Sigmund Freud's Psychological Theories Of Dreaming

Sigmund Freud is the first modern psychologist to look at dream. He developed “his psychological theory of dreams, from his experience with his troubled patients and his own life events” (Moorcroft pg. 200). According to Wayne Sproule, Freud argued that a dream is like a safety valve that harmlessly discharges otherwise unacceptable feelings. He believed that dreams had hidden meanings that can be showed through symbolic images and even puns. Dream was seen as a language of its own. Freud’s theory of dreaming has three basic aspects (Hunt, 1989): why dreaming occurs, (2) how dreams are formed, and (3) a method of dream interpretation (Moorcroft 173). Freud believed that all behavior, including dreaming, is motivated by powerful, inner, unconscious
forces (need to reword page 173 understanding sleep and dream). Consider this example, I dreamt about getting married one day often but every dream is different; The first time I dreamt about getting married I was so excited and I walked down the aisle with my father and married the man of my dreams. This is an unconscious desire that exhibits itself in my dreams as a wish fulfillment. Angela Richards posits that, Freud believed , “dreams are not meaning less, they are not absurd; they do not imply that one portion of our ideas is asleep while another portion is beginning to wake. On the contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete validity – fulfillment of wishes” (Richards 200). Every dream have a meaning but we must be open to know that the meaning may not be the same every dream ( need to reword) . According to Freud, if we have a repetition of the same dream sometimes it changes and has a different meaning; “the first dream is the fulfillment of a dream; the second one might turn out to be a fulfilled fear; the content of the third might be a reflection; while fourth might merely reproduce a memory” (Richards pg.200). For instance, getting married is a dream I produce often. As mention above, I dreamt about being happily married and my father walking me down the aisle, that first dream was the fulfillment of a wish; the second time I had the dream, I dreamt about walking down the aisle but I turned back because I did not have my father walking down the aisle with me and I refused to get married without him, my second dream turn out to be a fulfilled fear.
On the contrary, the third time I had this dream, I dreamt about when my mother had her wedding and how she felt walking down the aisle by herself; the third dream was a memory of the past. There are two popular methods of interpreting dreams by Freud. According to Richards, “the first of these procedures considers the content of the dream as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and I n certain respects analogous to the original one” (Richards pg.170). Freud’s second popular methods of interpreting dream is “described as the decoding method since it treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning in accordance with a fixed key” (Richards pg.171). For example, I dreamt of a wedding and my
father. I consult to a dream dictionary, I find that to see or attend wedding in you dream symbolizes a unification with some aspects of yourself and if your father is dead in real life and appears in your dream he is most likely just a symbol for your conscience (dream bible 2014). It then remains for me to link together they key words which I have deciphered in this way and once more, to transpose the result into the future tense. Freud has this idea that dream mainly concerned with the future and being able to foretell it. He posits that it is a “remnant of the old prophetic significance of dreams provides a reason for transporting the meaning of dream when it has been arrived at by symbolic interpretation into the future tense” (Richards 170). According to Freud, when recalling a dream ,we often can recognize some of the events, people , or sights as having a recently been part of our waking experience.(Moorcroft 173). Freud believed that we use aspects of our recent experiences which he called day residue (Moorcroft 173) to precipitate some of the images of our dreams. These images are combined with memories, including those of childhood, to become the dream during the process of secondary revision
An example of this procedure is to be seen in the explanation of pharaoh’s dream propounded by joseph in the bible. The seven fat kine followed by seven lean kine that ate up the fat kine all this was a symbolic substitute for a prophecy of seven years of famine in the land of Egypt which should consume all that was brought forth in the seven years of plenty.

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Activation-Synthesis Theory

According to the activation synthesis model, dreaming is another result of the REM-ON area by configuring the functioning of the brain differently by activating several forebrain system while a few others are deactivated.
(page 188 Moorcroft). Moorcroft posits that, The process of synthesis during dreaming is no different from what occurs when you are awake. All us constantly synthesize the currently available sensory and motor information with our present affective state and then draw upon our memory banks of similar experiences and meanings to order to try to make it coherent (pg 189). On the other hand , according to the original version of this theory, a dream is catch as catch can synthesis by the forebrain, which is making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relatively noisy signals sent up to it from the brainstem” (Hobson & McCarley, 1977, p.1347). On the other hand, activation synthesis theory is not the best theory to explain dream. There are several critic of activation such as , being too neurological or too narrowly scientific to describe what dream is really about , there are people who have rems and do not dream and there are people who dream but don’t have rems , random stimulation of the forebrain that results in dreaming cannot explain the meaningfulness and it is based on animal brain research that may not apply to a mental functions in human” (Moorcroft
p.217).