According to Freud, dreams about air crashes, being late for the flight express our unconscious fear of death, and they also prove our traumas and worries. They refer to the impulse of a death, which was often mentioned in Freud’s Psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a man, who we can say that has changed the way most people look at their own dreams.
Nowadays, it is considered that Sigmund Freud too obsessively focused on sexuality. He made that the metaphorical world of dreams took a personal dimension.
Freud believed that dreams express our banned from an early age sexual desires, which are embarrassing to speak about and that we push them somewhere in the depths of our consciousness.
He attempted to lead humanity out of the Victorian era, when the topics related to human sexuality were the realm of taboo – it was forbidden not only to talk about it, but even ponder over it. Before the end of the nineteenth century,
Freud formed psychoanalysis in Paris, which is based on his belief derived from the ancient Greek courts, that the correct interpretation of the sleep can have healing properties. The Viennese psychiatrist did not want to heal the human bodies like his predecessors, but the souls and human emotions.
In the center of Freudian psychoanalysis was the belief that human psyche is not identical with consciousness – there is a mental life, remaining in the realm of the unconscious, which is irrational, with instincts, especially sexual ones, as primordial elements.
During his studies he discovered that our mind hides unconscious motivations for behaviour which are still a mystery. In order to solve it, he was trying many times and different methods. Among other things, he was studying associations and interpretation of dreams.
The pioneering work of his achievements was the book “The Interpretation of Dreams,” where he wrote about his theory that the mind expresses the hidden or suppressed emotions through dreams, but at the same time is trying to conceal them – hence we remember our dreams in a modified form.
In his opinion, every dream is an expression of latent wishes, usually motivated by libido and sexual desires. The importance attached by Freud to sexuality has been rejected by modern psychiatry, but until today his works are considered to be revolutionary, especially due to the influence that they had on people’s approach to the mechanisms of the human mind.
Freud believed that dreams were hidden desires. He believed that studying dreams was the easiest way to understand the functions of the mind. His theories say that dreams consist of two parts: the content, which is the dream we remember when we wake up, and the latent content, which we do not remember, but which remains in our consciousness.
Psychologists are divided over the function and meaning of dreams. Some psychologists believe that dreams are nothing more than the result of random brain activity that occurs during sleep, while others accept the perspective of people like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who have argued that dreams can reveal a person’s deepest unconscious desires.
For Freud, every dream matters, no matter how nonsense it seems or how little we remember it.
Symbols of Freudian dreams
Sigmund Freud believed that “all the material that makes up the content of a dream comes in some way from experience.”
Freud said that the elements that make up sleep are:
External stimuli: when the body experiences true external stimuli during sleep. A few examples may include an alarm clock, a strong smell, a sudden change in temperature, or a mosquito sting. Often these sensory stimuli make their way into dreams and become part of the dream narrative.
Internal (subjective) arousal: visual imaginative phenomena or, as Freud calls it, “hypnagogic hallucinations.” “These are images, often very vivid and rapidly changing, that can appear – quite often for some people – while falling asleep.”
Internal organic somatic stimuli: sensations produced by internal organs during sleep. Freud suggested that this form of stimulus could be used to identify and diagnose diseases. For example, “dreams of heart disease sufferers are usually brief and end frighteningly upon awakening; their content almost always includes a situation related to a terrible death. “
Physical sources of stimulation: thoughts, interests, and activities involved in the day before bedtime. Freud said that “the oldest and most recent dream researchers were united in the belief that people dream about what they do during the day and what interests them when they are awake.”
Freud believed that dreams can be highly symbolic, which makes it difficult to discover the waking elements that constitute them. Therefore, dreams can appear random and independent of our conscious experience, and according to Freud, they can lead us to believe that dreams have a supernatural cause.
According to Freud, the veils of sleep always play physiological and empirical elements that can be identified by appropriate methods. This is the basic principle in Freud’s approach to dream analysis.
Goals of sleep
The purpose of sleep in Freud’s ideology is to bring to the surface repressed desires so that the dreamer can face them and come to terms with repressed feelings. Freud wrote that dreams are “a hidden fulfillment of repressed wishes.”
According to Freud, the main purpose of sleep is to “release the pressure” of repressed fears and desires of the dreamer. Freud also specifies that wish-granting dreams are not always positive and can be ‘wish-fulfillment’; fulfilled fear; reflection; or simply recreating a memory.
The meaning of dreams
By analyzing the patterns and meanings of dreams, you will discover that it is not difficult to recognize the many images and actions that appear in dreams as essential. It must be emphasized, however, that there is little scientific support for Freud’s interpretation of hidden content. Dreams depend largely on culture, gender and age. Very specific cultural influences can be observed in reports from West African Ghana, where people often dream of attacks by cows. Likewise, Americans often dream of themselves ashamed of being naked in public, though such reports seldom appear in cultures where it is customary to wear skimpy clothes.