Dreams And Desire : Synthesizing, The Interpretation Of Dreams, And The Birthmark

It is universally known that dreams are full of meanings and emotions. In Freud’s theory, all dreams are wish fulfillments or at least attempts at wish fulfillment. The dreams are usually presented in an unrecognizable form because the wishes are repressed. Freud proposes there are two levels in the structure of dreams, the manifest contents and the latent dream-thoughts. The manifest dream, a dream

"And, Aylmer, spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my heart at last." Aylmer was overly joyed with Georgiana’s decision and immediately started planning the attempt of removing the birthmark. Aylmer “Georgiana, you have led me deeper than ever into the heart of science.” Aylmer without ever thinking back on his dream he set forth with the surgery. Georgiana awoke and looked into the mirror to see that the birth-mark no longer appeared. Georgianna’s birth-mark had disappeared but she wasn’t at her best, “My poor Aylmer," she repeated, with a more than human tenderness, "you have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am

Dream content reflects aspects of waking-life experiences. After memories are made, they are often fragmentally merged with other information to construct larger, holistic dreams. Autobiographical memories are predominantly represented in dreams in comparison to episodic and semantic memories. Among various characteristics from waking-life experiences such as places, people, and events, emotions are highly incorporated into dream content. There is also a decreasing relationship between the cognitive demand of an activity and the frequency in which that activity occurs in dreams. Dreams tend to include material from experiential memories and events from the preceding day as well as experiences from 5-7 days prior. The recurrence of memory content in dreams seems to support the hypothesis that dreaming helps with memory consolidation, or particularly the content which is reflected in dreams.

It seems as if Aylmer has long suffered with the crucial significance in identity issues: how his sense of himself is constituted. In "The Birthmark," these concerns are not only the concrete foundation for character development of all main characters. This is reinforced in the character of Aylmer when he literally dreams of eliminating Georgiana’s birthmark, fully unaware how accurate his subconscious drama would prove to be. Ironically, his

To many people, dreams are the thoughts that occur while sleeping, having almost mystic qualities. For millennia the significance of dreams has escaped even the brightest of philosophers and intellectuals. Many people have speculated about why people dream and what meanings the dreams have but in recent times two theories have gained credibility in answering those questions. The first theory is Sigmund Freuds and the other is known as the cognitive theory of dreams also known as biological determinism.

Freud’s wish fulfillment theory began because he believed that the wishes in adult dreams were disguised in order to reduce their anxiety tendencies. Freud theorised that dreams are disguised by a “censor” of sorts, in four cognitive processes he collectively called the “dream-work” (Freud, 1900) these include; displacement, whereby highly charged thoughts are transferred to minor elements in the impending dream. Condensation then compresses several different dream thoughts. These two are then joined together by the regard for representability, which changes abstract thoughts into a form that is applicable for the sensor. Finally the dream is shaped by secondary revision which basically gives the dream content an understandable pattern. (Freud, 1900).

In the dream Aylmer attempts to cut off Georgianna’s birth mark. The symbolism becomes evident when Aylmer finds that the mark in his dream goes deep and eventually leads to her heart. "I know not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself. (343).

Women were meant to just be beautiful and this birthmark hindered her beauty in his mind. Aylmer could no longer even keep a straight face when looking at his wife. When Aylmer looked at Georgiana it was with an expression that Hawthorne described as “ a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand was brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on white marble” (Hawthorne 3). This birthmark made it hard for Aylmer to even look at Georgiana without making a face of disgust, this was a look that made Georgiana shutter. As time went on thinking about this birthmark started to haunt Aylmer in his dreams; Aylmer would have horrible nightmares about it.

Aylmer’s thoughts are controlled by his desire to remove a birthmark from his wife’s left cheek. Aylmer’s wife begs him to remember his dream, wondering if he really was so captivated by the removal of the birthmark to actually dream about it. His response was yes, he really was dreaming about it. The author writes, “Aylmer now remembered his dream. He had fancied himself… attempting an operation for the removal of the birthmark” (Hawthorne). Dreams are often a result of what has been on our minds all day long, and that is exactly what happens to Aylmer. He has a dream of operating on his wife’s cheek with the help of his trusted servant, proving it is all he thinks about. He even plainly says to his wife, “Dearest Georgina, I have spent much

Freud felt that he must rely upon his own dreams because of the difficulties of studying other people’s dreams. This was also a problem because he felt that he would then have to reveal his own private thoughts to the world. Freud states, “But if I was to report my own dreams, it inevitably followed that I should have to reveal to the public gaze more of the intimacies of my mental life than I liked, or that is normally necessary for any writer who is a man of science and not a poet. “ Having decided that he would willingly share his dreams and feelings for his studies he then expresses, “I can only express the hope that the readers of this book will put themselves in my difficult situation and treat me with indulgence”.

These are often suppressed because people do not want to come to realization that this is a desire of this and this is often times why people dream about such things. Although Freud and Jung share a research topic, Carl Jung did not agree completely with the sexual desires concept. Jung believed that dreams are messages from our subconscious. Allen Hobson was another top contributor to the theory of dreams and why people dream. He is known as the first man to study dreams scientifically. Hobson created a new theory in the 1970’s that was not based on the content of dreams, but how the brain worked during those dreams. In the article, “What are Dreams?”, it states the belief that Hobson had. The statement is, “It asserts that when we enter REM sleep, the state in which we dream the most, a signal is sent out from the brain stem located farthest below the brain, and the area of it responsible for visual perception becomes active. During sleep, we cease to input information from the outside world, so the brain takes memory fragments and pieces them together to create a story: a dream. The part of the brain that handles caution and judgment is not fully active at this time, which results in incoherent stories.” “REM means a stage in the normal sleep cycle during which dreams occur and the body undergoes marked changes including rapid eye movement, loss of reflexes, and increased pulse rate and brain activity. Also

Freud’s theory is that dreaming is meaningful, unlike the activation synthesis theory. He believed that the mind had three sections, represented in a shape of an iceberg; the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious. The conscious is the tip of the iceberg above the water involves everything we are aware of right now such as our thoughts. The

Dreams have been around as long as the first civilization came to be and have been a normal part of human existence. One third of your life is spent sleeping, and of that third, on average you will have spent a total of about six years of it dreaming. Most people dream on average two hours every night, but you can have anywhere from four to seven dreams in one night. According to research, the most common setting for a dream is in your own house. In our dreams we can do anything we want and be whoever we want to be. Our dreams are an escape from reality. While we dream we are unable to control our actions and choose our surroundings. We let our minds take over. Sometimes dreams can be understood in the context of repressed thoughts. Dreaming serves as an outlet for those thoughts and impulses we repress during the day. When we go to sleep at night and slip into our dream state, we feel liberated and behave in a manner that we do not allow ourselves to in our everyday life. Visions and ides can come from your dreams. Often, authors, screenwriters, and even poets turn to their dreams for inspiration. The think quest oracle library goes on to tell about the most well-known of the modern dream

    Everybody dreams during his lifetime. It is a part of human nature that we experience almost everyday. Dreams can be lost memories, past events and even fantasies that we relive during our unconscious hours of the day. As we sleep at night, a new world shifts into focus that seems to erase the physical and moral reality of our own. It is an individual's free mind that is privately exposed, allowing a person to roam freely in his own universe. As we dream, it seems that we cannot distinguish right from wrong or normal from abnormal and, therefore, commit acts that we would not have done in a realistic society. Perhaps Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,

Freud believed that dreams represent repressed desires, dears and conflicts. He distinguished two aspects of dreams: the manifest content (Actual event) and the latent content (symbolic meaning of the event). In Freud’s latent content all of the symbolic meanings had a sexual background. He viewed dreams as revealing conflicts in a condensed and intensified form.