The Theatre In Each Of Us: The Psychological Phenomena of Dreams
We all succumb to the pleasures of going to the cinema occasionally, yet we fail to realize that every night for 365 days a year a movie unfolds and manifests itself in front of us. And not only are these mere movies but they hold a psychological depth that contains what constitutes the deepest recesses of our own consciousness. Dreams are the terms that we have given these movies. I am going to attempt to explain how to pay closer attention to this human phenomenon known as dreaming, because they hold a psychological depth to them and reveal what lies beneath the surface of our own mind, which could in turn be of great value to our lives.
Perhaps the greatest psychologist to live, Carl Jung, put it in two beautifully put quotes: “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul”, and “The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance”, referring to the necessity of dreams for our psychological health.
It’s no wonder that world-famous psychologists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud published books about dreams and how to interpret them. I’m not going to tell you how to interpret them; instead, I’m going to show you the beauty that lurks beneath every dream. The way great scholars, such as Dr. Jordan Peterson, tend to describe dreams is that there is something in you that is actively pulling strings as you sleep and manifesting a sort of rolling movie. It’s not like you go to sleep telling yourself what type of dream you want to be shown as that is out of your control, except for the occasional lucid dreamer, and it’s hard to find some human phenomena that is more staggering and profound than the fact that there is something in you that rests in your subconscious whereby every single night for 365 days it rolls you a movie. In a nutshell, dreams just happen to you the same way life happens to you. If there were ever a quote to frighten you let it be this saying by Carl Jung: “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” Meaning, essentially, that there are things inside you that control you and not the other way around. One of them being dreams.
Most people commit a grave error of turning a blind eye to their rather seemingly meaningless dreams, but this is as far from the truth you can get. Even if there is no fully valid approach to dream interpretation, one should constantly seek to uncover the hidden meanings in a dream. Some particular good markers of dream interpretation in my own opinion is finding not the obvious meaning but rather the hidden symbolic meaning. I would say do not go in search for meaning in a dream, but rather go in search for symbols. A rather perfect example of this was a particular acquaintance of mine who had a fairly dismal love life; she never had a boyfriend and never had a long-term relationship, and this expressed itself in a recurring dream of leaping to her death from a cliff edge while dressed in a wedding gown into a pool of sharks. If it isn’t the perfect image of a failing love life, I don’t know what is. Symbols in dreams are frequently used to inform the dreamer of what he or she has to accomplish or overcome in order for his or her life to improve. People have had dreams from the beginning of recorded history, and the symbols in those dreams have remained mostly unchanged across time, unlike spoken and written language.
Some analysts speak as to how dreams may act as a therapy for the mind for the reasons that it is trying to communicate something greater than the dream itself. Dreams are highly universal, creating this mystical aura around them, implicating that they are not so individualistic but more of a global phenomena rather than a human phenomena. Dreams have enthralled humanity since the dawn of time, and they will almost certainly continue to do so in the future. We’ve learned a lot about the human brain thanks to science, yet we may never know for sure what our dreams imply.
