In ancient times, people were much more anxious about dreams. Today it is the lot of mystics and depth psychotherapists.
One of them was at one time the humble Austrian physician Sigmund Freud. Having devoted many years to the study of hysteria and other neuroses, in 1900 he finally published the main work of his life - The Interpretation of Dreams. This book becomes the catechism of a new movement in psychology - psychoanalysis. It will become the doctrine of the doctrine of the unconscious, it will be destined to turn the world and the fate of all branches of human thought: from medicine, psychiatry and anthropology to philosophy and art.
In it, Freud reveals the nature of dreams, proving that night dreams are not at all meaningless, they can and should be interpreted. However, this is very difficult to do. Therefore, never believe in the existence of a "Freudian dream book," just as you do not believe in the flowers of the golden fern. “Dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious,” Freud said. And in order to understand dreams, one must understand what the unconscious is and how it works.
Sigmund Freud
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Thinking primitive
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It is this - the key to understanding our unconscious - and to understanding our dreams. The fact is that the thinking of a primitive man in many ways resembles the "thinking" in the dream of our contemporary. First of all, the fact that he operates not with abstract verbal concepts, but with concrete images - as in childhood. There is no abstraction or figurative meaning here. Words are perceived as things. If in a dream the unconscious "wants" to say: "The devils brought guests to the dacha," then it will depict devils who will literally carry guests to your dacha.
In addition, primitive thinking is characterized by processes such as displacement and condensation. Let's explain.
Dreams are nothing more than the "children" of our unconscious, the legacy of primitive times. The so-called primary process reigns in the unconscious (the secondary process in psychology is called all the processes for which our consciousness is responsible: this is rational thinking, logic, analysis and synthesis of any information, etc.). The primary process, like primitive thinking, is characterized by fluidity of energy, there is no rigid connection between some event, image (for example, the death of a mother) and the emotion that accompanies this image or event in our conscious, real life (in this case, feeling of grief). Therefore, if we dream, for example, of the death of our mother, we may not experience any sadness, or experience only slight sadness, or even the opposite feeling - stormy joy. Thus, the emotion of grief is "shifted"breaking away from the very image of the mother's death. It is thanks to the displacement that our dreams look so strange and incomprehensible.
"Sleep". Salvador Dali, 1937
Have you seen in a dream some man about whom it is impossible to say for sure whether he was your father or, for example, a husband, and a woman who seemed to be your mother, but at the same time a completely unfamiliar lady?.. All these images are from dreams are not a figment of your imagination and not the result of a strange flaw in sleep consciousness. They are the product of the so-called thickening process. Primitive man perceived reality in large chunks, not paying much attention to details. Our unconscious, which gives rise to dreams, behaves in the same way - instead of one image, it uses whole groups.
And also in the unconscious (and at the same time in primitive thinking, and, by the way, in the thinking of savages, small children and mentally ill people) there is no logic. Therefore, it is not in our dreams either. If it exists, then with a skillful interpretation of sleep, “removing” it is no more difficult than froth from boiling milk. Logic in dreams is only an appearance that hides completely illogical episodes of sleep. Its modest role is to make the dream more comfortable for the perception of a modern person who is not used to irrational material. The aforementioned secondary process, which, of course, also participates in the creation of dreams, makes our dreams even somewhat logical.
One of the Egyptian pharaohs, as the Bible says, had a strange dream. He saw seven fat cows and seven skinny ones. The skinny cows "devoured" the fat ones, but they didn't get any fat from this. After that, the king saw seven thick ears and seven thin ones. As you know, Joseph very correctly interpreted the dream: seven years in Egypt there will be a harvest, and in the next seven - hunger
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Another feature of the unconscious is timelessness. Probably, it is already clear that in this area of our psyche a complete vinaigrette reigns, it would be strange if the concept of time existed in it. That is why events that are completely incompatible in time can appear in a dream.
In ancient times, dreams were almost more important to people than reality itself. At one time, clay tablets were found in Babylon, which belonged to the third millennium BC. These were dream books, which, in fact, were no different from modern ones. The Egyptians and Greeks treated dreams as the voice of the gods. However, some cultures considered dreams to be the machinations of the devil. Among them is the Orthodox Church. This is understandable given her puritanical values. The Hindus regarded dreams as a window between the mortal and sacred worlds.
An important feature of primitive thinking is the absence of denial. To depict him, an archaic man resorted to the opposite. The dream behaves in the same way. A dream can express a negative attitude towards something, for example, through a feeling of inhibition of movement. Let us explain. This phenomenon can be observed, for example, in dreams of nudity, which Freud, "the tragic Wotan of the twilight of bourgeois psychology," called the terrible word - exhibitionistic. We dream that we are walking naked down the street, while, for some reason, we cannot reach the house and get dressed, our movements may be slowed down. All these dreams reflect nothing more than a secret desire to demonstrate oneself, as they say, in what the mother gave birth. There is nothing terrible, however, in the appearance of such dreams. They are just an expression of longing for our carefree childhood,when we ran naked and enthralled everyone around us. This completely innocent dream belongs to "typical dreams", which will be discussed below, and which everyone has seen at least once in their life.
It turns out that the problem of interpreting dreams is the problem of translating images formed by primitive thinking into a form acceptable for a modern person.
A dream is a wish fulfillment
Such simple dreams as dreams of thirst or food (when the dreamer actually wants to drink or eat, drinks or eats in a dream - and can neither get drunk nor eat enough), or childhood dreams about receiving a cherished toy, about giving to the offender or about to become a superman, they say that the goal of at least part of our dreams is the fulfillment of some desires or needs. Freud also noticed this. But, as befits a famous pervert, he went further, suggesting that in general all our dreams are nothing more than the fulfillment of desires.
It is clear, however, that most of the dreams of adults are experienced, rather, as unpleasant, frightening and even nightmarish, or do not cause any special experiences. Based, again, on his clinical experience, Freud sees the reason for this discrepancy in the distortion of the dream. Let us explain.
Any neurosis is a kind of regression to the previous stages of human development. We can say that the more “violated” a person is, the more “primitive” he is, the more his “thinking” resembles the thinking of a primitive man, a small child and a savage. The dream is also generated by primitive thinking - it has all its characteristic features. Therefore, Freud suggested that neuroses and dreams can lie on the same mental plane. But that's not the point.
Every neurotic symptom is felt by a person as unpleasant. But, oddly enough, it is generated by something desired (not to be confused with more severe psychotic and borderline symptoms - NS). It is the result of a conflict between a hidden desire (desire for It) and psychological "censorship" (superego), which prohibits realizing this desire for various reasons - for example, social prohibitions, or prohibitions by a particular family member. After Freud's patients realized this latent desire, their symptoms disappeared.
Therefore, the founder of psychoanalysis suggested that an unpleasant or neutral dream could also be the product of a compromise between desire (It) and the same controlling, forbidding psychological authority responsible for morality, shame and conscience ((Super-I)).
Desire and censorship
A dream, as Freud noted, consists of manifest (explicit) and latent content. The creators of a dream are two certain psychic forces, of which one forms an expressed (usually with the help of images) desire, and the other carries out censorship. The latter is needed in order to distort, hide the forbidden desire.
All of the aforementioned features of primitive thinking come to the aid of censorship. Despite the fact that the dream even without the action of censorship has, for the most part, only the pictorial means of archaic thinking, the censorship skillfully uses the same means for its insidious purposes, masking forbidden desires in our dreams. If we secretly wish death to a person we hate, but our conscience does not allow us to realize this, we can see in a dream the “compromise” of our desire and censorship-conscience - the news of the death of this person, from whom we cry and wake up. Needless to say, all this is realized only as a nightmare.
Naturally, in each specific case, dreams need to be interpreted in different ways (excluding only typical dreams, which will be discussed below). You cannot consider them without the participation of "free associations" of the dreamer himself. Yes, and the very "meanings" of a dream, as a rule, are very many, they follow from one another, leading further and further into the depths of our psyche. A dream is most often like an onion, the layers of which can be removed for a very long time, in some cases even for years.
Greetings from childhood
A dream, as Freud believed, expresses the fulfillment of not a simple, but an infantile desire, something that originated and arose in deep childhood. This is understandable. After all, the dream itself (and also neurosis) comes from prehistoric times and from childhood. This does not mean that desire could not have acquired more "adult" reasons, but its root will always grow from childhood. This is also confirmed by the dreams of adults who dreamed of them at a tender age, and then migrated unchanged into adulthood.
Today, the dream is not viewed as categorically as Freud did. If we are talking about deeper layers of dreams, about dreams that are seen by more disturbed people than neurotics (to which ruthless psychoanalysis, perhaps, all; from psychiatry), then dreams may reflect some psychological goals of the one who sees them - for example, the goal of "collecting" his psyche into a single whole in psychosis, attempts to heal himself, etc. Nevertheless, all these goals will still be comes from childhood, since any psychological disturbances or simply deep levels "belong" to the early years.
The founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, however, went even further. He saw in dreams not so much the heritage of individual development as the development of all mankind. And this is also possible, because sooner or later everything that is individual is intertwined with the universal.
The function of dreams is to reconcile two opposing forces: the physiological desire for sleep and arousal from the psychic or somatic realm. Dreams are the guardians of sleep, they allow us not to wake up due to the ongoing work of our psyche and body.
From what was
What are our dreams made of? Oddly enough, from the most insignificant episodes of real life. Freud calls them day residues. These are, as a rule, some small, completely neutral events for us that have occurred during the day. Even if something extraordinary happened to us during the day, at night we will dream of some trifle. You have probably noticed this yourself.
The "great and terrible" Sigmund Freud also sees a certain hidden meaning in this. The point is that the neutrality of daily balances is important for censorship. After all, some significant, emotionally saturated events for us would be very difficult material for "building" a dream that is already permeated with secret desires. It requires faceless "bricks".
Also, our dreams are filled with symbols. Their role is to replace some individual things that are significant only for us with some common symbolism. They are the legacy of our phylogenetic experience and archaic thinking of the past. In addition, symbols, again, help the "Jesuit" plans of censorship - they disguise important objects for us as neutral ones. Symbolism, by the way, is a tool not only for dreams, but also for cinema, art and literature. However, like many other "pictorial means" of archaic thinking.
Symbols are universal - common to all mankind, known from myths, legends, rituals and folklore. They are conditional - meaningful in this particular culture (for example, for Russians, white is a symbol of purity, and for the Japanese - death). And, finally, symbols can be individual - meaningful and understandable only for a specific person. They were formed in the process of his own development.
In all dreams, without exception, the dreamer himself is present, even if it would seem that he is nowhere to be found. He can "hide" behind the image of other characters in the dream: people, animals, objects and even phenomena.
Night artist
As mentioned above, dreams cannot express abstract words - instead, they use images. Therefore, they can replace such a concept as frequency with quantity. If there are a lot of something in your dream - people, chairs, cars, etc. - this may mean that something is often found.
A dream cannot operate with the concept of time or distance, therefore it depicts such things in its own way. For example, if you see small people or animals in a dream, this may mean that something was long ago.
The union "and" the dream expresses with the help of a simple arrangement of events or objects next to each other.
And a dream also does not know how to say no. Rather, he can, but very badly. We spoke above that a dream can express protest or denial of something through inhibition. Another means of "protesting" censorship against the content of sleep is the so-called "dreams in a dream", when we dream that we have already woken up, while we continue to sleep. What we see in a dream as reality is our undisguised desire. But, thanks to the censorship, when we wake up, we are comforted by the fact that it was just a dream.
In full measure, a dream is considered only with a single logical connection: "just like". The similarity of something is depicted through the unification of people or objects into one whole.
Interpretation of dreams
How to interpret dreams? Unfortunately, this is not easy to learn. This requires a certain skill and months of training. First of all, it is necessary to learn to think psychoanalytically - this means the ability to see something deeper behind the usual rational things. Dreams are fundamentally illogical, and therefore you need to try to turn off logic when interpreting them.
Freud: "Two things are required of the dreamer: increasing attention to his psychic perceptions and turning off the criticism with which he usually sifts through emerging thoughts."
The interpretation of dreams is based on the method of free association discovered by Freud - the pronunciation of everything that comes to mind. This is very difficult. It is worth trying to start doing this, even alone with yourself, and immediately a stupor may arise. From childhood, we are taught to clearly structure our speech and thoughts, to reason logically, and not to carry incoherent nonsense from words. As soon as a person begins to try to “freely associate”, then all sorts of thoughts and words either disappear from him, or he considers them incomprehensible nonsense, nonsense and even indecent things, and does not consider it necessary to express them. To overcome this, it is necessary to turn off the internal censor and logic. This is very difficult to do. Try it and see for yourself.
A person is hampered not only by the lack of the habit of freely associating, but also by an unconscious internal resistance, for which the same censorship is responsible, and which always strives to make sure that the true meanings of the dream remain unrecognized. If a person learns to carry such "nonsense" - he quickly begins to understand what primitive thinking "hid" from him, and how useful it is sometimes to turn off logic in order to plunge into the archaic of his own psyche, into how our ancestors "thought". In the end, it’s just interesting.
In order to take the first step - focusing attention is not on the whole dream as a whole, but only on its individual fragments. Now it is worth starting to express your associations, thoughts, in general, everything that comes to mind about this or that fragment. Let it be even any separate and "irrelevant" words. The most important thing here is not to think at all. After a certain amount of training, you will learn to better understand your dreams, and therefore, yourself and the people who are near you.
Often dreams, however, are very difficult to tell, they are vague, approximate, unclear. But for the interpretation of dreams, this does not matter at all. Dreams are illogical and unclear in principle, therefore everything that comes to a person's head in the waking state when he tells a dream, paradoxically, also refers to the "thoughts" of a dream. After all, when we plunge into free associations, we are practically daydreaming. Our dreams are a product of our own psyche, this is the same fantasy that we can come up with in reality. Our associations about dreams are also a product of our psyche, so there is no need to fear that we will inaccurately convey the dream.
However, sometimes a stupor is an indicator that in front of you is a symbol, which, as a rule, is interpreted in the same way for everyone. But using only symbolism for the interpretation of dreams is completely meaningless, since symbols are only a very small part of the "idea" of a dream.
In addition, a dream can almost never be interpreted without the participation of the free associations of the dreamer himself: no one can know the dream better than himself. Therefore, questions like: “What does my dream mean?”, Asked not to oneself, do not make sense. Although an experienced psychotherapist can still give some direction of thoughts, but, again, after listening, for a start, to the dreamer himself.
That is why Freud deliberately scattered symbols and their meaning throughout his works - so as not to provoke the creation of another dream book. As a rule, there is no traditional interpretation of dreams - most of them are unique and have a very specific meaning for a particular person.
If people or objects in a dream are small, this may mean that something was long ago
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Typical dreams
And yet, there are dreams that in most cases have a single meaning for everyone and were dreamed by almost everyone. Here they are:
1) About nakedness and disorder in clothing. At the same time, others do not pay any attention to the dreamer's nakedness.
2) On the death of close relatives. These dreams, in turn, are divided into two groups: accompanied by emotions (grief and sadness) and not accompanied by emotions.
3) About exams. Usually they dream on the eve of some kind of test, although this is not necessary. The fear in such dreams is associated with childhood memories of the punishment for failing to fulfill the assigned task. If you have such a dream before a real exam, then in a dream you will see yourself on the exam, which at one time you successfully passed. In a dream, you fail this exam or pass very badly. When you wake up, you are relieved to understand that you nevertheless passed that exam and passed it well. Despite the alarming nature, the purpose of these dreams is to reassure you: "If you passed the exam then, you will pass it now."
In a dream, according to legend, the great chemist Dmitry Mendeleev saw his table. But what does the hidden desire have to do with it? Moreover, it turns out that even intellectual work is possible in a dream, which means that there can be no question of any archaic thinking. In fact, in the preconscious (a psychic instance located between consciousness and unconsciousness, where our memory is "located") the table was already in the scientist's head. He thought about it all the time, worked on its creation for many years. The table was already ready to become "conscious", and simply appeared in a dream. It was the result of painstaking work, and not at all a message from heaven. Just like the second movement of Goethe's Faust, Paul McCartney's song Yesterday, the structure of atoms by Niels Bohr, the brilliant 40th symphony of Mozart, etc. The dream simply outpaced the process: what was still hidden,but was about to appear in consciousness - appeared in a dream. As for desire, all these dreams express it more than clearly. And Mendeleev, and Mozart, and Bohr have long gone to their discoveries and passionately wanted to make them.
4) About being late for the train. Such dreams are often dreamed of by neurasthenics and workaholics, who carry the burden of some endless work on their shoulders all their lives, waiting for the day when all this will end, but, unfortunately, such a day never comes. Leaving is a symbol of death, and being late is a consolation: "You will not die." Such dreams are usually provoked by a conscious or unconscious fear of death, which for some reason made itself felt the day before.
Dreams that are closely related to the plot - when the dreamer escorts close relatives to the train - are interpreted as a hidden wish for them to die.
5) About flights. The origins of this dream lie in childhood joyful sensations from throwing up and throwing the baby (and now the dreamer) up, from swinging on a swing. If a teenager (especially a boy) dreams of such a dream, it means that he wants to grow up, or rise above others in another way. May mean organic experiences. Often associated with the inability to achieve something in reality, a tendency to fantasy and projection.
6) About the fall. Such dreams are often associated with fear. For example, with fear of succumbing to some temptation and falling in the eyes of others. According to Jung, they may be associated with a fear of death.
Not a single self-respecting military leader of antiquity went on a campaign without having an interpreter of dreams with him. Without fail, they were included in the royal retinue. As you know, on the way to Egypt, Alexander the Great failed to take the small city of Tire. He decided he would do it on the way back. But Tyr did not give up the second time. Soon Alexander had a dream that Hercules (according to legend, the ancestor of the Macedonian king) from the walls of the fortress invites him to enter. Reassured by the dream, the Macedonian laid siege. It lasted nine months, after which the king began to lose patience. But soon I saw a dream again: a satyr was dancing and mocking on his shield. It is not known how such a dreamy "audacity" would have ended if the Macedonian had not come with his dream to the interpreter - Arestandru. He, without thinking twice, wrote the word satyros and divided it by a line into two parts,it turned out two words: Sa Tyros, which meant: "Your Tir". The next day, Tyr fell. This linguistic approach is quite common today.
7) About swimming, floods and fires. Caused, oddly enough, by memories of childhood enuresis. Associated with instilling cleanliness skills.
8) About passing through a narrow passage. In such dreams, a person re-experiences his own birth, and they can appear even in those who were born through a cesarean section. Here, rather, one should talk about some problems associated with the stage of birth, and not necessarily physical, but, possibly, psychological, becoming oneself as a person, etc.
“I don't see dreams”: the recipe for getting rid of this “ailment” is simple. Think about your dreams more often, and they will definitely come to you. Many also complain that they forget dreams. In order to have time to remember them, it is also enough just to think about them more often, to try to concentrate on sleep immediately after waking up. The dream can be recorded. And even if a person is woken up during the phase of paradoxical sleep, he will tell you his dream in almost all cases. There can be about five such phases per night.
Dream diagnosis
There is ample evidence that dreams can reflect both mental and somatic pathological processes long before their manifestation in real life.
However, it is not yet possible to isolate stable markers of a particular disease. All of the dreams listed below can be dreamed by everyone, without exception, it is, rather, not about the very fact of having such dreams, but about how often certain groups of dreams are dreamed.
Depressive disorders
Most often, depression is associated with the inability to respond to anger and aggression outside. In this regard, an aggressive impulse turns towards oneself. In dreams, this can be reflected in scenes with aggressive behavior of the characters in relation to the dreamer, and vice versa. The image of a dog biting on the left hand is very common. Frequent appearance of food in dreams, especially milk. Scenes of being in dirty, spoiled water with the inability to get out of it can be observed. Dreams are possible with the appearance of deceased relatives, sometimes calling for them.
Anxiety disorders
The dreams of such people can be divided into three groups: unpreparedness for the exam, persecution, disaster (earthquakes, floods, etc.).
There may be disturbing stories about getting into a foreign country without money and documents, stories about being late (including the train), about situations of loss (for example, wandering in the forest).
Obsessional neuroses
Dirt, blood, feces, bad smells, etc. often appear in dreams. Or it will be dreams related to control and management (strange driving, driving it without a driver, etc.). This also includes the classic dream about an elevator that does not obey and flies up, less often falls down.
Psychoses
The central characteristic of the dreams of such people is unusualness. They contain something that is not found either in nature or in mythology. For example, unusual creatures - animals without skin, heavy contamination of living and nonliving in creatures (people with wheels instead of legs, animals with "built-in" bolts and nuts, etc.). Plots may appear with falling apart and scattering into parts of the body of both the dreamer himself and someone else.
Olga Fadeeva