Dreams and interpetations essay

Dreaming is generally defined as imaginal, sensory, motor, and thought processes occurring during sleep. Neither sleep nor dreaming however can be precisely defined. Dreaming depends on how it is measured and in which of the four basic stages of sleep it occurs in. Dreaming takes places in varying degrees in all stages of sleep. Dreams are not necessarily visual imagery as blind people dream in auditory and sensory motor modes.

Dreaming has always been the subject of controversy. Egyptian papyrus documents dating back to 2000 B. C. discussing dreams and their interpretations. In ancient Greece the dreamer was to be in contact with the Gods. Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen believed that dreams often contained physiological information that heralded future medical illnesses.

In succeeding centuries, Sigmund Freud led the modern age of dream research in his monumentally original book of the Interpretations of Dreams. According to Freud, dreams are disguised thoughts from the unconscious mind. Freud spoke about Manifest Content, which being the obvious but the superficial, meaning of dreams and also about the Latent Content , which was the true meaning of dreams that is found in the symbols in their Manifest Content.

Freud’s theories have always been objected and tested by many. C. G. Jung challenged Freud’s position but retained and even expanded his metaphors. Jung began to insist first on the primacy and then on the exclusive validity of the manifest dream. He stated that the manifest dream picture is the dream itself and contains the whole meaning of the dream.

Jung stressed reading the dream as text metaphor prior to the interpretation. He gradually moved from Freud’s free association toward a method that he called amplification which is extending and deepening the dream content with images from a variety of sources. Jung’s awareness that interpretation depended completely on that initial process of reading is conformed by practicing translators.

“ In The Alchemy of Discourse” where Paul Kugler sets out a development, use, and interpretation of language that he derives from the work of Jung. He starts out by showing what Freud and Jung have in common and then traces their difference of opinion. Kugler put Freud and Jung in competition over their understanding and interpretations of dreams. Kugler argues that “ Perhaps the reason dreamers, poets, and madmen display such an uncanny sense of the imagination is that their perceptual systems-like those of the oral tellers of myths-are tuned to the invariant archetypal structures of sound and image” (Kugler 1982, 28).” Each human language maps the world differently. (Steiner, 1992, xiv) George Steiner wanted a universal language for interpreting dreams of all individual minds.

Even though Steiner spoke three languages, he did not describe himself as a linguist. Steiner made justifiable claim ahead of his time in translation studies and had an understanding of their significance. Researchers have raised the doubt, whether dreams are meaningful and thus worthy of interpretation.

It has been proposed that dream images are randomly generated by the burst of random nerve cells in the Brainstem during the REM sleep. It is believed that images are meaningless but dreams represent the higher brain’s efforts to make sense of the haphazard signals generated by the lower brain. Dreams may have a meaningful reflection of unconscious mind and may serve a problem solving function. Interpreting these dreams would lead to the information about oneself that would be difficult to get otherwise. If dreams represent a message from one’s unconscious mind that needs to be heard and attended to, then interpretation of dreams could have a positive and some times a negative outcome. An alternate explanation for the desired effect of the dream interpretation could be that one can create a meaning out of meaningless symbols. Therefore, the actual dream could be meaningless but one could create a meaning when they interpret it. An experiment was conducted by five therapists who had 60 randomly assigned subjects who were tested in three conditions of own dream, other dream, and own event.

Therapists practiced all three conditions with each other until they felt comfortable in delivering all conditions. Therapists were urged to see the benefits in all three conditions and withhold judgment about which condition would be best. Subjects had to talk about their own recent dream, someone else’s dream, or a recent troubling event. Interpreting one’s own dream was superior to interpreting another person’s dream and interpreting one’s own recent event. One’s own dream seemed to add a powerful element above and beyond which was obtained by just collaboratively working together to understand a person’s dynamics. Dreams often enable persons to think about themselves in ways that they would not be able to otherwise.

Contrary to popular belief, dreaming is not caused by eating certain foods before bedtime or by environmental condition during sleeping. Dreaming is caused by internal biological process. Researchers have indicated that large brain cells in the primitive brain stems spontaneously fire at about every ninety-minutes, sending random stimuli to cortical areas of the brain. As a consequence, memory, sensory, muscle-control, and cognitive areas of the brain are randomly stimulated which results in higher cortical brain which attempts to make some sense of it. This gives a rise to the experience of a dream. The content or meaningful representation in dreams are caused by non-conscious needs, wishes, desires, and everyday concern of the dreamer.

Both articles were similar to each other as an attempt was made to interpret the meaning of dreams. They were argued through theories which were further doubted and tested and also by experimenting which had limitations. The difference was that one article used verbal theories which were written on paper to interpret the dreams where as the other article did a physical experiment on many different subjects trying to interpret the meaning of dreams and in hope to put new theories on paper.