Dreams & Related Symbols - Part 1

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Almost everyone dream in the night while they are fast asleep. People often go off to sleep after the whole day's work, keeping in mind the tension and stress they had to go through in the day. This results in a disturbed sleep and we find that people are more prone to get dreams that are in store for them. Dreams sometimes can be good and can be disturbing at times. However, according to me, whatever be the nature of the dreams, may be it is good or bad has some adversary effects on the person and affects his or her sleep in some way or the other. Thus dreams and the topics related to dreams have been and is still a matter of concern and study for many researchers.

Sometimes it has been found that a person is so happy in his world of dream that when he comes out of it he feels like returning back to it in for a moment to experience that feeling of well being once more. Sometimes the stories remain incomplete and the person wants to complete the story that he has seen in his dreams. As a matter of fact, these are very common experiences that a person goes through while he is in his sleep. He feels that the subconscious mind that he was in was far better than the conscious mind that he is going through. The mind is said to go through three states - one the conscious, second the subconscious and the third the unconscious. It is said that the person dreams what he feels and thinks. This is gradually embedded in the subconscious mind and he dreams that when he is asleep. Sometimes, it happens that after a dream the person wakes up and feels that he was dreaming about something that he was thinking few days back, but forgot about it due to certain reasons. Thus in a way, it lands a recall of the events that are embedded in our minds.

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Dreams are very significant and it symbolizes many things. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are very important signifiers of many things and as such he placed a huge degree of importance to the subsidiary things related to dreams. According to Freud, dreams are spyholes into our unconscious. Fears, desires and emotions that we are usually unaware of make themselves known through dreams. To Freud, dreams were fundamentally about wish fulfillment. Even "negative" dreams (punishment dreams and other anxiety dreams) are a form of wish-fulfillment; the wish being that certain events do not occur. Very often such dreams are interpreted as a warning.

Freud had collected some information from normal people through which it is easy to discover wish fulfillment. The following are some excerpt mentioned by Sigmund Freud in one of his books on Dream analysis, which goes to prove this....

A friend of mine who knew my dream theory and had shared it with his wife said to me one day "I must tell you that my wife dreamt yesterday that she had her period. You know what that means." "Certainly I knew; since the young woman had dreamt that she had her period, it meant that her period had not come. I could well believe that she would liked to have enjoyed her freedom a little longer before beginning the burden of motherhood. It was a clever way of announcing the onset of her pregnancy. Another friend writes to me that his wife recently dreamt that she noticed drops of milk on her blouse front. This is always a sign of pregnancy, but not first pregnancy. The young mother wanted to have more milk for the second child than what she had for the first."

Freud believed that although our dreams contain these important messages, they are encoded or disguised. The unconscious mind doesn't speak any verbal language and therefore it must communicate with us via symbols. Some of these symbols are near universal while others are very personal