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Dreams, By Sigmund Freud

Decent Essays

Dreams can often be mysterious and quite questionable at times. It can leave us wondering what a particular dream means to the dreamer, and we can argue about what causes dreams in the first place. Science can explain how dreams are related to brain functioning, but only a psychological understanding of the unconscious can explain why a dream happens at a particular time of your life and what it means psychologically. So what exactly are dreams? Strictly speaking, dreams are a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a persons mind during sleep. This can include people you know, people you have never met, places you’ve been, or places you’ve never heard of. Sometimes they can even be your deepest, darkest fears and secrets, and most private fantasies. There’s really no limit to what the mind can experience during a dream and no reason to what you end up dreaming about. In Sigmund Freud’s classic text, The Interpretation of Dreams contains some of his finest work. Freud believed that every dream is a wish fulfillment, and he kept this theory to the end, even though he gave up his initial idea that all dreams have an underlying sexual content. For Freud, the concept of wish fulfillment didn’t necessarily imply that a pleasure was sought because a person could just as well have a wish to be punished. His psychoanalysis, the idea of a “secret” wish being masked by a dream was his main, central idea. Of course, there are other ideas about dreams besides

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