Psychology of Dreams

Dreams are thoughts, emotions and the images shaped by them, which are encountered when asleep. One has dreams during the rapid eye movement sleep. Various theories on dream interpretations exist but the real purpose of dreams is still unknown. Dreams are closely associated with the human psychology. Research shows that during an average lifespan, a human being spends about six years in dreaming which is around two hours every night. Let us look at the dream psychology.

Psychology of Dreams
Sigmund Freud had proposed that dreams are the means of one's expressions of his/her unconscious wishes. He had said that bad dreams allow the brain to gain control over the feelings that are a result of distressful experiences. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist suggested that dreams compensate for one-sided feelings borne in consciousness. According to Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a dream bears something that cannot be expressed outright. Some theories say that dreams involve one's repressed emotions that are fantasized during the sleep while other theories suggest dreams to be an outcome of the cleaning-up operations of the brain.

Hartmann believes that dreams give a person an opportunity to organize his/her thoughts. Blechner's theory of Oneiric Darwinism, which attributes the generation of new ideas to dreams, is quite supportive of Hartmann's analysis. Griffin, through his recent research has proposed the expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming, according to which dreaming completes patterns of emotional expectations.

According to the theory of emotional selection by Richard Coutts, dreaming is a way to modify one's mental schema. The theory of emotional selection is about a process of executing a set of dreams during the non-REM sleep. A second set of dreams is executed during the following REM sleep in the form of test scenarios. It defines an accommodation as the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences. If the accommodations performed during the preceding non-REM dreams reduce one's negative emotions, they are selected for retention, else they are abandoned. Thus emotional selection says that the psychology of dreams is usually about the enhancement of mental schemas, it’s about increasing one's social abilities.

Have you wondered about the significance of the content of your dreams? Dream psychology believes that the elements of the dreams are closely related to the environment and the experiences one is exposed to. Presence of colors in the dreams is the result of long years of exposure to colored media, which is evident by a study that shows people of the olden times to be having black and white dreams. Colors, which appear in the dreams, carry the emotions represented by those colors. Dreamer often ‘watches’ the incident in the dream as an ‘onlooker’. Mostly, the visual and auditory senses form a part of dreams. It is seldom touch or taste that are experienced in the dreams.

Although dream dictionaries give meanings to dreams and various ways of dream interpretations exist, dream psychology believes that the association between objects dreamt and their meanings is subjective. What is indicated by a particular dream depends on what the dreamer associates the elements of his dream with. It is suggested to write down your dream and decipher what each of the constituent of the dream conveys. It is important to understand what you associate with a particular thing you dreamed of. The thought or emotion that you get in relation to a certain color, object or a person in your dream, can serve as a clue to interpret your dreams. After having a dream, you can make its write-up, identify your psychological associations with the dream images and link all of them. More than what the elements of your dream symbolize, it is about what the elements mean to you.