The Royal Road to the Unconscious

"The Royal Road To The Unconscious"

What is a dream? - A dream is an event transpiring in that world belonging to the mind when the objective senses have withdrawn into rest or oblivion. I chose to write my paper on dream interpretation/analysis because it was always a subject that intrigued me because one will never dream the same dream, just like no two flowers are ever the same; you fail to find the same fragrance in the rose at all times. Persons of the same or similar temperament will be more deeply impressed by a certain dream than would people their opposite; and though the dream cannot be the same in detail yet it is apparently the same.
When you venture into the realm of dream interpretation you must try to decode your dream, you need to dissect it into the separate fragments and examine each for its particular meaning. Each one contains a small nugget of the whole picture. Dreams are composed of a collage of little parts of your own life experience that are stored away in your brain symbolically.
Dream interpretation/analysis which is briefly discussed on page 530 in our text book; says that Sigmund Freud, who first opened the road to the use of dream interpretation/analysis as means of psychic investigation; was a firm believer in psychoanalysis to bring unconscious conflicts into conscious processes. Freud, the author of a monumental work on dream interpretation titled, The Interpretation of Dreams; should be a book that anyone who is curious of the psychology process of the dream should definitely read. I believe that dreams can significantly affect our everyday lives in that whatever we dreamt of the night before, that next day we will search for any symbols or events that might have triggered that certain dream. For example, lets say you had a dream that you were in a garden of blooming flowers, which usually signifies pleasure and gain, if they were bright colored; or if you dreamt of white flowers, which would denote sadness; you either could have received flowers that day which would have triggered a dream or you may look around the next day for flowers and try to figure out why you had the dream. The essential point, then, in this procedure is that the work of interpretation is not applied to the entirety of the dream, but to each portion of the dream-content severally, as though the dream were a conglomerate in which each fragment calls for special treatment. I also believe that dream symbols can be keys to unlock the secrets in your unconscious mind.
The Bible, as well as other great books of historical and revealed religion, shows traces of a general and substantial belief in dreams. Plato, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Napoleon assigned to certain dreams prophetic value. Joseph saw eleven stars of the zodiac bow to himself, the twelfth star. The famine of Egypt was revealed by a vision of fat and lean cattle. The parents of Christ were warned of the cruel edict of Herod, and fled with the Divine Child into Egypt. The prophets and those who have stood nearest the fountain of universal knowledge used dreams with more frequency than any other mode of divination.

In conclusion, I believe that the world of dreams will remain a big mystery; for no one is accurate on decoding dreams or dream symbols. Simply using a dictionary of dreams is misleading, because these interpretations had a value to the composer of the list, which may have been a part of his or her personal experience. Someone else's experiences don't create the same symbols that your own mind has created. There will always be books, magazines, articles, etc. published on someone attempting to solve this great mystery but in my opinion there's one book that will still be the most accurate to help in interpreting dreams and that is Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
"A dream, then, is a psychosis, with all the absurdities, delusions and illusions of a psychosis. A psychosis of short duration, no doubt, harmless, even entrusted with a useful function, introduced with the subject's consent and terminated by an act of his will. Nonetheless it is a psychosis, and we learn from it that even so deep going an alteration of mental life as this can be undone and can give place to the normal function. Is it too bold, then, to hope that it must also be possible to submit the dreaded spontaneous illnesses of mental life to our influence and bring about their cure?"

Bibliography

"Classics in the History of Psychology" The Method of Dream Interpretation

Lohff, David C, and Jones, Greg. The Dream Directory: The Comprehensive Guide to Analysis and Interpretation, with Explanations for more than 350 Symbols and Theories Running Press Book Publishers, September 1998

"Dream Analysis and Interpretation" How to Analyze Your Dreams