Dreaming is the involuntary succession of ideas, images and emotions in a person’s mind at different sleeping stages. It is difficult to interpret a dream unless the person furnishes the core details which have proved difficult. However, psychologists have developed a technique that attempts to interpret dreams. There are several topics under dream interpretation including the wish fulfillment, interpretation method, sources of dream, distortion, and work and dream process psychology. In the present paper much attention is paid to dream process psychology and its role in dream interpretation. There is a clear hypothesis that the process of a dream displays the meaning associated with it (Freud, 1900).
The following literature reviews attempt to explain the hypothesis. This serves as a background to clearly bring out what actually constitute the psychological dream process in the case of a sick child and a father in hospital. A father sat at the bedside to watch over the sick child all day long. He finally had to retire to bed following the death of the child. He slept in a room just next to the child one but leaving the door open. The death child lay in the bed surrounded by candles. After a short while the fathers started dreaming that the child came and stood by his side. It complained to the father that the lit candles were burning it and needed his help. Earlier when the father retired to bed, he had left an open space that he could see the death child. When he woke up following the dream, bright light shone on him from the next room where he left the corpse. By the time he reached the site, the Child’s caretaker had slept and the candle had fallen down burning child’s arm and the bed sheets. This clearly shows that there is a direct link between actual activities and what takes place in a dream (Freud, 1900).
From a psychic point of view, this dream means that the father actually got an impression which he would have witnessed if he hadn’t slept. The father would have seen the candle falling if he was to stay put and perhaps he would have saved the child and the bed sheets from being burnt. Furthermore, what we deduce from this dream is that the words of the child complaining about being burnt must have been uttered before death. The speech telling the father to see it show that the child had pain while passing on.
From the above we can deduce that a dream have meaning. Looking at the context of the dream from a psychic point of view, it portrays a wish fulfillment. The dream made the sleeping father to wake up immediately. The corpse in this case looked a live issuing warning to his father. All these happened for because of desire for fulfillment of the dream. The art of waking up in a dream clearly show up in this case. The death of the child would have come earlier had the father not resorted to sleeping.
Up to this point I have explained the constituents of the dream by exposing its meaning using psychology. The meaning is so clear and not a disguised one. However, there is a conspicuous discrepancy from a persons wake up thoughts and the characteristics clearly brought out in the above dream. Now I turn my concentration on psychic dreaming process to explain the difference which is rather a tall order. It requires one to carry out a thorough investigation of the dream psychology from a psychic point of view. This is because of the difficulty associated with tracing back to the known. This process is more often prone to conjecture. This comes up because assumptions must be made when deciding on factors to consider for the investigation. Other factors will be kept constant while others variable and therefore the conjecture. I now turn my attention a comparative study of psychic activities as it proves kind of reliable to making a positive inference. To keep high the efforts of interpreting a dream and make it a piece of cake a research comes in handy.
The above hypothesis has received several criticism and rejection from many parts. We have to be able to explain the following issues related to dreams that will help us to see light in investigating the dream process. Therefore I want to take into account several issues that will help shade more light to explain the objection at this stage. They include dream forgetting by the person, dream repression, desire for fulfillment, waking as a result of the dream and reality. To start with is about forgetting a dream one just had. Human mind has always proved not faithful in recollecting all the steps in a dream and in the right sequence with every small detail associated with it. People therefore have a high tendency of complaining about their ability to recollect a dream. Others say they have dreamt much to be able to remember everything. This brings up uncertainty in trying to recollect the context and the finer details of a dream. This clearly shows that human mind’s memory reproduces an opposite impression of the actual dream. Another problem associated with forgetting of a dream is the ability to trust oneself whether there is a full connect or disconnect in relying what we purport to have dreamt.
There is no clear indicator to tell us whether disconnect as it may be, was actually real or it’s due to human forgetfulness. This means that there are high chances that what an individual’s reports after a dream is either truncated, rounded off or the actual dream. One therefore ends up making wrong inferences because of lack of real contents of the dream. This is why a conjecture is rampant in interpreting dreams. In the process of unearthing the above dream, this highlighted warning was given a blind eye. What makes it even more of a conjecture is that uncertain and very insignificant components of the dream outweighed the more open and certain components of the dream.
This makes it had to dispense information which was not during dream interpretation. Arbitral improvement of night thoughts has therefore riddled the whole process. Upon considering this factor and disconnect it unearths, we gain a new insight into the dream. Other writers have however played down the notion that information is distracted during dream reporting. This to them is because one cannot always think of arbitral things and fix in the mind without having the idea or even a link to make them anticipate. Further argues that a memory undergoes little change once a person wakes up from a dream. This means the chance of remitting arbitral information is limited (Andreas & Marinelli 2003).
The next issue is regression. Once the issue of objection of a dream has been dealt with, censorship in interpreting a dream isn’t complete if regression is overlooked. The dream now needs to be factored into psychological life context. The dream about the burning corpse is a full representation of receivership of psychological act which is a desire for fulfillment. However psychological censorship has played a big role in making the dream not seen as a wish as it looks absurd. The representation of thoughts image, outside structure of the dream and senses also contributed more to the censorship. These therefore led to assumption and therefore conjecture in knowing the dream. The dream is factored into psychological life to explain the reason for reciprocal wish motive in the dream.
A person will at given times dream of what they wish to happen. This clearly shows that there are several motives behind a dream. This can be done first by explaining why the father opted to dreaming as opposed to waking up earlier. In this case the father had a wish of the child not dying. The continued living of the child as opposed to death was the driving force of the dream the father had. This pushed him to go to bed as opposed to staying up despite mourning the death of the child. Another factor of this dream conjecture and disregard is the thoughts in a dream and its logic. This is where a person puts dream in the present state perception. The father in this case should have thought that the lights that came through the door might be that the candle has fallen down and that the child needs his attention and so help to prevent being burnt (Freud, 1900).
Thirdly is the wish fulfillment theory. The true meanings of dream as well the values associated with psychological part are always concealed in its back. Dream is viewed as dynamic thoughts when a person is a sleep. During the day, a human mind thinks of so many things. What happens in the night is that the same thoughts are continued from where the mind left them during the day because mind has fewer activities at night when one rests. This makes it unclear to pin down that the thoughts at night constitutes actually a dream or a mere ambition which is a continuity of ones thoughts as opposed to actually thinking.
The problem here is that the mind skews what we think during the day to wishes at night. In the case dream above the desire for fulfillment played a big role in the dream events and contents. The father turns starts anticipating things when he is shone by the lights from the candle. The thought of the child burning was because the candle might have fallen was just turned into a dream. There is however other dreams with the desire for fulfillment and others that lack. To account for the role of the wish for reality in a dream, I look at what makes it happen at night now that an individual continues with the thoughts experienced during the day. One is that the need to have repelled not be given during the day therefore night come in handy. Another reason is that other circumstances might not have conducive during day time hence culminate at night. The sleep desires by a person makes him or her preconscious (Blencher, 2001).
The other factor on board is waking up as a result a dream. The dream space is the watershed between the period when a person sleeps and wakes up. An individual needs a given time span so as to wake up. Dreams occur during this waiting period. Once a dream becomes seemingly real waking up is the next thing. This happens because the dreamer is almost exhausting the waking up time (Freud, 1900).In the case study of dream above, the father had to wake up having become so clear that the child was actually burning upon realizing that the candle had fell down.
The next issue is repression. Study have shown that an individual more often attempt to repel their own ideas by incursion of instincts from their conscious mind to unconscious part. This greatly impacts on interpretation of a dream the psychological away. Lastly is reality, more often when interpreting a dream we fall short of reality especially in the psychic apparatus. This leads us to make several assumptions than they really happen in a dream. The end result of this is conjecture and hence wrong dream interpretation (Freud, 1900).
In conclusion there is a challenge of accurate interpretation dream. The factors of interpretation reviewed above clearly points out that we are far from accurately interpreting our dreams albeit others have successfully been. It is thus recommended further study from this point be done to unearth the truth. There is high chance of arriving at a more accurate parameters albeit little hope of perfect research. This presents a good field for future psychology enthusiast to carry out further studies and research and help in developing better parameters and way of interpreting dreams (Pear, 1913).
References
Andreas, A. and Marinelli, L., (2003). Dreaming by the Book: Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, New York.
Blencher ,M.,(2001). The Dreamer Frontier. Routledge,New York.
Freud, S.,(1900). Interpretation of Dreams. Sterling press.
Pear, H.,(1913). The analysis of some personal dreams: Freud’s’ Interpretation of Dreams’. British Association, Birmingham.