The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

( Freud )

It has been objected on more than one occasion that we infact

have no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or,

speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know

them as they actually occured.

In the first place, what we remember of a dream and what we

exercise our interpratative arts upon has been mutilated by the

untrustworthiness of our memory, which seems incapable of

retaining a dream and may have lost precisely the most important

parts of its content. It quite frequently happens that when we

seek to turn our attention to one of our dreams, we find ourselfs

regretting the fact that we can remember nothing but a single

fragment, which itself has much uncertainty.

Secondly, there is every reason to suspect that our memory of

dreams is not only fragmentary but innacurate and falsified. On

the one hand it may be doubted whether what we dreamt was really

as hazy as our recollection of it, and on the other hand it may

also be doubted whether in attempting to reproduce it we do not

fill in what was never there, or what was forgotten.( Freud,

pg.512 )

Dream acounts are public verbalization and as public

performances, dream accounts resemble the anecdotes people use to

give meaning to their experience, to entertain friends and to

give or get a form of satisfaction.

In order to verbalize the memory of a dream there are at least three steps one must take. First putting a recollected dream into

words requires labelling categories, and labelling categories

involves interpretation. Next since the dream is multimodal,

putting them into words requires the collapsing of visual and

auditory imagery into words. Finally since dreams are

dramitizations narrarating a dream is what linguist call a

performance or demonstration and the rule, " What you see is what

you get ", cannot apply, since only one party can see. ( Dentan,

PH.D,1988 )

In the case of dream accounts, it is the context which is

vital. After all, since meaning is context, they are by

definition meaningless. David Foulke, who wrote the book

Dreaming: A Cognitive Psychoanaylsis Analysis, correctly states

" that dreams don't mean anything ". But people make meaning,

" as bees make honey compulsively and continuously, until it

satisfies their dreams and their lives ". ( Dentan PH.D, 1988 )

In analysing the dreams of Freud's patients he would sometimes

use a certain test. If the first account of the patient's dream

was too hard to follow he would ask them to repeat it. In by

doing so the patient rarely uses the same words. But the parts of

the dream which he descibes in different terms are by fact the

weak spots in the dream. By Freud asking to repeat the dream the

patient realizes that he will go to great lengths to interpret

it. Under the pressure of the resistance he hastily covers the

weak spots in the dream's disguise by replacing any expression

that threaten to betray its meaning by other less revealing ones.

( Freud, pg.515 )

It will no doubt surprise anyone to be told that dreams

are nothing other than fullfilments of wishes. According to

Aristotle's accurate definition," a dream is thinking that

persists in the state of sleep." Since than our daytime thinking

produces psychical acts, such as, judgement, denials,

expectations, intentions and so on. The theory of dreams being

wish fullfilment have been divided into two groups. Some dreams

appear openly as wish fullfilment, and others in which the wish

fullfilment was unrecognizable and often diguised.

The next question is where the wishes that come true in dreams

originate? It is the contrast between the consciously percieved

life of daytime and a psychical activity which has remained

unconscios and only becomes aware at night. There is a

distinguishing origin for such a wish. 1) It may have been

aroused during the day and for external reasons may not have been

satisified. Therefore it is left over for the night. 2) It may

have arisen during the day but been repudiated, in that case what

is left over is a wish that has not been dealt with but has been

suppressed. 3) It may have no connection with daytime life and be

one of those wishes which only emerges from the suppressed part

of the mind and becomes active at night. 4) It may be a current

wishful impulse that only arise during the night such as sexual

needs or those stimulated by thirst. The place of origin of a

dream-wish probably has no influence on its capacity for

instigating dreams. ( Freud, pg. 550-551 )

Freud states that a child's dreams prove beyond a doubt that a

wish that has not been dealt with during the day can act as a

dream-instigator. But it must not be forgotten that it is a

child's wish. ( Stanely R. Palombo, M.D., 1986 )

Freud thinks it is highly doubtful that in the case of an

adult a wish that has not been fullfiled during the day would be

strong enough to produce a dream. There may be people who retain

an infantile type of mental process longer than others. But in

general Freud feels a wish left over unfullfiled from the

previous day is insufficient to produce a dream in the case of an

adult. He admits that a wishful impulse originating in the

conscious will contribute to the instigating of a dream , but it

will probably not do more than that.

My supposition is that a conscious wish can only become a dream-instigator if it succeeds in awakening an unconscious wish with the same tenor and in obtaining reinforcement from it . ( Freud,pg. 552-553 )

Freud explains his theory in an analogy:

A daytime thought may very well play the part of the entrepreneur for a dream, but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital. He needs a capitilist who can afford the outlay for the dream, and the capitilist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of he previous day, a wish from the unconscious.( Freud pg.)

Sometimes the capitilist is himself the entrepreneur, and

indeed in the case of the dreams, an unconscious wish is stirred

up by daytime activity and proceeds to construct a dream.

( Palombo, M.D, 1986 )

The view that dreams carry on the occupations and interests

of waking life has been confirmed by the discovery of the

concealed dream-thoughts. These are only concerned with what

seems important to us and interests us greatly. Dreams are never

occupied with minor details. But the contrary view has also been

accepted, that dreams pick up things left over from the previous

day. Thus it was concluded that two fundamentally different kinds

of psychical processes are concerned in the formation of dreams.

One of these produces perfectly rational thoughts, of no less

than normal thinking, while the other treats these thoughts in a

manner which is bewildering and irrational.

Referring to Freud's quote stated in the beginning, by

analyzing dreams one can take a step forward in our understanding

of the composition of that most mysterious of all instruments.

Only a small step forward will enable us to proceed further with

its analysis. ( Freud, pg. 589 & 608 )

The unconscious is the true psychical reality, in its

innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of

the external world, and it is as incompletely presented as is the

communications of our sense organ.

There is of course no question that dreams give us knowledge

for the future. But it would be truer to say instead that they

give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the

past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams

foretell the future is not false. ( Freud, pg. 662 ) By picturing

our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the

future. But the future, which the dreamer pictures as the

present, has been molded by his indestructible wish into a

perfect likeness of the past. ( Palombo, M.D, 1986 )

Although there has been some descriptive study of the

incidence and character of feeling in REM dreaming, there has

been no investigation of the appropriateness of dream feelings to

accompany dream imagery. It has been suggested that, the

generation of affect in dreaming may not be as reliable as the

generation of other forms of dream imagery. Dream affect

generally seems to be consistent with the larger narrative

context of the dreams. ( David Foulkes & Brenda Sullivan, 1988 )

Research by Cohen and Wolfe has shown that a simple

distraction in the morning had a strong negative effect on dream

recall. The study concerned a variable relatively neglected in

dream research, the level of interest the subjects have about

their dreams. One finding was that interest in dreams appeared to

vary with sex : woman reported that they more frequently

speculated their dreams and discussed them with other people than

did men. These differences could reflect a greater tendency for

woman to pay more attention to their emotional life and inner

self. ( Paul R. Robbins & Roland H. Tanck, 1988 )

Exhibitionism is a psychosexual disorder which, according to

DSM-III has the following diagnostic criteria :

Repetitive acts of exposing the genitals to an unsuspecting stranger for the purpose of achieving sexual excitement, with no attempt at further sexual activity with the stranger. ( pg. 272 )

The essential conflict in exhibitionism is castration

anxiety. Today more attention is paid to the patient's manifest

content. Manifest dream content can sometimes give a clear and

condensed presentation of the essential conflict in

exhibitionism, i.e., castration anxiety. ( Ivan Buzov, 1988 )

One assumes naturally that the past events incorporated in

his patient's dream imagery may be defensive substitutions for

other more objectionable events of the past. Through its relation

to the dream, the screen memory, like the day residue, provides

access to the associative structures of memory in which are

embedded the wishes and events whose repression lies at the core

of the neurotic process. ( Palombo M.D, 1986 )

Dreams do not consist solely of illusions, If for instance, one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary- but fear is real .( Freud, pg. 74 )

Affects in dreams cannot be judged in the same way as the

remainder of their content, and we are faced by the problem of

what part of the psychical processes occurring in dreams is to be

regarded as real. That is to say, as a claim to be classed among

the psychical processes of waking life. ( Freud, pg. 74 )

The theory of the hidden meaning of dreams might have come to

a conclusion merely by following linguistic usage. It is true

that common language sometimes speaks of dreams with contempt.

But, on the whole, ordinary usage treats dreams above all as the

" blessed fullfilers of wishes ". If ever we find our

expectations surpassed by the event, we exclaim , " I should

never have imagined such a thing even in my wildest dreams "!

( Freud pg. 132-133 )

Bibliography

Buzav, Ivan, " Exhibitionism : The Essential Psychical Conflict in Manifest Dream Content," The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Sum. 1988, Vol.48(2) pp. 180-183.

Dentan, Robert Knox, " Butterflies and Bug Hunters : Reality and Dreams, Dreams and Reality," Psychiatric Journal at the University of Ottawah, Jun. 1988, Vol.13(2) pp. 51-59.

Foulkes, David and Sullivan, Brenda, " Appropriateness of Dream

Feelings to Dreamed Situations," Cognition an Emotion, Mar. 1988, Vol.2(1) pp. 29-39.

Freud, Sigmund, " The Interpretation of Dreams, " Basic Books A Division of Harper Publishers, year unknown.

Palombo, Stanley R. M.D, " Day Residue and Screen Memory in Freud's Dream of the Botanical Monograph," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, May, 1986, Vol.36(4) pp. 881-903.

Robbins, Paul R. and Tanck, H. Roland, " Interest in Dreams and Dream Recall," Perceptual and Motor Skills,Feb. , 1988, Vol.66 (1) pp. 291-294.