Dreamscapes and The Interpretation of Dreams

Monday, June 22, 2015 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

Dreams are an extension of you. They are the buried you, the secret you. They are the you under all of your years and all of your memories and all your secret desires. Dreams allow you to peer into your inner self with a strange, twisted gaze. For once you look inside to see through and into the illusion. Images flow without restraint and forced interpretation and labelling of the conscious mind. Dreams are the inner eye, drawing its gaze upon itself.

Recently I've been reading The Interpretation of Dreams again, by Sigmund Freud, (the illustrated version is particularly interesting) and there are some quite miraculous cases and anecdotes in it, as well as examples of interpretations that would never have arisen had the psychiatrist not gone into in-depth talks with his subject beforehand. That is to say, to know one's dreams, you must first know the person who dreamt them. Which begs the question as to why we can rarely successfully interpret our own dreams. Do we know so little about ourselves?

Sigmund would confirm this to be the case and often refers to this "unknowing" as something quite normal.

The subconscious is a net of experience. And if the concept of COEX System is indeed accurate, meaning that memories and emotional and physical experiences are stored in the psyche not as isolated bits and pieces, but in the form of complex constellations, then each dream holds its own impressions and emotional depth, likely a multitude of them. In this fashion, your dreams draw from these layers of webbing pulsing beneath new and fresher layers of experience, but still just as active.

It is interesting to note that there are so few points that make up the dream and its contents when it comes to its material and sources, and once you realize what they are, it may make it easier to interpret some of them.

There are three points which are most important, and follow as such:

1. The dream distinctly prefers impressions of the few days preceding the dream.

2. The dream makes its selection according to principles other than those of our waking memory, meaning that it recalls not what is essential and important, but what is subordinate and disregarded.

3. The dream has at its disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood, and brings to light details from this period of life which again seem trivial to us, and which in waking life were considered long ago forgotten.

All of this is preceded by the notion that All Dreams Are, in their basis, The Realization of a Wish. Yet that wish may be hidden behind layers of conflicting information and are subject to something called "Dream Distortion".

The last part (3) is especially difficult to judge when it occurs, because the respective elements of the dream are not recognized according to their origin after waking. That is to say, that it is hard for the dreamer to know he still remembers something which the conscious mind does not actively recall. This conclusion thus can only be reached objectively, yet can sometimes be recognized when the dream held a certain kind of "power" or nostalgia or a deeply buried desire, which can only be fully explored when subject to interpretation by another subject.

I have began keeping a dream diary and take notes of the dreams while I still remember them, since most but the severely powerful and "educational" dreams tend to fade within 4-15 minutes after waking. The experience so far has proven interesting.