Dream analysis by Freud :
Psychoanalysis is a discipline dealing with the scientific study and analysis of our unconscious mind. The famous psychologist Sigmund Freud brought psychoanalysis into the vogue and interpreted many events in our physical world and conscious life to be directly linked and influenced by our unconscious mind and its desires. He described dreams as the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious, arguing that dreams provide us with the best understanding of the repressed desires in us.
Freud argues that there is always a tension between the Id, our aboriginal desires which demand instant gratification and the Superego, our morality and conscience which seeks to control these desires. The job of our conscious self,or Ego, is to balance these two forces upto a socially granted limit. In daytime,these unfulfilled desires lay dormant but during sleep there is no danger of these repressed desires being put into action. They find a measure of fulfilment
when they express themselves as dreams. Dreams are codes which conceal within themselves the language of the unconscious and of distorted desires,and through them the repressing force is bypassed. This mechanism of
dreams is known as the dream work in Freudian terminology.
The whole process of dream mechanism is broadly classified into two sections : the dream content and the process of making dream, or, dream work. According to Freud (1900), sources of dreams include stimuli from the external world, subjective experiences, organic stimuli within the body, and mental activities during sleep. Latent dream content is the actual content of the unconscious that seeks expression and the images or events that directly appear in one’s dream is the manifest dream content. Since the latent dream content is concealed inside complex structures and codes, it can be revealed only through a thorough analysis of the manifest dream. Freud argued that the latent dream content undergoes four stages of dream work before it expresses itself in the manifest dream : condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision.
Condensation of the elements of the latent dream content leads to the superimposition of several elements on each other to produce a complex image in the manifest dream. A traumatic situation or a whole series of events may be expressed only as one particular symbol. In the process of displacement, the features of the signified is displaced and transferred to the signifier, turning the manifest symbol associative with the latent meaning. The language of the dream often uses complex and implausible codes – a process we know as the representation. Freud argues that the latent dream content takes recourse to a strange language or images fraught with contradictory elements ,for example,erect objects symbolizing phallus, where there is no rational or cultural connection between any of them. Finally the dreamer, in the process of secondary revision, revises the dream content and rejects certain
uncomfortable aspects of the dream by means of censorship. This happens because the conscious mind organizes the elements of the dream into recognizable and acceptable themes or images, ignoring and forgetting the rest.
Thus, Freudian dream analysis clearly bridges our dreams to the yet undiscovered vistas of our mysterious unconscious. For him, both art and dreams are means of channelizing the repressed desire in a socially acceptable way, and dreams, if interpreted properly, can furnish significant information about the dreamer.
