Another quick disclaimer before I get into the meat of this,
to horrify/upset/rage-bait my fellow psychologists I actually rate dream
analysis to be as valid a technique as astrology and tarot reading. You can
really only tell something about a person by asking them how they feel about their dreams, attempting
to interpret them as an outsider is like trying to convince somebody that they
don’t like a type of food because they are “tasting it wrong”.
Regardless!
It’s something that crops up a lot in psychology, the idea of you sitting on a
couch and telling me about that dream you had where the money propositioned you
but you couldn’t accept because you’re already engaged to a formula one car. Then
I take a drag on my pipe, adjust my little circle-glasses and tweed suit and
then while making a few notes on some paper you can’t see tell you that this
comes from a deep seated urge to do the dirty with your mother/father.
I’m
sad to say there is a tiny bit of truth in this, like all stereotypes it’s
based on something that happens so I’ll break it down for you. I’m sure you’ve
all heard of Freud, who had some very interesting ideas about the penis and
your relationship with your parents. Modern psychologists consider his work
about as relevant as aerospace engineer would refer to the Wright brother’s
planes. The guy was a pioneer of his time, but his ideas now are… well “dated”
is the nice way of describing them. But before you blow him off remember that
before this point, nobody had considered the notion that a traumatic childhood
could affect you into adulthood, or that emotional wellbeing was as important
as physical wellbeing, so penises and parent-banging aside, the guy had some
pretty interesting stuff to say.
One
of his biggest ideas was the notion of an “unconscious mind” the part of your
brain that makes all the decisions for you, and then tosses them up to your
pre-frontal cortex for your conscious mind to mull over. It’s also part of the
brain that has a big impact on your dreams, and as such Freud referred to your
dreams as “The royal road into the unconscious mind” and set a lot of stock on
analysing them to discover what your “Inner self” was really worried about. To
an extent this is true, things that your unconscious mind fixates on will tend
to crop up in your dreams, many people still re-live events from their
schooldays in their dreams, or are confronted with people who broke their
hearts, it’s not all balderdash, but it also can’t be said to conclusively
demonstrate a mental illness either.
So
how much stock should you put in your dreams? Well the answer is “as much as
you want to.” It’s not “Your mind trying to tell you something” any more then
flipping through your “most viewed channels” and finding a lot of naked people is
telling you that maybe you gotta ease back on all the porn. Your unconscious
mind doesn’t have a “will” par sé, it’s more like an adaptive learning computer
that tries to make sense of the world for you and then hands you the important
bits on a platter for you to do something with. Dreams are its way of passing
that information back and forth between its various evolved bits and when it
leaks through you get to see the result, it’s not what your unconscious it
thinking, it’s more like fragments of what you may potentially be thinking if
you decided to poke your unconscious the right way, it’s a graveyard of “thoughts
that may have been” and your dreams are
the ghost of those thoughts, coming back to haunt you.
