In Dreams
- briangparker63
- Jun 29
- 4 min read
"A candy-colored clown they call the sandman • Tiptoes to my room every night • Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper • Go to sleep, everything is alright" - Roy Orbison
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) believed that dreams are our mind’s way of expressing hidden desires—things we secretly want but can’t admit, even to ourselves. These desires, thoughts, and motivations come from the unconscious part of our mind — the part that's usually hidden during our waking life because they might be socially unacceptable or distressing. He distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what we remember upon waking) and the latent content (the hidden psychological meaning). So, in essence, Freud saw dreams as symbolic puzzles our unconscious creates — and if we can decode them, we get a peek into our hidden selves.
Jungian theory came out of Freud’s ideas and has the idea of the collective unconscious. It’s something that you’re carrying from your ancestors. The basic idea behind Jungian dream theory is that dreams reveal more than they conceal. They are a natural expression of our imagination and use the most straightforward language: mythic narratives. Because Jung rejected Freud’s theory of dream interpretation that dreams are designed to be secretive, he also did not believe dream formation is a product of discharging our tabooed sexual impulses.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) developed his dream theory from Freud’s early ideas but took a different path. One of Jung’s key contributions was the concept of the collective unconscious — a deep layer of the unconscious mind shared by all humans, containing inherited memories and universal symbols called archetypes. In Jungian dream theory, dreams are not puzzles hiding forbidden desires (as Freud believed), but rather expressions of the unconscious that aim to guide and integrate the self. Jung saw dreams as revealing rather than concealing, using mythic and symbolic narratives that tap into both personal and collective experiences. Unlike Freud, who thought dreams were disguised expressions of repressed sexual urges, Jung believed they naturally reflect our inner world and help us move toward psychological wholeness — a process he called individuation.
I am no psychologist, psychiatrist, neurologist, or, really, any "-ist", but I have long felt that the Freudian and Jungian theories of dreams don't fully explain my personal dream life.
My earliest dreams were centered on mysterious steel-wool things that I remember filled me with fear — these were my dreams before I had learned anything to dream about, before I was maybe three years old and had any real experience in the world. When I was in kindergarten, I remember a dream of me standing in front of our bathroom mirror, prying my heart out of my chest with a bobby pin. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Simpson, was a presence in that dream, but unseen. The heart, I'm sure was imprinted in my mind by the "Christ with his heart out" print that hung on my Great Grandmother's wall, modified by the time my Great Grandmother Hall was cooking chicken and I asked if one could eat the heart.
For a time, I had occasional "sleep paralysis" dreams where what I'll call a demon or mask would appear in the upper left corner of my bedroom curtain. It looked like it was talking, but I couldn't hear anything and felt deep dread. I tried to call out, hoping someone would wake me, but I couldn't make a sound or move.
Later, like many young children, I became fixated on dinosaurs and decided that I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. At the time (mid-1960s), there was a movie that played occasionally that featured a dinosaur wrecking traffic in a city, and my dad took me to see a traveling dinosaur exhibit created by the Sinclair Oil Company for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Out of those events, my mind made a nightmare that would end my obsession with dinosaurs. In it, we were driving on New Circle Road in Lexington, Kentucky (my hometown) when a massive tyrannosaurus picked up our car and peered inside. I woke before it ate us, and never really thought about becoming a paleontologist again.
In my teenage and young adult years, times when I was anxious and felt unsettled, I had recurring dreams of a menacing, faceless man walking towards me, always in the dark, always in remote places. I thank Steven King's "The Stand" and his character Randall Flagg for putting him in my head.
Of course, I frequently have the common dreams that return me to my college years, peppered with forgotten class schedules and missed exams, stress dreams where I can't remember important numbers or repeatedly mistype passwords, dreams where people I lose people from one scene to the next, dreams populated with familiar places, people, and activities.
In the late 1970s, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson (1933 - 2021) proposed that dreams were constructed when the cortex interpreted random signals from the brain stem as signals from an outside world. Hobson's dream theory completes the map of my dream life in that I have long thought that, while Freud and Jung explain my (for lack of a better word) mundane dreams, they do not explain the dreams I have of places I have not personally been, seen, or experienced — the events that seem real but are spun out of whole cloth. In Star Trek, Spock speaks of the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations), symbolizing the elements that create truth and beauty. It is with Hobson, Hawking, and the fictional Spock that I have formed my personal theory that dreams are, in large part, echoes of our lives around the multiverse bleeding into our nighttime wanderings'
Mahalo.
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