Using Time Tested Psychology to Interpret Dreams
What Psychology's Founders Had to Say about Dream Interpretation
Sep 22, 2008
Dreams are looked at many different ways depending on the theorist’s perspective. Some consider dreams to be detailed psychological processes that help the dreamer deal with life‘s frustrations, and some more biologically minded theorists consider dreams merely a brain’s reaction to biological processes that occur during sleep. But, nowadays, many people have strange dreams and run immediately to the bookstore to purchase what they consider to be a psychologically sound book on symbols in dreams to figure out the meaning of the dream, hoping it will reveal some sort of in-depth insight.
The problem with this sort of dream analysis is that the symbols listed in the popular dream books do not resemble dream symbols in any real sense. A person looking in this dream book might look up a dream about a house to discover that the dream book cites a house as being a symbol for pregnancy, and this will likely hold absolutely no relevance to the dreamer. Instead of becoming alarmed at the often controversial content of the dream book’s analysis, it is more accurate to look scientifically at what a dream means using dream analysis methods used for hundreds of years by the psychological forefathers that outline today‘s counseling methods.
Psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were often ridiculed for their contentious ideas about the human mind, but many of the processes they laid out are still used in many psychologists’ offices to this day. They differed in that Freud believed that dreams were often dangerous and repressed wishes and fantasies that the patient’s subconscious was trying to repress for the sanity of the patient; and conversely, Jung believed the patient dreamed in order for the subconscious to actively communicate to the conscious mind with helpful archetypes of universal struggles all people need to deal with.
Another theorist, Alfred Adler, believed like Freud and Jung that dreams were the unconscious way of dealing with things humans feel powerless over in day to day life, but he believed dreams were driven by a person’s troubles in life (not a war between the conscious and the subconscious) and should be interpreted to incorporate the findings into helping the person actively deal with the issues during waking hours. Still another theorist, Frederick Perls, founded Gestalt Therapy which did not at all lend credibility to symbols in dreams, but rather pragmatically sought to integrate rejected parts of the person’s whole which are expressed in dreams.
Here is a do-it-yourself version of some of the most helpful methods of dream interpretation based around the teachings of these famous inventors of dream analysis.
Free Association
This is a process by which the dreamer might talk out loud about things they saw in their dream and what they think the symbols might mean to them on an individual level. Instead of looking up a dream about a house, the person would say out loud that a recent frustration in life might have been the search for the perfect home to buy, which might bring up feelings of being unsettled.
Act it Out
Re-playing the dream in a present tense and acting out how objects with particular emphasis in the dream might feel is a way used to discover where the emotional void in the dream may be coming from.
Keep a Journal
By keeping a dream journal and writing in it immediately after you awaken, you can accurately remember key components in your dream and link together important subjects and symbols you dream about frequently to see patterns and further interpret underlying themes.
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