Freud mentions “that at night wishes of which we are ashamed also become active in us, wishes which we have to hide from ourselves, which were consequently repressed and pushed back into the unconscious.”
But what about those dreams having no relation to the happenings in our real lives? Does everything in our dreams stand for something we desire?
Take for instance a nightmare. Clearly, there would be nothing in such a dream that we desire. It may evoke some fear we have, but it certainly is not one of those "wishes of which we are ashamed."
Freud seems to see daydreams as exaggerations of real experience; yet I know I've never actually seen any monsters in real life that occur in dreams. Are dreams not exaggerations, but, perhaps, some form of impressionist art forms? A monster may not be real; but what appears as a monster in someone's nightmare may just be a contorted version of some real person or thing that we fear in reality.
Looking to art, a dream could be compared to something like Edward Munich's The Scream. It's highly unlikely that there is actually someone who looks like the character in Munich's painting; yet it is a form similar to a human whose characteristics have been distorted to portray something which embodies panic and fear. Or perhaps the forms in our dreams are ourselves, our “split[ting] up [of our] ego by self-observation into many component-egos”--nightmarish forms are just our fears or worries manifested into more comprehensible dream forms. Or maybe, Freud is completely wrong and dreams are nothing more than dreams--what we dream of has no significance to our actual lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment