Do My Dreams Mean Anything? A Philosophical Look at the Unconscious Mind

Every night, we leave the grand tapestry of intricate details that make up our daily lives and travel into a completely different world. Our dreams can certainly be wild, utterly nonsensical, and seemingly completely divorced from ourselves and our reality. However, since ancient times, dreams have held a special status across many different cultures. Since as early as 3100 BCE, the Sumerians believed that dreams were a gateway to other worlds and a means for divination.

Ancient Egyptian priests were proficient dream interpreters and the renowned Greek Artemidorus Daldianus wrote the first elaborate work on dream interpretations, the Oneirocritica.

In the Middle Ages, all key figures in Islamic philosophy have extensively written on the nature of dreams and the etiquette of their interpretations. Is the significance of dreams still applicable in modern times or should it be buried along the antiquated traditions of the ancients? The only way to find out is to explore how dreams are understood in modern thought. 

In his magnum opus, The Interpretations of Dreams, Sigmund Freud argued that “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”.  Freud developed his theory of dream interpretation after having a dream about one of his patients, Irma, about whom he felt guilty due to her lack of response to treatment. In the dream, known as Irma’s Injection, Freud met Irma at a party and told her: “If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault” (Freud, 1900).

Irma complained to him about the pain she was suffering and he resolved to examine her with his colleagues, concluding that she suffered due to an injection administered by another doctor. Freud interpreted the dream using his psychoanalytical method of free association and realized that the dream served as a wish-fulfillment where he absolved himself from his guilt towards Irma.

Based on his dream and analysis, Freud argued that dreams primarily served as a disguised fulfillment of the wishes of the unconscious mind. In his later works, he also emphasized that dreams reflected the internal struggles between the id, ego, and superego. What seems fundamental to Freudian dream analysis is his understanding of the dyadic nature of dreams, which consists of the manifest contents of the dreamscapes and the meanings they hide – the latent contents. 

Manifest vs. Latent Dream Content

In the waking state, we are subjected to the full power of the superego and the ego’s defense mechanisms. When we sleep, however, these defenses become loosened enough to allow what is repressed in the unconscious to emerge into our awareness in the form of dreams. According to Freud, dreams are distorted expressions of the unconscious. This distortion is due to still present resistance that, although weakened, still censors the manifestations of unconscious content in order not to interrupt sleep. The result is that the manifest content of dreams simultaneously expresses and veils the activities of the unconscious. 

Dreams aren’t meaningless, but their meaning is latent within the apparent dreamscapes. To take Irma’s Injection dream as an example, the manifest content comprised of the wish-fulfillment whereas the latent content was Freud’s underlying wish to escape accountability for his patient’s condition. The latent content of a dream is concealed and symbolized by the manifest content through several mechanisms that Freud called ‘dream work’. 

According to Freud, the latent content of a dream is often an unconscious wish or desire that is socially unacceptable or personally disturbing. For this reason, it is censored in several ways by the manifest content of a dream. Condensation, for instance, is the process whereby several latent contents are combined in a single element of the manifest content. As Freud observed about his dream, Irma did not only represent herself, but also his daughter, wife, and other patients.

As he notes, “Irma became the representative of all these other figures which had been sacrificed to the work of condensation, since I passed over to her, point by point, everything that reminded me of them” (Freud, 1900). It is impossible to determine the amount of condensation in a dream, which is why the manifest content withholds a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of meanings that can reveal much about the unconscious mind.   

No ‘Innocent’ Dreams

Psychic displacement is another form of censorship in dreams. In this case, the intensity and significance of an object is displaced to another less significant one. We may sometimes dream of irrelevant or insignificant things, perhaps of indifferent details from our waking lives.

Freud argues that the real meanings expressed in a dream are displaced into a manifest content that the dreamer deems irrelevant or unimportant. For instance, a dream of stabbing a stray cat we’ve seen in the street may symbolize our unconscious repressed desire to kill someone we despise. Freud argued that “there are no indifferent dream-instigators – and consequently no ‘innocent’ dreams” (Freud, 1900). 

The latent content of a dream is also hidden in what Freud calls ‘secondary elaborations’, which are the storylines or ‘logical’ sequence of events that unfold in dreams that create the immersive quality of our dream experiences. Secondary elaborations connect the different elements present in a dream to make sense of them or create a certain story out of the manifest content. Freud believed that dream narratives obscured the latent content, which is why his method of dream interpretation primarily focused on analyzing each element of the dream separately without trying to understand it in light of the larger context of the dream narrative.

Freud encouraged his patients to engage in a free association process where they must say whatever thoughts, feelings, or memories occur to them in relation to each element of the manifest content of a dream without judgment or self-censorship, even if what emerges seems completely irrelevant to the elements analyzed. The psychoanalyst then interprets the dream based on both what the patients say and what they omit. 

Carl Jung: Beyond Free Association

Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology and Freud’s former student, strongly critiqued the use of free association in dream interpretation. As he wrote in Man and His Symbols, using dreams as a point of departure for a process of free association “was a misleading and inadequate use of the rich fantasies that the unconscious produces in sleep”. Jung noticed that anything could serve as a point of departure for free association to discover the complexes of a patient.

What then is the function of a dream if anything could be used to uncover what is repressed in the unconscious, or, in Jung’s words, “one can reach the center directly from any point of the compass”? This realization was a turning point in developing his new psychology. Instead of allowing free association to lead him away from the dream, Jung “chose to concentrate rather on the associations to the dream itself, believing that the latter expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say”.

Along the course of decades of closely studying dreams, Jung discovered that “the general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material  that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium”. For instance, a man whose feminine side is suppressed in his conscious life may dream of a powerful anima figure so that the balance between the masculinity and femininity of his psyche is reestablished. The dream also serves as a warning by shedding light on his current state and what may result from it. The language of dreams is symbols. While some may refer to personal motifs, many are collective in nature, which Jung called archetypes.