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1-Page Summary of The Interpretation Of Dreams
Overview
Have you ever woken up from a dream and felt like you missed something important? Skeptics would say no, but there’s more to dreams than what we see. They can tell us about our internal thought processes. Whether a dream is scary or mundane, it has something to teach us. But what?
In this book, Freud shares his ideas about dreams. He says that we should not look at them as omens but instead try to understand what they mean for our unconscious emotional lives.
Dreams fulfill our unconscious wishes. They act like a journalist in a country with heavy censorship laws and are shared by many people.
Big Idea #1: Ancient interpretations of dreams were unscientific. A far better approach is to relate dreams to real psychic memories.
Dreams are confusing and often make no sense. People have tried to figure out what they mean throughout history.
In ancient times, people thought that dreams were messages from the gods. They would use two methods to interpret them.
The first thing that a person would do is to interpret the dream in its entirety before relating it to the future. It’s usually an oracle or someone who specializes in dreams and their meanings that does this.
The second technique involved the dream reader taking apart the dream and translating it piece by piece. For instance, Alexander the Great had a dream while he was fighting for Tyre. In this dream, he saw a woodland god known as a satyr dancing on his shield. The word “satyr” meant “Tyre will be thine,” so the interpretation of that part of the dream was that Alexander would win in battle against Tyre.
Dream interpretation is usually done through the dreamer’s perspective and experiences. However, this approach is unscientific because it does not consider all possible interpretations of the dream. A more scientific way to interpret dreams would be to analyze all possible meanings of a dream based on its content, rather than just looking at one person’s personal experience with that content in their dreams.
Sigmund Freud had a dream about his friend Otto. In the dream, Dr. M says that Irma is sick because of an infection, likely caused by Otto using a dirty needle to inject her with something. This was similar to a phone call he had just had with Otto in which it seemed like he blamed Freud for Irma’s illness. However, in the dream, it wasn’t actually him who was at fault but rather Otto so this fulfilled his wish not be responsible for her sickness.
Big Idea #2: All dreams fulfill wishes, although most of them are disguised.
So, Freud’s dream about Irma was wish fulfillment. But that doesn’t apply to all dreams. For example, a colleague of Freud’s knew he had to wake up early for an appointment, but instead dreamed that he was already in the hospital bed.
If you dream about being in the hospital, it means that you don’t have to get up.
However, most dreams are not obvious about the wish fulfillment. In fact, some dreams can be painful to interpret. For example, one patient dreamed that her nephew was dead in an open casket. How could such a nightmare fulfill a wish?
Charles was deeply in love with a family friend who had recently stopped coming around. This person attended the funeral of Charles’ older brother, Otto.
When Charles died, the professor came back. The wish that was being fulfilled here was simply seeing the professor again.
That’s a tricky situation to be in. But dreams often disguise their true meaning, so it makes sense that the patient would suppress her desire and not even realize she was doing it. She rejected loving the professor because he didn’t love her back, so she kept this fact from herself by repressing her feelings for him. This is like censoring news stories in countries where journalists need to distort their reporting to circumvent censorship laws. In a similar way, dreams distort their message to evade censorship by the psyche.
