Print this article The unconscious and dreams

Dreams leave you perplexed, hesitant. Human beings sense that they have a depth that is not possible to find when you are awake. Dreams have a different time, an inner, privileged time.
In dreams we perceive the presence of a mystery that regards it but that is receding. The presence of a precious message indicated in an absurd, illogical form, a secret whose sense seems to be avoided but that gives us the impression that its knowledge would make us progress in the comprehension of ourselves and something therefore seems to push us towards searching for the hidden treasure.

Dreams come from an autonomous region of the psyche which is called the unconscious.
The unconscious is continually working and its intense activity shows above all in dreams that never present themselves in a clear way but in an elaborate form, which they reach after having covered a chain of deforming mechanisms. Freud demonstrated that mental life goes beyond the conscience, which we are not aware of, and he observed that the unconscious influences other parts of our personality such as the conscious and the intermediate part known as the pre-conscious.
Unconscious material is taken away from the conscience when it turns out to be unacceptable.

The analysis of dreams offers a way to penetrate the unconscious and to discover the energies that are opposed against the acceptance of unconscious material. A part of this unconscious material was once conscious and ten removed while other parts have never been conscious.
We now know that the organisation and logic of the unconscious relates to life, although the transverse paths that it follows do not clearly reveal all it wants to suggest which at times is so odd and original that you have to ask yourself the reason for so much effort and this is where censorship intervenes.

Freud attributed a psychological meaning to dreams that is possible to identify through the analytical work of interpretative by looking at dreams not like somatic processes but the result of a psychic process. According to Freud the unconscious expresses above all generally things of a sexual nature that realise themselves in dreams in a hallucinatory way. The wishes, feelings and thoughts of the unconscious are afflicted by the conscious part, but our sleep is often not disturbed by such contents since dreams are interposed by censure that has the task of masking latent messages of the unconscious and modifying them in tolerable images for the conscience. Our conscience refuses our wishes as immoral and the most profound impulses, of nature for that is for the most part sexual and aggressive, that through the work of the censure it becomes almost deformed in the oneiric context and they find their representation at a symbolic level. The symbolic representation is therefore the most important mechanism that censorship uses for introducing prohibitions to the expression of unconscious wishes.

The interpretation of dreams lays bare the distortions that oneiric censorship imposes. The meaning of a dream, in fact, is revealed through the interpretation that the obvious content, that is to say what is remembered of a dream, arrives at the unconscious as latent content. According to Carl Gustav Jung, dreams can be interpreted not only by the Freudian cause related method , that from the dream it is possible to arrive at the unconscious reasoning of an individual’s past, but also by the perspective method applied to the future. In this way, it is possible to observe in the oneiric background the development of a psychological development growth from the potential that is shown in dreams. Moreover, for Jung, dreams represent the contents of personal unconscious and also themes of the collective unconscious in that wide territory of the human psyche that keeps archetypes as universal symbols that do not derive from personal acquisitions, but are inherited from humans as a product of the history of the humanity from its origins. Jung wrote that it looks after itself of “… great dreams, or rather of dreams rich in meaning that come from a more profound layer of the psyche … it is no longer about archetypal images, of personal experiences, but in a certain way general ideas whose fundamental meaning is found in its characteristics and not in the context of personal events”. Jung had sensed, through a dream he personally had, of the existence, in the personal psyche, of a collective a priori related to traces of primitive ways of behaving that are supported by instinctive forms that he called archetypes.

The study of dreams is the study of wandering, winding paths on which unconscious human instincts encounter the thoughts we have when we are awake at the borders of our conscience.