DREAM INTERPRETATION
Next time you want to liven up a dull social gathering, ask the people around
you to describe a recent dream. Although some of us remember dreams betterthan others, most people have little trouble recalling a funny, bizarre, or
frightening dream they ’ve experienced —sometimes more than once. In my
dreams, I ’ve walked on clouds, been visited by cartoon characters, and inter-
acted with talking clocks. Friends have described dreams in which they fly
like Superman, discover lost cities under the sea, live inside a potato, and
fight with giant spiders. When unrestricted by the laws of time and physics,nearly anything is possible.
If you are like most people, you probably wonder from time to time just
what your dreams really mean. Your curiosity reflects one of Freud ’s legacies
to 21st-century Western culture. The notion that dreams contain hidden psy-
chological meaning was promoted and popularized by Freud. Freud inter-
preted his patients ’dreams in an effort to understand their unconscious
conflicts and desires. Today, therapists from many different perspectives use
dream interpretation as one of their therapeutic tools. But how accurate is
dream interpretation? Different therapists can generate entirely different inter-pretations of the same dream. Still other psychologists deny that dreams have
any significance at all, or they challenge the ability of therapists to understand
the significance of dreams. Who is correct?
Although conducting research on dreams presents many challenges, a
large number of investigators have studied this universal but mystical phe-nomenon. We ’ll look at two questions addressed in this research, with a
particular eye on what the findings tell us about Freud ’s theory. First, what
do people dream about? Can we use psychoanalytic theory to predict thecontent of our dreams? Second, why do people dream? Freud had some
definite hypotheses about this, and researchers have produced findings rele-
vant to some of these ideas. However, like other aspects of Freudian psy-
chology, this research still leaves muc h room for interpretation by believers
and skeptics.
The Meaning of Dream Content
According to Freud, the content of our dreams provides clues about what ’si n
our unconscious. Occasionally a dream contains images or evokes emotions
that we feel must mean something. But for the most part, our dreams are
absurd, vague, or just silly images that seemingly have no relation to any-
thing. If you were to describe one of your dreams to a traditional Freudian
therapist, you would likely be told that the objects and people in your dreams
are symbols, which in the Freudian tradition usually means sexual symbols.
Later psychoanalytic theorists argued that dreams represent unconsciouspreoccupations (Hall, 1953). That is, our unresolved conflicts surface during
our sleeping hours. According to this interpretation, a therapist who knows
what his or her client dreams about has an important clue about the client ’s
unconscious conflicts.“Dreams are never
concerned with trivi-
alities: we do not al-low our sleep to be
disturbed by trifles.”
Sigmund Freud70 CHAPTER 4 The Freudian Approach