Freud's Involvement In The Study Of Dreams

Dreams are an amazing thing that are still studied and analyzed on a daily basis. The reason they prove to be so mysterious is because they are not only something that researchers can analyze, they are also the reason why we wake up scratching our head sometimes wondering why in the world we just dreamt whatever it is that we dreamt. They are very applicable to every single individual which is why they are so interesting to study. Something that Freud is well known for is his involvement in the study of dreams and the unconscious. Dreams can be hard to understand and study since they happen when an individuals is not awake and unaware of their surroundings. According to the psychoanalytic theory, “dreams have two levels of content: a manifest
A particular study was conducted in order to confirm Freud’s thoughts that dreams are, in fact, a primary-process. In this experiment, researchers Frank Auld, Gary Goldenberg, and Jutta Weiss picked a sample of college students to sleep for an allotted amount of time over a three week period and simply report their dreams afterward. The room they slept in was very bland and did not contain any stimuli that could potentially affect the participant’s dreams. Once the participant’s sleeping time was over, they would simply explain the dreams they experienced with a voice recorder, and would then rate their dream on a scale of 1 to 7; one being a fairly normal and logical dream to seven being the dream made no sense at all and parts of the dream may not have even correlated with any other part of the dream (Auld, Goldenberg, & Weiss, 1968). Researchers assumed that if dreams were secondary-process (conscious mind) that participants would dream about things that they were experiencing at the current time; for instance, they might be dreaming about the experiment, the room they were sleeping in, the couch they were sleeping on, etc. and dreams would probably be fairly normal and logical. However, if the dreams were random and did not apply to that individual’s specific situation, then this shows that there is a relationship with the unconscious, because their brains are taking events and information from things that are not currently relevant in their lives and creating dreams out of that. With this information, the researchers were able to conclude that Freud’s original thoughts about dreams when it comes to the unconscious’ involvement do prove to be true (Auld, Goldenberg, & Weiss,