Why should we care about dreams?
Aren’t dreams silly … just random neurons firing?

Evolution has chosen to dream.
Sleep researchers tell us that all humans and many animals dream multiple times each night. Dream sleep is so important that experimental subjects who are prevented from experiencing REM sleep, the part of sleep in which dreams occur, begin to hallucinate after just a couple of nights of deprivation. Indeed, they begin to dream when they are awake. Is that important to dream. The ability to dream has been evolutionarily selected because it fulfills a vital function in human life.

Human beings in all times and places have examined dreams with interest and attention. Mythical and religious characters are portrayed as valuing and being influenced or changed by dreams. The ancient Greeks dedicated temples and trained priests and priestesses to interpret dreams. Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, from which most other modern therapies developed, called dreams “The royal road to the unconscious” and Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish philosopher, is famous for saying that “A Unexamined dream is like an unopened letter. “

The psychoanalyst Paul Lipmann (2008) offers us the following list of what he feels that dreams offer:

• Declare and solve problems.
• They express emotion … subtle and strong.
• They can express in pictures and stories those feelings and experiences that are most difficult to think or talk about when they are awake.
• They can express hidden feelings about one’s relationship with powerful and less powerful others.
• They can dissociate and unite traumatic aspects or any experience.
• They can help cover pain and embarrassment or they can tear apart a defense scab.
• They represent our current problems, past dilemmas, and future possibilities.
• They satisfy the wishes.
• They can give expression to life not lived.

Dreams are unconscious products.

Cognitive psychologists tell us that we can store roughly seven (plus or minus two if your memory is exceptionally good or bad) “chunks” of information in our minds at a time.

It’s seven digits in a phone number, seven items on a shopping list. There are not many, and yet we have access to a vast reservoir of memories, concepts, and emotional experiences that are effortlessly and seamlessly invoked in that famous seven-piece set. And with the same fluidity, those concepts that are not used immediately are escaped and saved. It’s a really amazing system when you think about it … effortless and taken for granted. But what is the mechanism that downloads and extracts the information that is needed? Most of the time it is not a “conscious intention”.

Unconscious processing is a natural and necessary part of thinking.
Unconscious processing forever sustains and facilitates conscious thought. It is the system that receives, organizes and makes accessible all the concepts and experiences that we have. It’s simple impossible be aware of everything we know or consciously make all the associations between facts that we must to make sense of our experience.

Important related facts, ideas, and feelings may have accumulated throughout life, arriving at different times and from different life experiences. The conscience, which is busy thinking about what to prepare for dinner, rarely takes the time to snoop around and explore all possible associations … even with life’s pressing problems.

Fortunately we have an alternative system to do this work … psychoanalysts call this the personal unconscious . Cognitive researchers call it “automatic processing,” “implicit thought systems,” or even “deep psychological processes.” No one tries to pretend that the conscience is big or strong enough to do all the work alone.

When we are preoccupied with some aspect of our lives or relationships, the unconscious continues to work on the problem while the consciousness is busy doing other things. Anyone who has ever had an “Aha!” moment has had the experience that things unconsciously come together and present themselves as a fact or a now obvious solution.

Sleep on it !!

The unconscious tries to offer us greater access to what we know.
One of the main ways the unconscious is affirmatively integrated into our lives is through dreams. Dreams contain attempts by the unconscious to bring us information and make the arguments that elaborate or counteract the conscious attitude.

Usually our feelings about situations and people are more complicated and nuanced than positive thinking, common sense, or good manners will support.
We have mixed feelings about most experiences.

• The birth of a child brings joy but also a restriction of freedom.
• We love and admire our best friend, but her success makes us jealous.
• We think we want to study to be a lawyer, but is it really our father’s dream for us?

Understanding our dreams helps us understand ourselves more fully.

• When the conscious attitude do you agree Well enough with the unconscious, dreams will underline, support, or strengthen belief and resolve … they support a feeling of trust or “righteousness.”
• When consciousness overvalues dreams of a person or situation can shrink in size by portraying it in an unpleasant or inferior way.
• When consciousness does not value enough a person, situation, or goal, the unconscious can elevate the idea, symbolically representing it as appropriately precious.
• Dreams can add new knowledge to consciousness, raise questions, or suggest goals or things to avoid.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Much of the information we receive about the world is visual. Almost all important experiences have a visual memory of people, places, and things attached to it. Since most ideas and knowledge of life are related in some way to visual images, it is not surprising that images are the material that the unconscious uses to represent its ideas.

Dream images may seem strange at first glance, but it is often shown on examination that they are extremely accurate visual metaphors for a situation that worries the dreamer.

A very personal point of view

• There is no “one size fits all” dream interpretation. Dream images are usually mysterious and strange, they can refer to other times and places or show the dreamer as someone completely different from what they really are.
• Dream dictionaries should be used sparingly and treated primarily as sources of inspiration.
• The dreamer is the only person who can tell if an interpretation “works.”

Dreams in psychotherapy

A psychologist working with dreams in therapy draws on her knowledge of the client’s situation and life history, as well as her training in typical patterns of human response. She works with her clients to understand dream images in relation to what the client is struggling with or has experienced in life. Together they try to understand what particular relevance and what associations these images have for this particular individual.

• Dream work in therapy contributes to the process of deepening self-knowledge.
• Understanding of Full range of their wishes and responses allows the client to invent new possibilities of action and decision … to change their life so that their wishes and their actions are more congruent.
• Dream work deepens therapeutic intimacy and creates an atmosphere of collaboration between therapist and client.

Brief therapy focused on dreams

Psychotherapeutic dream work can be part of an ongoing therapy or it can be helpful as a short-term process that focuses on understanding a particular situation, for example:

• In periods of normal transition, such as passages of life,
• In periods of crisis
• When difficult decisions are being considered
• When you have to assimilate radically new life experiences.
• Sometimes a dream or a series of dreams particularly to evoke a desire to question or understand a current or past situation or experience.

At these times, it may be helpful to consider working with a psychologist or therapist who will provide guidance and emotional support and help you stabilize as you explore the questions.
that raises the examination of dreams.

Dreams are part of our system of unconscious reorganization and creative problem solving. They draw the essence of a problem situation out of the clutter of daily experience so that we can see it more clearly. They remind us of what we have almost forgotten, or what we have tried to forget and put together ideas that we knew separately but that click and create a new understanding when put together. I walk towards future possibilities that arise from past experiences.