Freud's Interpretation Of Dreams

For my final project I will be doing studies that are derived from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. A well know phrase Freud himself coined was that dreams are the “Royal Road to the Unconscious”. Children’s dreams, as Freud had put it, where easy to understand because they have not built up any defenses or resistances to “mask” the motive behind their dream. Adults however, Freud theorized that they expressed unobtainable wishes, and being adults have built up a resistance or put a “mask” on making it more challenging to interpret the meaning of adults wishes thus hiding its true meaning. Freud believed that since people are asleep, when they are dreaming, they have their guard down and because of this, peoples dreams will reveal repressed wishes and desires, that otherwise could not be accessed in waking life.
Freud even believed that regardless of what kind of dream, whether is was a nightmare or a normal dream, all dreams had some sort of underlying wish that is unobtainable.
Because of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, recent studies have shown that unlike many of Freud’s ideas about psychology, Freud’s hypothesis about dreams, that dreams are a motivated phenomena, have shown support for this. Freud had two distinct types of dreams, Latent dreams and Manifest dreams. Manifest dreams are dreams the people will remember the next morning, all thought it may seem to be a dream of random unidentifiable attributes, but have some form of a story all the same. The Latent dreams is the meaning hidden in the content of the manifest dream that are discovered later. The latent dream in the manifest dream is what psychologist’s seek to
discover.
The following studies seek to explain Freud’s therious, and provide a deeper, and more recent understanding just what dreams hide within themselves and whether the interpretation of those dreams have an impact on the dreamers everyday life.
The first study conducted by DeCicco (2007) titled, “Dreams of female university students: Content analysis and the relationship to discovery via the Ullman method.” The Ullman method is a four stage process that allows dreamers to draw a meaning from their dreams, using a “safe” approach as to not reveal any personal or threatening material. Past researchers have studied dreams by examining themes or categories, meaning the general dream such as being chased or falling dreams, studying dreams in a detailed fashion with content analysis. The purpose of DeCicco (2007) was to examine female Canadian students' dream content, what students discover about their dreams and, and to examine how the dream content relates to discovery, when the dreamer finds something new about themselves or their waking life. Doing this, researchers expect the results and the content of dreams to be similar to results found in previous studies. The method of DeCicco (2007) was using 56 female students and 3 male students, whom researchers later removed the male results due to low male participants and the fact that studies have shown gender differences in dreams.
What DeCicco results had shown was a significant relationship amongst many categories, such as being chased. An example used is a dream about being chased and an animal appearing in the dream, Also, a moderate relationship between feelings toward animals such as fear and aggression in chase themed dreams. Another common dream in females was that of relatives, when female students dreamt of relatives, results show that it was related to unhappiness, objects, misfortune and so-on. Content and discovery, or when the dreamer finds something in the dream about them-selves or waking life, also had many correlations for example, in female students dream content of anger was related to some discovery about males.