Dreams

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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