Dream Theater

Sigmund Freud proposed that the dreams we have show what we want to feel but are too afraid to admit. He used the terms ‘manifest content’ and ‘latent content’. Manifest content can be defined as the remembered story line of the dream. For example, if you had a dream about going to a casino and gambling. The manifest content is remembering that you lost at the table or the machines. Latent content is applying that dream into your unconscious mind to interpret what it means. The gambling may…

Freud once said, “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious” (“The Interpretation”). Sigmund Freud firmly believes that dreams allow people to be what they cannot be, and to say what they can not say in our more repressed daily lives (Freud). Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a novel that involves dreams to symbolize characters and foreshadow situations. Raskolnikov’s dreams may give more insight to his mind than the entire novel. Raskolnikov experiences four dreams from beginning…

Dreams serve as an effective way to look deeper into the character of a novel. Dreams allow authors to speak through their characters in a new way and act as a ploy to insert an idea or theme into a narrative, subtly. Dreams can speak to the mind of a character in profound and indirect way (WC) as well. Furthermore, dreams reflect both A Map of Home and Minaret and act as a motif to highlight the main characters as well as add to characterization. The two protagonists, Najwa and Nidali, come…

Death of a Salesman presents the struggle of an American family to achieve success. Willy Loman, the main character, is a salesman who is motivated by the desire to provide for his family. This desire is the quintessential definition of the American Dream. Blinded by this desire, Willy Loman loses sight of his true happiness and tears himself apart. To fully understand the breakdown of Willy, one must first look to the play. Miller uses numerous literary devices to introduce the audience to…

“Follow your dreams,” quoted by Kobi Yamada. Now one may think this quote is talking about the dreams as in goals and things people want to do in their life, but think again. Have you ever wondered about real dreams? The one’s you have when you’re asleep at night; the normal dreams, lucid dreams, the false awakenings, and even the nightmares? A dream is a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep (Dream). Dreams are a great wonder to the world that…

What It Means To be American To be an American means not being afraid to follow your dreams and follow your heart. To be an American means be willing to fight for what is right and not just for yourself, but for other people you may like or dislike. An American is a hard worker that makes sacrifices for the greater good. It is okay to work hard and suffer and have delayed gratification. There are many songs that provide words that will move you and leave you feeling pride for your country. The…

In “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller, the main character, Willy Loman is an elderly man. He has come to a fork in the road of struggling with everyday life in modern America, in the late 1940’s. As constantly newer appliances and cars are being manufactured, Willy Loman is progressively tries to obtain the latest models for his family. As he slowly starts to lose his mind in this materialistic world, it becomes clear that the only thing he is really concerned about is keeping up with the…

In “On Dreams”, Freud (1901) lays out many of his thoughts of the fundamentals about dreams and their interpretation through the interpretation of his own dream which occurred on July 23-24th, 1895. In this case study, the fundamental concepts of dream interpretation will be outlined beginning with an analysis of the difference between manifest and latent content of dreams. Also included will be a discussion of of condensation and displacement as forms of distorting dreams and the related…

do a quick search on Google for Dreams, you will get over 7 million results including the definition of dreams which is “successions of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur usually involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep” (“Dream” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 18 January 2016). That definition sounds so scientific in comparison to the dreams I’ve had and while it is accurate in the science of dreams, I am certain that when you dream it feels like more than a…

Dale M. Kushner’s Understand Your Dreams by Using Jung’s “Active Imagination” takes on C.G. Jung’s ideas about the latent content of dreams to develop the thesis that states, what is hidden from our minds in the day-world becomes manifest in living color in our dreams (Para. 1). Reading Kushner’s thesis confirmed my ideas about what the underlying meaning of our dreams really are. According to Jung, “Our darkest dreams might contain imagery that illustrate our internal conflicts and…