FREE ESSAY ON BASICS ABOUT DREAMING

BASICS ABOUT DREAMING

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Understanding Dreams as Private Mental Experiences
What are dreams? Why do we dream? And also, why do we dream the dreams we dream? In
general, "The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind."
Dreams have been a mystery to us since Adam first breathed life. With the stuff of
legends, myths and fairy tales, dreams have always fascinated mankind.
Dreams are private mental experiences, which may be described as an alteration in
consciousness in which remembered images and fantasies are temporarily confused with
external reality. It is a communication of the mind, body, and spirit in a symbolic
communicative environmental "state-of-being." Investigators do not yet understand why we
dream at all, much less why they dream what they dream. However modern methods of study
have answered many great questions about dreaming.
In the dream state, we have an opportunity to access our private unconscious and the
collective conscious. Private unconscious materials are those things that are
"exclusively ours." For example, the experiences and issues that features in our dreams.
Jung thought that dreams were generally compensatory in nature. They try to deal with
errors, deviations, one-sidedness and other shortcomings in our lives and personality.
Dreams that arise out of our private unconscious are generally valuable and relevant to
the current time. (If a dream brings up a past experience, it must be because old issues
are unresolved.)
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When we are dreaming and the dream is about something from our daily life, then that
dream comes from our private or personal unconscious. The dream may be ego based and is
very important. This type of a dream will increase our awareness and enable us to see
some issue, problem, or a personal characteristic in a new, more fulfilling and
productive way. For instance, in our society, dreams can be an excuse to say something
intimate to someone. It may be a tentative way to see if a deeper relationship is
possible, as in "I had a very nice dream about you last night." People do not want to
take as much personal responsibility for their dreams as they do with most of their other
thoughts. It then produces a platform to say whatever nonsense, lie, or fantasy someone
might have on his or her mind, because there's no way to determine if the claim is true
or not. 
Conscious thoughts are those that we can control and can be quite aware of. The word
"consciousness" can be substituted with the word " awareness." We can think of the
conscious and the unconscious as two sides of a coin. The coin being us humans - which is
of this physical world, and connected to the ego.
Then we must answer why do we dream? Dreaming makes connections more broadly than waking
in the nets of the mind. Dreaming produces more generic and less specific imagery, it
cross - connects. The connections are not made in a random fashion; they are guided by
the emotion of the dreamer. Dreaming contextualizes a dominant emotion or emotional
concern. The dream, or the striking dream image, explains metaphorically the emotional
state of the dreamer. Generally stated, dreaming makes connection and it does this
extremely broadly. For some, dreaming obviously makes 
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beautiful and interesting connections; but even those who believe dreaming throw things
together in a more or less random fashion must admit that a dream image somehow connects
material in our memories, imaginations, and so on. Clearly, dreaming makes connections
between recently experienced material and old memories. It combines or puts together two
different people, two different places, two different parts of our lives, in the
mechanism Freud refers to as " condensation." Our dreams correlate with age, gender,
culture, and personal preoccupations.
As Erik Craig (1992) puts it, " While dreaming we entertain a wider range of human
possibilities than when awake; the 'open house' of dreaming is less guarded." Elizabeth
Campbell (1987) says, " Anything can happen in a dream. There are no boundaries."
Emotion guides the process and is the structural background of our dreams. The emotion -
the dominant emotion of the dreamer- is the force which drives or guides the connecting
process and determines which of the countless possible connections are actualized at a
particular time and exactly which images to appear in the dream. Our dreams "
contextualize" the dominant emotion.
For many of us leading fairly ordinary lives, there are many emotional concerns active at
any one time, and it is not so easy to determine one dominant emotion. Thus, this leads
our dreams to seem confused and almost random at times. However, people who have recently
experienced a severe trauma show connections being made between 
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the traumatic event and other images, past memories, etc. The connections appear to be
guided principally by the emotions or emotional concerns of the dreamer.
As mentioned above, dreams contextualize emotion. What generally experienced are images.
The dream world looks very much like the waking world. We should compare dreaming (how
our minds function at night) with our total experience in waking (how our minds function
in the daytime) which includes living and navigating in the perceptual world as well as
the world of daydreams, fantasy, and imagination. Occasionally, a dream may simply pick
up bits of daytime material (day residue), or may consist of a word or a formula, but
this is rare. When a dream is fully structured - a true dream - its structure can be
understood not only as pictures in motion, but usually as metaphor in motion.
Are dreams simply the way things are, or does dreaming have a function? Does it play a
role in maintaining the human organism? " I believe that above all, dreaming has a
quasi-therapeutic function (Hartmann 1995). Dreaming allows the making of connections in
a safe place. In dreaming - especially the REM sleep - the safe place is provided by the
"well - established" muscular inhibition that prevents activity and the acting out of the
dreams. As connections are made between the terrible recent event and other material, the
emotion becomes less powerful and overwhelming, and the trauma is then gradually
integrated into the rest of life. Thus, dreaming appears to give a quasi-therapeutic
adaptive function, which can be seen most easily after trauma.
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Dreaming should not be confused with REM sleep, nonetheless most of our memorable dreams
come from the REM sleep, which is the ideal place for dreaming activity to occur. The
function of dreaming in terms of making connections and cross-connections is at least
compatible with the view that REM sleep, especially in young organisms, helps to develop
the nervous system. It is also very compatible with the view that REM sleep functions in
the " repair, reorganization, and formation of new connections in amine - dependent
forebrain systems" summarized as " knitting up the raveled sleeve of care" (Hartmann
1973). 
To conclude, dreams are irreplaceably important in obtaining psychological freedom,
spiritual understanding, and spiritual wealth. Life is an adventure, and as Carl Jung
pointed out, maybe the most important experiences are our internal experiences. In order
to become familiar with our "internal" makeup, we must take the journey inward. This
journey requires that we pay close attention to our dreams and our emotions. We can learn
much from our dreams, if we only listen with a trained ear. There is nothing psychic
about understanding our dreams. There is just a certain degree of intuition, coupled with
logic, and a working knowledge of dreaming. We must reflect and contemplate, and finally
get a grip on what is truly valuable and what will bring deep, satisfying, and lasting
happiness.