Giving Meaning To Your Dreams: Interpreting.

In Chapter Two Freud talks about interpreting dreams. When we try and interpret our own dreams, it is like trying to give the dream a meaning,“for to interpret a dream is to specify its meaning, to replace it by something which takes its position in the concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of definite importance and value.” We connect it to our daily life and try to give that dream an important role. Interpreting dreams depend on us, on how much farther we want to interpret the dream or not. As Freud states, “I could still spend much time upon it; I could draw further explanations from it, and discuss further problems which it seems to propound. I can even perceive the points from which further mental associations might be traced; but such considerations as are always involved in every dream of one's own prevent me from interpreting it farther.” Interpreting ones dream is like interpreting a quote, one chooses to go as far as he or she wants.

Once my mom had a dream that me and my sister were in a forest and that my sister got kidnapped. Two weeks later it was the trip to the Amazon, so my mom interpreted the dream as a warning that something bad was going to happen. She really didn’t want us to go, but she let us go and told us over and over again to be careful. Nothing bad happened to my sister, yet she did get home sick and cried the night we slept out in the forest. As Freud says, “they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.” So what was the meaning of that dream? Was my mom’s interpretation good enough? Could she have gone farther? What was that “thought-process”?

All dreams have a meaning and we are in charge of giving them one. Dreams are very important and deserve to be looked at, “If the method of dream- interpretation here indicated is followed, it will be found that dreams do really possess a meaning, and are by no means the expression of a disintegrated cerebral activity, as the writers on the subject would have us believe.” Dreams are far more complex than as Freud says “a disintegrated cerebral activity. Dreaming is a “psychic” activity.