On Dreams Part 1

First off, I edited this post after my original post for the purpose of structuring this series differently so you might need to read it again if you read it prior to this but otherwise enjoy...

I'm reading On Dreams by Sigmund Freud as a result of a recent personal interest in dreams. Freud argues that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment, our desires are achieved in our dreams. Using anecdotal evidence Freud makes the point that in children's dreams these wishes are obvious but the dreams of adults have become more complex and need to be analyzed in order to be understood for how the wish is present. What I appreciate most about Freud's theory is that he took seriously how the mind produces dreams and creates a means of dream interpretations that essentially reverses the process.

First of all, Freud differentiated between the manifest content of the dream and the latent content of the dream. The manifest content was the actual dream. The latent content was the ideas and thoughts that were eventually transformed into the dream. The mind transformed the latent content into the manifest content. Freud hypothesized that the reason the mind transformed dreams into less obvious content was first of all due to the constraint of dreams being typically situational. So the brain needs to transform ideas into a dramatic scene.

Freud believed that another way dreams are formed is through a process of condensation. Each element of the dream represents two or more ideas that have been condensed. For example, the morphing of two people into one person within our dreams results because our dreams are trying to represent more than one person. Freud would argue that dreams are typically, though not always, tremendously complex. The process of condensation allows for greater amounts of content to be portrayed in a single dream.

Freud is right in saying that dreams are complex and often condensed but, in my opinion, I believe he is wrong in saying that all dreams are wish fulfillment. Nightmares are perhaps the best counter-evidence for this. I believe that dreams are creations of inner conflict. This conflict can be wishes that have gone unfulfilled but they can also be conflicts over guilt, anger, fear, and sadness. In other words, dreams can heighten (and not just repair, as Freud would argue) our dissatisfaction over our wishes not being fulfilled. Perhaps our dreams highlight these conflicts so that we can seek out resolution in our waking hours.

In Part 2 I will continue to expand on Freud's theory.