Dream Theory
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Dreams are mental experiences that routinely occur during sleep, often including vivid visual imagery. Despite dreams being one of the most commonly shared aspects of human existence, they are a conscious phenomena that remain a mystery. While there are various theories proposed regarding the function of out dreams, they are largely based on conjecture more than research. This seemingly magical world of consciousness is what drew my interest to dreams and dreaming. Additionally, dreams are personal in that we most often dream about ourselves. The self-centeredness of dreaming also makes me believe that an understanding of the phenomenon is helpful for an individual to understand more about themselves. Despite this interest and the routine nature of dreams, the theories of dreaming available to us remain largely untested. Cartwright (1978, 2) points out that while there are at least seven major theories on dreaming, “none of the theories has been tested adequately.” Only in recent history have dreams been subjected to empirical study. Dreams act as a bridge between our sleeping and our waking states. Freud viewed them as a means of wish fulfillment for ungratified needs while awake, while other theorists like Rosalind Cartwright (Webb and Cartwright, 1978, 224) see them as a means of “working through the major problems in our lives.” Certain themes while dreaming appear to be more common than others, such as falling and be
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were, in modern terms, the solutions of equations describing a new reality given in symbolic terms” (Wolf, 1994, 44). One other contrast between the theories of Freud and Jung, even though both accepted dreams were the language of the unconscious mind, consists of Jung’s believe that dreams were messages from ourselves to ourselves. In other words, they are devised to reveal something, whereas Freud believed they were constructed to hide something.
Jung believed that certain images in dreams were universal to all people. One small aspect of the image in a dream represents something common to all dreamers, a portion Jung labeled the archetype. While people in different cultures may dream of different images, the meanings of the images, that is, their archetypes, are the same. Like Freud, Jung analyzed his own dreams as a manner of devising his theories. Because of when wherein he reverted back to a primal state, he theorized that while some content of dreams is related to the dreamer’s personal live experiences and waking consciousness they also transcend this level to the collective unconscious that is universal to all humans “For Jung the dream was a structural diagram of the human psyche showing that below the personal un
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Approximate Word count = 4739
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)
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