Want to Decode Your Dreams? Psychoanalytic Research Suggests You Ditch Your Dream Dictionary
7 steps you can take right now to decode your dreams, according to dream psychology.
My love for psychology and curiosity for understanding my deepest self led me to a seat in the back of a college course called the psychology of dreams. It was a gripping experience; having to be vulnerable for an A was not exactly what I’d thought college was going to be like, but the reward was massive. By the end of it, I was motivated to quit my dreadful day job.
At the beginning of the semester, my professor urged us to give away our dream dictionaries and expressed how useless they are in our quest to understand our dreams. This was a promising viewpoint from someone with glowing reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. He familiarized us with dream archetypes and symbolism; the textbook screamed definitions I’ve never heard of. This is what dreams are made of, I thought.
I gathered myself, took a deep breath, and down the rabbit hole I went.
Down with the dream dictionary
There isn’t a solid science-backed system of dream interpretation. Patrick McNamara, Ph.D., writes in a Psychology Today article, “ What you will get if you look…
