Life is Like a Dream
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Life is Like a Dream

According to the famous psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, there are 3 levels of consciousness (structures of mind): Conscious, Pre-Conscious and Unconscious.

As the term suggests, our conscious mind consists of things that we remember or which can be readily retrieved from the memory. Pre-conscious mind consists of thoughts and feelings which we are not aware of but can easily be brought to consciousness.

And the most important one, the unconscious mind consists of underlying desires or instincts which are continually repressed by the individual due to their disturbing content. (These instincts are mostly sexual or aggressive in nature.) That is why most of the times we are unaware of such feelings and wonder why we acted in such an odd way (defense mechanisms at play).

Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what the dreamer remembers) and the latent content, the symbolic meaning of the dream (i.e. the underlying wish). The manifest content is often based on the events of the day.

He suggested it was in fact our repressed unconscious instincts which often took the form of symbols in dreams. For example, a 'lion' may be symbolic of power, aggression, courage etc.

Although the same symbol may be subject to different interpretations in varying contexts. (If you remember in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia talks about her dream where she witnesses a lioness whelp in the street. The interpretation of the dream was different.)

 Freud termed this manifestation of symbolic representation of the unconscious as wish-fulfillment. The purpose behind this was to transform a forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to sleep peacefully.


With this one can rightly say that dreams are nothing but "the royal road to the unconscious."

So, do dreams have any psychological explanation to them?

Yes.

Does dreaming about a person mean that they were thinking about/missing us?

A big NO!

Some people believe that when you dream about anyone, that you may actually be connected to them in the dream state. A dream "telephone call" so to speak.

Moreover, it may be a two way connection... they may also be dreaming about you as well. 

Certain spiritualists believe that spirits (or ghosts) may connect to someone more easily in the dream state. There are instances reported of a husband and wife or a close proximity couple having the same or similar dream during the same sleep session.

Then again certain dreams may be Karmic remembrance from past life experience with that same person.

The Dream World does not operate along the same rules as the awakened state. It is not fully understood what the brain (or soul) is doing when in the dream state.

It is possible that people do dream about each other, either because they miss them or have other deep seated concerns about that individual.

What is even more strange is the presence of someone in any dream that you have never met or do not know.

This could be Karmic remembrance, prophetic imagery or weirdest of all, you may actually be in an alternate universe or a different reality while dreaming.

Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensue discussion or debate.    

Thank you … Let me take the controversial road here. There are two ways I think about this.

One is scientific: When you dream about someone, you're attaching their qualities to yourself, giving another face to an aspect of your own personality.

No one in your dream is who they are in real life, they are just manifestations of your subconscious while it processes "something." Science doesn't know the meaning of dreams, only the physiology of dreaming.

Read Karl Jung for more on dreams and archtypes.

The other isn't: Science has made few advances in explaining, or proving for all intensive purposes, the experience of extra-sensorial phenomena.

 I see not point in denying there are and have been many human beings, accounted and unaccounted for, who experience extraordinary abilities.

It may be the stuff of myth, or it may not, but there is a precedent for concepts like clairvoyance, remote-sensing, etc.

In my personal experience, I can say I know one individual whose dreams foretell reality. I can't explain it, and I want to avoid the skeptic avalanche that invariably comes from such statements.

The fact is, I've seen it throughout my life, exposed by this one individual. In their case, dreaming of a person usually doesn't represent their personality, but it more closely represents the actual person in the dream. 

It's a toss for me. Science has a strong pull on my explanation of life, but I don't discard the extraordinary.

Now, does it mean people are missing you when you dream about them.

Unlikely, unless you have found you have an extraordinary ability to sense things beyond your immediate experience.

Want to add word or two?  

As romantic as that notion is, it's like saying you sneeze when someone talks about you. There is something that many of my psychology professors tell me, and it is that just because there is a correlation between two things, there doesn't mean that there is causation.

In order for that theory to be true, there must have been a significant number of people that have noted that they dream about someone and they think that the other party misses them and that’s why they dreamed of them.

That means that someone else has an influence over what a person dreams about, and that's a whole other debate.

It's just illogical to assume that your dreams are influenced by other people. Your dreams are influenced only by yourself, and even then when you dream its a subconscious thing, lucid dreaming being the exception of course.

So the 'theory' that you read online is not so much a theory but a romantic idea.

Your comment ….?

In psychology there is a term call alpha waves, which is responsible for communication between the world and our unconscious mind.

So basically when you dream some one actually your unconscious mind is trying to communicate with world and try to find that person by his/her alpha frequency.

This communication delivers the message to that person's unconscious mind. Eventually he/she gets that message and it turns into "missing" feeling. But this whole communication depends on many factors but your tuning with your unconscious mind is crucial.

Dreaming about people in your dreams has a different meaning. You have to consider 2 levels: the subject and the object level. Often, both levels are being addressed in the same dream.

Object-level:

Is this person a man or a woman?

How old is the person in your dream?

How would you, emotionally, characterize this person?

In which situation does this person appear in your dream?

Subject-level:

Do I also have the characteristics of this person in me?

E.g. being funny, helpful, loving?

Is the dream showing me a specific situation in which these personal traits

are helpful in solving a current problem?

etc. etc.

Note that a dream will never give you the ONE single answer as there is not a universal dream language and dreams need always to be seen in the context of the dreamer.

Well, we cannot say True or False.

We humans believe what only science proves, but there are more apart from science.

Humans feel that a truth is which could be felt from their perspective. But there is lot more what humans cannot prove.

No one can absolutely say No/False about the theory.

How can any few number of people prove, a theory to be right or wrong, when there are millions of people & trillions of experiences.

Lets say we see the sky Blue, Plants Green, etc. We are seeing these through our eyes, what if other creatures could see things differently through their eye/brain.

 Which one is true?

We need to have an open mind to accept analyze & accept that everything around us is nothing but our perceptions, there could be more dimensions, which we are yet to discover.

We all would have come across few experience (not coincidence) which cannot be explained by any field of scientific study, because we have to come out of the box, explore different cultures, experience it, not everyone/everything can undergo a set of standard scientific procedures created or formulated by us.

We are still in the ever-ending process of learning.

Until we read the next chapter of the book, you can only guess but cannot conclude.

Dayal Ram

Managing Director at DAYALIZE

5 年

I guess all these type beliefs are as real as we want to think they are. No one can take a dream and subject it to the scientific process and get very far. Therefore all that remains is our faith in the meanings of dreams. What we do have is our personal experience. And it has been mine that when I start dreaming about a important character in my life I tend to experience something in reality that corresponds with that dream. Deja Vu ain’t nothing compared to when this happens. So yes, I feel we are very much connected somehow by our spirits and a dream is a manifestation of that connection.

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