The Interpretation of Dreams

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…

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…

This week’s myth was on research showing that dreams have symbolic meaning. This psychological belief goes all the way back to Freud, who stated that dream interpretation was not universal, even though he treated it like it was. I was most surprised to learn that this belief actually stems from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. I knew it wasn’t a new belief, but I did not know that belief was over a hundred years old. This myth has persisted because we believe in a subconscious self, and we…

“Midsummer’s Night Dream”, composed of an assembly of figurative language, this idea of the word “dream” itself, and the complexity of this in connection to the overall story and characters, will be explored further. Understanding it’s historical…

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…

Intro: Freud in The interpretation of Dreams creates a procedure to analyze dreams. He first proposes the idea that all dreams fulfill a subconscious wish. This theory creates a fundamental issue: How can all dreams be wish fulfillment if in many cases they are destressing to the dreamer? To combat this issue Freud proposes the idea of manifest and latent content as the keys to understanding dreams. Manifest content is defined as the dream itself, it is the “plot”. Latent content is the…

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…

For the mystic, Dream Yoga is an essential tool in the collection of Amrita and in understanding the nature of Nirvikalpa-samādhi, yet it is the Atman that will control the dreaming awareness as Self can only experience ordinary dreams. The Atman awareness can move out of the lucid dream state and enter into the unknown, unifying the energies of the Yantra chakra with the energies of the Bindu chakra. In many ways, ordinary Self becomes the dream and dreaming becomes the reality as the Atman…

degree that wouldn 't bore me to death, and I figured, "A class about dreams has to be at least somewhat interesting, right?" So I signed up expecting nothing more than to learn a few facts, and get through my last semester at Lakeland. However, I quickly learned…

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…