The mental cinema of our dreams is not exactly Oscar-worthy. Instead of an elegant, coherent plot, we are presented with a strange jumble of set pieces night after night. A neurologist from Vienna claimed in 1899 that it is no coincidence that dreams appear so confused and grotesque. The “manifest” dream content, as it enters our consciousness, has previously undergone mutilating and distorting censorship. The true material of the dream is simply too shameful and outrageous for the inner psychological censor to let it pass. This actual, unconscious dream often has to do with sexual desires, repressed since childhood and now triggered by some experience the day before. In a dream, the wish urges fulfillment.
According to the neurologist, anyone who wants to understand the meaning of the dream and thus uncover the unconscious wishes should look for traces of these wishes in the dream memory, which are often symbolically disguised there. An example: In his dream, a young man accidentally opens a hotel door and observes a lady and her two daughters undressing. Before the protagonist is expelled from the room by a male figure, there is a gap in the dream memory. And this censored gap, wrote the aforementioned Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud, stands for nothing other than “the genital openings of women going to bed,” because the dreamer had feverishly longed to spy something like that since he was a little boy.
Dreams, Freud said, are “the royal road to the unconscious.” His book The interpretation of dreamspostdated to 1900, went far beyond its subject matter. It presented a theory of the human psyche and formed the foundation of psychoanalysis.
Even more milestones in psychology: dreams
2013 Tomoyasu Horikawa and others reconstruct dream images from brain scans
1995 Barry Krakow gives nightmares a new script
1980 Stephen LaBerge studies lucid dreaming
1953 Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman discover dream-rich REM sleep
1861 Alfred Maury observes dreams empirically
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