Liza Tkemaladze
Interpretation Of Dreams
Since the earliest time of recorded history, people have theorized about the function and meaning of the dreams. What are dreams? Strictly speaking, dreams are images and imagery, thoughts, sounds and voices, and subjective sensations experienced when person sleeps. This can include people one may know, people one have never met, places one has never been, and places one has never heard of. Sometimes there are as mundane as recalling events that happened earlier in the day. They can also be ones deepest and darkest fears and secrets, and most private fantasies. There is no limit to what the mind can experience during a dream and really
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“The interpretation of Dreams”, published in 1900, is considered the fist psychoanalytic work by Freud. It is based on Freud’s studies about dreams, which are, according to him, the “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” For Freud, dreams represent “a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish.” They have a manifest content, which is the conscious experience during the sleep, and also a latent content, considered unconscious. The latter is composed of three elements: the sensory impressions during the night (for example, the feeling of thirst during sleep), the day’s residues (register of the events of the previous day) and the id instinctual drives (related to sexual or aggressive fantasies). These elements of the latent dream tend to wake the individual. During sleep, the repression is weakened, which increases the possibility of drives reaching consciousness. Nevertheless, the dream works as “the guardian of sleep.” Because of a compromising solution between the id and the ego-which is the instance responsible for repression-, a partial gratification of the instinctual drives is allowed, reducing their force and, consequently, allowing the individual to continue to sleep. Such gratification takes place through a visual fantasy (the manifest content of the