How Dream Analysis Can Help In Real Life - Self-development

The most famous phrase associated with dreams in the field of psychology is, perhaps, Freud's that dreams are the royal road to understanding the unconscious. In ancient times, people took their dreams seriously. In many tribes, there was no distinction between sleep and reality. And the messages of the deceased ancestors were taken with the same seriousness, if not more, than the messages of the ancestors of the living. But the more civilization developed, the more man became alienated from his animal part, the less importance was attached to dreams, the analysis of dreams was forgotten. Dreams were equated with simple superstition, meaningless recollection of daytime situations and impressions, an empty sequence of pictures.

"An unsolved dream is like an unopened letter"

Talmud

Behind the screen of even the most everyday, seemingly insignificant process in a dream, there is always a deep meaning and an important message.

“We don't dream of anything that is not a meaningful reflection of our inner life; all dreams can be understood with the key. "

Erich Fromm. Forgotten language

But the situations and impressions that we encounter during the day can really be a kind of entrance, a door to a deeper level of the meaning of sleep. Despite the seeming simplicity of sleep, there are always other levels of meaning, dreams are almost always multilevel.

Example, dream K.

A girl on the eve of sleep, in the afternoon, walking down the street, smelled urine.

At night she had a dream that a cat had written in her bathroom. The cat itself was not there, but from somewhere she knew that it was a cat. And she started cleaning the bathroom. Woke up.

It would seem that in a dream, a not very pleasant daytime impression of the smell is simply digested. But in the morning, taking a shower, the girl began to think: “Write in the bathroom, write in the shower, in the shower! In the soul! Here it is!" In real life, at that time, one person did not live up to the girl's trust, and she sometimes reflected on this topic. And she doubted whether to stop communicating with this person or not. But the dream showed what actually happened and that there was no need to doubt. That is, at the conscious level, the process of choice was still taking place, and the unconscious, through a dream, pushed to the correct decision. Everyone, of course, decides for himself how to deal with the information received from the unconscious, but it is better not to ignore the analysis of dreams.

"The term 'unconscious' is usually used exclusively in terms of daytime experience and thus does not convey that both consciousness and the unconscious are just different states of mind, belonging to different states of existence."

Erich Fromm

In The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm analyzes the dream of a young man who met a “very important” person the day before. Before the meeting, the young man had already developed a certain and very positive image of this person, since there were only positive reviews about him. And the first flashed hostility quickly evaporated and was absorbed by the already established positive way. At night he had a dream where this "very important" person appeared in a different form. Cruel, unpleasant and telling how he tricked someone out of the last money. Sleep under certain circumstances, of course, could mean a share of the dreamer's envy towards this person. But the dreamer began to observe the person more closely, not based solely on the opinion of others. The analysis of dreams allowed us to be critical of a very important person. And soon the facts of cruelty and dishonesty were confirmed in reality. Thanks to the dream, the dreamer was more critical, attentive and careful and did not become a victim of deception and manipulation.

Z. Freud VS C. G. Jung

Thanks to S. Freud, dreams are restored to significance. In his concept, dreams reflect repressed desires, impulses, feelings cut off from awareness. And we are talking more about "base" desires: jealousy, envy, anger, perverted sexual desires.

For example, people who, on the external level, can be very submissive, endure humiliation, mistreatment and do not react to it with hostility, due to insecurity, upbringing, may have dreams where they kill, fiercely fight offenders, see them dead, crippled, or they crash in a car accident. All of this shows the dreamer's repressed anger towards the offenders.

Freud also believed that the task of sleep is to protect the very process of the state of sleep, so that a person does not wake up and recovers better overnight. Therefore, in a dream, the dreamer's desires can be "satisfied" so that he does not feel discontent and does not wake up. For example, if the dreamer is thirsty, then he may dream of water, the dream can compensate for the lack of something in real life.

This may be one of the meanings, but not the only one. Since, for example, Marie-Louise von Franz, Ph. D. and Jung's closest colleague, writes in the book On Dreams and Death that if the dreamer is in the illusion of impending death, then the dream can signal this very roughly and even mercilessly. And this contradicts Z. Freud's idea of sleep, only fulfilling the dreamer's wishes.

Of course, the dream needs to be analyzed individually, since dreams about impending death are very similar to dreams about the process of individuation, human transformation. Since death is one of the symbols of transformation. Therefore, do not be afraid of such dreams.

This brings us to a different view of dreams. And if Z. Freud was talking about the asocial manifestations of a person in a dream, then CG Jung, on the contrary, sees dreams as the greatest revelation of unconscious wisdom, which is much larger than a social person, a person as a person.

S. Freud + C. G. Jung

I am closer to the concept where a dream always carries an important message from the unconscious, it is multi-layered and can contain both repressed personality defects, mental material, regarded by the dreamer as "base, asocial", and the greatest wisdom. In my opinion, this is a more holistic approach, since the awareness of one's defects makes it possible to work on them. This is the first step towards change, and the realization of wisdom is a huge resource, a hint and contact with your nuclear power. By collecting these parts within oneself, using the analysis of dreams, a person himself becomes more holistic and harmonious.