What Do You Dream?

Conjure up a dream you’ve had.

It can be a dream you had last night; it can be a dream you had weeks ago, it can be one that has followed you through time or it could be something entirely new.

When you look, what do you see? Where am I? In a house? A hospital, a plane, a country, in a chair? What is in the space with you? Faceless people, school lockers, a teacher? You may be asking: what does any of it mean? Why do I see the same thing, why did I see that thing, why him/her, and why must it wake me from rest?

There are many people with much to say about dreams. Historically, dreams have occupied many roles in individual and collective psyches, and they have been long regarded as manifestations of wisdom, guidance, or cautionary tales. In Muslim communities, dreams have been regarded as divine wisdom 1 . Ancient Egyptians often used dreams as places from which to draw cultural wisdom, and at times they determined dreams to be representations of health or unhealth 2 . Many Hindu practices regard dreams to have a variety of uses: premonition and prediction of pregnancy, providing omens of family or business success, or being used as diagnosis for individuals’ temperaments or personalities 3 . Although interpretations can vary, one thing is gleaned across dream research: we gain value from seriously grappling with the images of the night.

Western psychology was arguably founded on the poetry of dreams. Sigmund Freud—often regarded as the founder of Western psychoanalytic theory—wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that they are the “royal road to the unconscious” and to our psychological struggles.

To Freud, a dream is like a scene from a movie that recreates a story from our unconscious. This scene is made up of a tension between a wish/desire that comes into conflict with a fear/anxiety, and this tension is presented to the dreamer. Treat the characters in the dream as the movie’s actors; they wear the masks of people that represent wishes and fears within ourselves. The events of the dream are like a metaphorical code for an internal struggle. Perhaps in your dream you are arguing with a bank teller, who happens to be your sister, over how much money you’re able to withdraw. In such case, you (the 1 st person perspective) wish for money (and what it represents) as you are hindered by your sister, who is acting out the role of a force within you warning you of the consequences.

Crucially, the symbols and objects of dreams can be regarded as metaphors, puns, or jokes made by the unconscious. Money, in the previous dream for example, serves as a symbol of power, authority, ability, or livelihood. It is helpful to see the dream as playing with images and words. Regard the following dream from a patient the day before their first therapy session:

“A stranger brings me a full suitcase and leaves the room. Intrigued, I open it and pull things out: clothes, personal items, a diary, but then Mary Poppins-style I pull out massive furniture such as desks and drawers. I worry, as I realize I may not be able to put everything back in before the stranger returns.”

Consider the puns and metaphors this dream rouses in you—Pandora’s box, “deeper than expected,” “a lot to unpack”. The conflict may be between the wish to explore something new and a fear that it may be a lot to handle.

One may wonder, why is the unconscious being so silly? Freud would say that is because the fears beneath the puns of the dream are too discomforting to be viewed directly. Our minds instinctively defend us from pain, and one manner of doing so is to indirectly call attention to the symbols of distress as though they are lighthearted jokes—like a comedian telling a dark joke to cut the tension of tragedy. Freud regards the mind as a storage vault for thoughts, feelings, and desires deemed too uncomfortable for conscious awareness. Laughter, the mind believes, is the best medicine.

This is only one theory. In contrast, Swiss psychiatrist, and protégé of Freud, Carl Jung, proposes a different idea: the mind—and its dreams— are an ocean of knowledge compiled of both our own struggles and the collective experiences of all humanity.

To Jung, dreams are not mere retellings of pathologic stories; they are symbols and narratives seeking to tell us what we must explore. While Freud sees the dream as an artifact to be analyzed, Jung sees the dream as something we should question, interact with, and learn from. He says to look at the people, objects, or animals as parts of yourself that may have been neglected, hurt, or threatened. You are encouraged also to compare your dreams to myths, legends, and symbols of ancient and modern times to see what previous wisdoms could help you.

A final dream to demonstrate: “You walk down a familiar hallway and notice a red door never there before. You open it to find a dim room with a broken mirror. You see a cracked version of yourself looking back, and you follow its gaze back to the door, where there is now a large, growling black dog sitting, blocking your exit.”

Notice the feelings of the characters, the visual puns, the metaphors, the large and small pictures. Something familiar and new, a fractured sense of self, a defensive force. Some new doors are enterable, others are guarded. What parts of us feel a fractured self or a cautious guard dog?

All good-faith endeavors to make sense and meaning of human experience should be respected; therefore, all dream interpretations are true at once. We are bound to spend our lives grasping for understanding of our mental states, struggles, and stories. Dreams are not just ours—they belong to our families, our ancestors, our communities, our humanity, and to seek closeness with them is to seek closeness with all the rest. Individual attention to one’s dreams, through journaling, recounting, or artistically expressing them, all stand to get you in better touch with your inner desires, fears, and cures. Furthermore, friends, family, and trained therapists can be invaluable resources for exploration—many clinicians find working with dreams of their patients to have great therapeutic effect⁴.

Anxiety, guilt, anger, sadness, and mourning are often replayed in our nighttime movies, wanted or not. They can frighten us, arouse us, anger us, and encourage us to look at the images of our inner worlds. Perhaps they are meaningless mashes of people, places, and ideas, or perhaps they are worth a second look.

References

1. Green, N. (2003). The religious and cultural roles of dreams and visions in Islam. Journal of the royal Asiatic society, 13(3), 287-313.

2. Eranimos, B., & Funkhouser, A. (2017). The concept of dreams and dreaming: A Hindu perspective. The International Journal of Indian Psychology, 4(4), 108-116.

3. Tribl, G. G. (2011). Dream as a constitutive cultural determinant–The example of ancient Egypt. International Journal of Dream Research, 24-30.

4. Schredl, M., Bohusch, C., Kahl, J., Mader, A., & Somesan, A. (2000). The use of dreams in psychotherapy: A survey of psychotherapists in private practice. The Journal of psychotherapy practice and research, 9(2), 81.