Leah Mousseri - Week 9 - Symbolism in Dreams

    Dreams are a big part of our lives. We dream for about two hours every night, whether we’re aware of it or not, and when we remember these dreams they can sometimes be strange, funny, or even frightening. Whenever I remember a strange dream, I like to tell my mom about it and she almost always tries to find meaning in it. I agree that some dreams have meaning or symbolism that stem from your life, but most of my dreams seem to me as simply a big mesh of my interests made into a non-coherent story of poppycock. I’m just saying I don’t think a bunch of characters from my favorite shows fighting over a KFC bucket in slow motion with Take on Me playing in the background has any meaning to it. But, maybe I’m wrong. Do dreams have meaning?

    A famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud, introduced a concept in his psychoanalytic theory stating that manifest content is a censored version of the latent content in a dream. The manifest content is what happened in your dream while the latent content is the symbolic, hidden, and unconscious meanings behind your dreams or the manifest content. Freud believes that our latent content in a dream is our unconscious disturbing desires that our conscious mind represses using "dream work." One process of "dream work" is displacement which Freud represented by interpreting a patient's dream of him strangling a small white dog as his distain for his sister-in-law since he used to call her a dog. Freud believes the unconscious mind disguised his sister as a dog to protect him from guilt, but this doesn't make sense to me because who would feel guilt for strangling a human but not for strangling a dog? In my personal opinion, Sigmund Freud is not the most reliable psychologist since many of his theories or beliefs, such as the Oedipus Complex and the belief that childhood experience completely shapes personality, have little to no ground. However, his theory of latent and manifest content does have evidence and is accepted by a number of psychologists today so it's a more believable theory than his others.

    On the other hand, there is the activation-synthesis model which is a theory that explains how neurons are fired in the brainstem and interpreted by the frontal lobe to try and make sense of things happening in your dreams during REM sleep. It was proposed by Harvard psychiatrists J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977 and later brought up controversy with Freudian analysts when it was published since it suggests that dreams are "simply the brain's way of making sense of activity during sleep." While the activation-synthesis model explains dreams as more of a physiological process, it doesn't completely rule out that there could be meaning behind dreams.

    Based on all this information, I think it's up to the individual to decide whether or not their dreams have meaning, and I believe a small few of my dreams have an underlying message while most are meaningless. There are some dreams that seem universal such as falling, being chased, or appearing naked at school or work, and many people have made many interpretations of these dreams that many people choose to follow. However, these messages seem so obvious sometimes that it feels as though our brain is just taking issues from our lives and making them into a dream. I can't count the number of times I've had a dream where I have a pile of assignments due soon or I have to take a test I'm extremely unprepared for. Instead of a symbolic meaning, I think these kinds of dreams just show me how stressed I get from schoolwork and that I even worry about it while I'm sleeping. I will say that recurring or continued dreams make me think about whether or not there is a hidden message behind them. I've had a recurring dream for what seems like forever where I'm simply trapped in a pool, usually my pool at home, with a shark and I spend the entire dream swimming, dodging, and trying to escape its jaws. My belief is that this dream is recurring due to my fear of sharks, but some say that any dream that is recurring exposes underlying issues. According to the Sleep Foundation, recurring dreams are a sign of poor psychological health (yay!) and are used as a way to process trauma.

    All in all, most of my dreams consist of absolute nonsense with the setting, characters, and mood switching constantly creating a confusing mess of a story. They're funny to think about, but they simply seem to me as your brain combining people from your life, experiences, shows, games, and other events that interest you into a story. I understand people who try to find meaning in dreams, (after all, it's a human instinct to make sense of things) but those who believe "it wouldn’t make sense for dreams not to have meaning" have clearly never heard of a dream like mine.

Do you think dreams have meanings?