Once Upon A Dream

 

    Dreams are unique phenomena, strange and surreal yet a normal and everyday occurrence. they span from large epic narratives to strange disorganised jumble of thoughts and stimuli, at least from what you recall of them before they fade away. There are many approaches to what dreams are and why they exist, with one of the earliest psychological explanations given by Freud who claimed that "Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious" 

Freud himself claimed that dreams are a form of wish-fulfilment that reflected the events of the day preceding the dream. in children, he claimed that since their thought processes are more simple and straightforward, they are easier to analyse through their simple dreams, but for adults, it becomes more complex with them having a surface element of their dream( called "manifest" content) and a more symbolic and hidden meaning that reveals their true unconscious desires and "wishes" (called "Latent'" content), the hidden desires of the unconscious.

For example, you could have had a normal day in school, walked around town on the way home and then across some stores and then gone home, watched some T.V. until going to bed and then had a dream about meeting a large tiger on the way home. In this case, your manifest content would be meeting a tiger on the road. taking wish fulfilment, does that mean you wish to meet a tiger? According to Freud, that manifest is only a cover to your hidden wish that arises from what you've seen and felt throughout the day.  your latent content may actually arise from coming across a pet store and send a kitten that you wanted but stopping yourself because it was too hard to convince your parents otherwise. The size would represent your desire for the kitten, the fact that it's a tiger would be to represent how hard the task of acquiring it to be, thus the wish-fulfilment aspect of dreaming will be the desire for a kitten.

 This was Freud's take on dreams, where he insisted that dreams, especially those of adults are not straight forward and superficial but complicated ways to live out our desires beyond our conscious control.