The origin of dreams

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.

In response to Christine Pavao...

Christine mentions in her most recent posting, "sometimes, 'improving' a mood by not allowing a 'bad mood' to exist doesn't work.  Sometimes you just need to feel whatever it is you're feeling...People are able to feel a terrible, beautiful, wide range of emotion, so why should we try to pretend otherwise?"

Well, Christine, I'm wholly in agreement with you on this one. When I'm sad, I don't want to listen to a song or watch a movie with a bunch of happy people making jokes; I want to hear an angry song or see a sappy movie with situations I can relate to my own situation, and then cry or scream or do whatever I must in order to experience what I'm feeling, get over it, and move on. Likewise, I tend to stay away from sad art forms when I'm happy; because, it is true, art has the power to completely shift our emotions and take us from a state of utter ecstasy to outright unrest.

As Wartenberg mentions when explaining Sigmund Freud's philosophy, "Feeling a deep need to express unconscious thoughts and emotions, artists create works that...are really the fulfillment of concealed wishes." Freud points out that as humans in such a conservative society, we are always taught and pushed to hold in our thoughts and emotions, repressing those which would, in typical society, be considered humiliating or embarrassing. With art, however, with "the essential ars poetica," we are able to find a place of comfort where we can freely reveal our "innermost secrets," where we can express ourselves (or at least see others express the emotions/thoughts we ourselves are feeling/thinking) "without reproach or shame."

So, my question to all of you, is it better to repress our emotions for the sake of societal standards, or should we express ourselves freely through the medium of art?