Demystifying Dreams: The Road to the Unconscious
How psychoanalysis explains what happens while we sleep
Sigmund Freud’s book “The Interpretation of Dreams”, published in 1900 at the turn of the century, is considered a major milestone for psychoanalysis. In his text, Freud presents us with one of the best ways of investigating our unconscious mind, our dreams.
“The dream is the royal road that leads to the unconscious.” — S. Freud.
We can divide the process that takes place during a dream into manifest content and latent content. The manifest content is what can be remembered immediately after waking up, what is told by the dreamer. Latent content, on the other hand, is hidden and needs to be investigated to be discovered.
The latent oneiric thought operates behind the dream, what we think during sleep, but we are not aware that of are thinking. These unconscious thoughts, after undergoing certain deformations caused by our own censorship, become the manifest content.
The unconscious censorship that occurs while we sleep, although more moderate in relation to the waking state, which allows for better exploration, still exists, fulfilling its main objective, which is to keep us asleep by avoiding situations that bring out emotions strong enough to result in our awakening.
Often a dream that seems to have lasted hours or days can be summed up in just a few sentences. Despite the sensation, the memory of the manifest content of the dream makes us believe that it was actually a smaller dream than it appeared, due to the mechanism Freud calls condensation.
In condensation, several elements that have something in common are converted into a single representation. These shared characteristics are often not consciously known to the dreamer.
The dream thoughts that have been converted are much more extensive than the content we remember. The dream analyses that take place in psychoanalysis demonstrate the density of each representation, which sometimes has endless connections.
“(…) even if the solution seems satisfactory and without gaps, there is always the possibility that the dream has another meaning” — S. Freud.
The objects in our dreams usually carry numerous meanings, but they are all subjective. These objects can be things, people or animals.
A compass can represent a gift from your father, spatial orientation, fond memories of a childhood camping trip for one person, while for another the cardinal points can bring back memories of the initials of your late grandmother’s name, a traumatic scene in a movie, abuse suffered during a boat trip. The way in which this object performs its function in a dream will probably make a huge difference to its interpretation.
In addition to condensation, we have displacement. In this case, all the investment that should have gone into one object is transferred entirely to another, in other words, one object is replaced by another. Substitution also occurs due to the censorship of our psychic apparatus.
“(…) But we are already familiar with the distortion of the dream. We have discovered its origin in the censorship exercised by one psychic instance of the mind over the other. The displacement of the dream is one of the main methods by which this distortion is achieved.” — S. Freud.
We can, for example, replace the father figure we resent in a dream with an object with similar characteristics and thus act the way we would like, which is a way of getting around our censorship.
Condensation and displacement are both widely explored in Lacan’s theory of the unconscious structured as language, which he calls metaphor and metonymy.
It can be said that the origin of oneiric content consists of impressions of experiences from early childhood, when language was not yet fully mastered, and therefore learned as visual situations, but also with recent events, single fragments of images, words, speech and even unaltered thoughts.
During the process of elaboration of the dream by our psychic apparatus, there are two stages. First, the visual arrangement is made, the oneiric thought is transformed into images, after which a narrative is created, ordering the components to fit together, resulting in the oneiric composition.
Even after all the deformities caused by our censorship, it’s still possible to find traces of what we intended in our dreams and, the moment we wake up, our mind starts working to eliminate these traces, leaving the memories of what was dreamt ever more distant throughout the day.
The path to dream analysis will always be discourse, subjective associations in relation to the elements of the dream and not remembered images. All these mechanisms work during sleep with one objective, the disguised realization of a repressed desire.
Freud came to his conclusion about the meaning of oneiric content based on childhood dreams, a time when repressions and resistances are not yet fully developed and desires are simpler.
When a child really wants to eat ice cream, for example, there’s a good chance that this will turn into a dream during the night. Children’s dreams are generally uncensored and the realization of their desires appears more clearly.
Behind every dream, even if in a totally distorted form, using all the mechanisms necessary to get past our resistances, our superego, lies a desire that has been realized.
Bibliography and quotations:
FREUD, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Publisher: Hogarth Press.
FREUD, Sigmund. A Interpretação dos Sonhos (1900). Editora: Imago.
FREUD, Sigmund. Sobre os Sonhos (1901). Editora: Companhia das Letras.
*Quotes from Freud translated from the Brazilian edition.
