Study
Two Psychology Today columnists wrote two respective articles, within a month, that worked to completely counter each other.
The subject matter: dreams.
David Bedrick's thoughts on dreams were provoked by a lifelong fascination. He talks about approaching dreams and analyzing them to further understand oneself and one's motives. According to Bedrick, "everyone dreams," and that "not having" dreams is simply not the case. We tend to get bogged down in reality and in our consciousness that not remembering every part of a dream is very common. He advises taking down your dreams in a journal when you can, and preparing mentally for a night full of dreams. He goes on to analyze two dreams and follows with personal suggestions. For example, one dreamer was at an old friend's new furnished house with an Olympic sized pool in the backyard. The dreamer's dog was struggling in the pool and the dreamer grabbed a ladder and tried to reel her pet back to land. Bedrick's advice to this dreamer would be to "dive in," don't be afraid of something too big or too challenging. Having this old friend implies having lost her, and her drowning dog needs rescue.
Reading this next article, after having gone through Bedrick's analysis, made me burst into mental laughter, mainly because it refutes almost everything Bedrick aims to prove. Dr. Patrick McNamara is a professor of neurology at Boston University and his article is entitled "The Folly of Dream Interpretation." From the get go, it is clear Dr. McNamara disagrees with the "dream interpretation sites" that provide "peddle nonsense, mostly along the lines of new age 'spiritualities' and ideologies." There can be basic meanings behind common dream themes (showing up to work in your underwear for example), but it is relatively trivial to scrutinize every subtle symbol in a dream to detect some hidden truth in one's life. Listening to these "experts" lecture on the complexity of the unconscious is an exercise in futility; it is all proposed! There is no science behind the "dream code," and until the dream code is cracked, long winded dream explanations should be taken with several grains of salt.
Reflection
I, personally, am a believer. I try to jot my dreams down when I can, and try to improve my dream memory by reading and reducing electronic stimulation before I sleep. Dr. McNamara clearly is a non believer. There apparently isn't a reason for everything, even in the unconscious world. He feels some things are meant to be unsolved.
To introduce a third text, Children's Dreams, by Carl Jung (a sure fire bust on psychology's Mount Rushmore), offers an interesting take to say the least. Jung, a Freudian product, emphasizes the unconscious as a construct that "remains beside the passing of time and perceives things that do not yet exist." Dreams can either represent moments in our conscious previously experienced or moments we haven't yet experienced. The perplexing notion that our dreams sometimes predict situations that occur in the future is what Jung taps into. For example, this would explain why I had a dream last night about my friend and I visiting a local Burger King (a totally possible instance) and then would have that same scenario play out a week later. This would mean that I had true access to my unconscious. Our unconscious is something that exists before we live and after we die; it has no time constrains and we tap into it ourselves through sleep and any other medium that would force our conscious to take a back seat. The conscious is reality, it's what we know. Things that we can observe, with subject to time, make up our conscious reality. Perhaps our unconscious is slowly revealed to us in the form of the conscious (resurfacing) or merely just in dream form.
The idea Jung proposes of "two different states" is quite difficult to grasp, but then again, so are dreams.
-Ryan Scanlon
Works Used:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-psychology-making-us-sick/201308/understanding-your-dreams
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dream-catcher/201307/the-folly-dream-interpretation
Jung, Carl (1987). Children's Dreams
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