possible in dreams. Paul McCartney famously
credited the composition of The Beatles song
“Yesterday” to a dream. Other artists, from the
poet William Blake to the filmmaker Ingmar
Bergman, have claimed to rely on dreams for
creative inspiration and guidance. The golfer
Jack Nicklaus solved a nagging problem with
his golf swing after sorting out the problem in a
dream. Recent research examined the role of
dreams in problem solving, using a group of
lucid dreamers. They found that lucid dreamers
could use their dreams effectively to solve
creative problems (in the case of the study,
the creative problem was crafting a metaphor
as directed by researchers). Studies like this
one suggest dreams may be fertile territory for
influencing and enhancing our waking frame
of mind. More broadly, dreams provide us with
insight about what’s preoccupying us, troubling
us, engaging our thoughts and emotions.
Often healing, often mysterious, always
fascinating, dreams can both shape us and show
us who we are.
consists, however, of “day residue,” that is,
memories of experiences and thoughts that
the dreamer has had on the day previous to
the dream. Day residue alone is not sufficient
to create a dream; it must be charged by an
infantile wish in order to transform it into the
conscious imagery of
a dream.
When the dream thoughts (latent
content) are transformed into the manifest
content of the recalled dream, they are
altered in certain ways. They are subject to
condensation; an element in the manifest
dream may be a compression of several dream
thoughts. They are subject to displacement;
feeling associated with a particular dream
thought is transferred to an otherwise
neutral element in the manifest dream.
Latent thoughts may also be represented
in the experienced dream by symbols. The
interpretation of a dream requires, then,
that all of the condensed manifest elements
be expanded into their constituent dream
thoughts, that all displaced affects be traced to
their proper sources in the latent content, and
that referents be found for all symbols. This is
a formidable undertaking, the result of which
is an interpreted version that is many times
longer than the text of the manifest dream. The
practicability of this method of interpreting
dreams appears to be restricted to long-term
psychotherapy.
Freud hypothesized that the dream
work, which consists of the operations
for transforming latent into manifest
content is governed by two aims: regard for
representability and disguise. Regard for
representability refers to the transformation of
abstract dream thoughts into concrete dream
imagery. The aim of disguise is protection,
based on the assumption that the undisguised
latent thoughts would evoke so much anxiety
that the dreamer would awaken. Many dreams
do, in fact, awaken the sleeper because they are
not sufficiently disguised. The sleep-protection
hypothesis is a biological one, for it explains not
what we dream but why we dream.
Freud’s Theory
Freud’s empirical method for interpreting
a dream involves free association. After a
person reports a dream to his analyst, he is
instructed to say everything that comes into
his mind when each successive element of the
dream is presented back to him. By using the
method of free association with his patients’
dreams, Freud (1900) was able to formulate
a comprehensive theory of the dream. The
dream has two kinds of content: the manifest
(conscious) content, which is the dream as
experienced and remembered by the dreamer,
and the latent (unconscious) content, which
is discovered through free association. Dream
interpretation involves replacing the manifest
with the latent content. The nucleus of the
latent content is an unconscious infantile wish
with which later experiences have become
implicated. The ultimate task of interpretation
is to unearth the nuclear infantile wish through
free association. Much of the latent content
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Jung’s Theory
It remained for one of Freud’s early
associates (later an apostate), Carl
Jung, to examine dreams for evidence
of a racial uncon scious that all men
share (Jung 1960). Jung was convinced
that there was sufficient evidence in
dreams and other types of material,
e.g., myths and religion, to validate the
concept of a collective unconscious. He
called the contents of this unconscious
“archetypes” and identified a number
of them: the anima, the shadow, the
earth mother, the wise