
will dream of eating something wonderful, and this will satisfy them enough
that they can stay asleep.
As we get older, the things that we want get more
complicated, and many of the things that we want are things that we feel uncomfortable
wanting. We may want the boss’s job, for
instance, but if the boss were to know that, the boss might object, and so we
hide that desire from the boss, but also, Freud proposed, from ourselves.
So, instead of dreaming about taking the boss’s job, we
might dream about beating someone at a game.
The person that we beat would resemble the boss in some important way, but
also NOT resemble the boss in some other important way. Our unconscious recognizes the symbolized
person as being equal to the boss, feels satisfied by the dream, and lets us
sleep. The conscious does NOT recognize
the person as the boss and so does not wake us up in alarm that we are doing
something that is forbidden.
This seems like a very complicated thing for our minds to be
doing when we are asleep – and to decide whether this is accurate, we need to
decode a dream, not always an easy thing to do.
This spring, though, a class of students was able to do just that.
In a class called “On Reading Freud”, we read and discussed a
famous dream of Freud’s, the Irma dream from his book “The Interpretation of Dreams”. We also read his essay about dream interpretation,
“On Dreams”. We also read a cautionary
tale about what happens when Freud harassed one of his patients, Dora, into
accepting his interpretation of her dream (She fired him). Then I presented one of my dreams and the
class interpreted it with me. We also
interpreted various pieces of literature as if they were dreams.
Then, the students, who had been asked to keep dream journals,
were asked if they would volunteer to interpret their own dreams. Four brave souls did, and the class of about
twenty broke up into groups of five to hear about the dreams and to try to help
the dreamer understand his or her dream.
The groups were instructed to offer suggestions, but to remember that
the dreamer would be the ultimate authority on the dream and not to push an
explanation.
In each of the groups, something similar happened. The dreamer began to make sense of his or her
dream. This was described by the
dreamers as “unnerving”. They thought
they were bringing essentially meaningless dreams to class, but the dreams had
important and relevant information about what was currently going on in the
dreamer’s life, about their wishes and desires, and, in a word; about their
dreams.
In two of the groups, after the first presenter had some
success, others in the group acknowledged that they had brought dreams as well
but weren’t willing to present until they knew it was safe, and these members
(in one group, all five presented a dream) had a similar experience of
discovering that the dream was not just random, but had important meaning.
This process, of discovering meaning in something that is
familiar but strange, evokes a feeling that Freud described as “uncanny”. Uncanniness is the sense that something that
we did not understand opens up and reveals something that we oddly, and in some
unknown way, always knew to be the case.
As students, but also patients, work to understand their
dreams, they get to know themselves in “uncanny” ways. They discover things that they always knew
about themselves, but had never been able to articulate – they had never been
able to put the ideas into words.
Dreams, which initially feel foreign and just weird, can come to feel
more like artistic creations that comment on our experience; and the
unconscious – something that was once totally unknown to us - can become an
ally in making sense of the complicated process of living.
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