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I’ve seen about 3 different psychologists. I don’t know if it’s fallen out of favor, since no psychologist ever asked me about my dreams, but one of the things that struck me the most when I started studying psychoanalysis was precisely dream interpretation.

As far as I understood, this is where the disagreement between Freud and Jung started. Jung was a disciple of Freud, they were friends for a long time. However, their views on dream interpretation were completely different, to the point that they couldn’t understand each other and ended up splitting up in two psychoanalysis schools, today we have “Jungian” and “Freudian” psychoanalysts, among others.

By Freud, dreams were representations of desires. They always indicated something the person wanted to accomplish (desire, punishment, etc.). There is also a latent content which is the seed that allows the brain to “generate” the dream.

The manifest content is the most obvious, it’s the direct memory of what happened in the dream. For example, you dreamt that you were riding a horse on the beach. This would be exactly the manifest content.

The latent content is not clear in the dream and depends on interpretation. If the horse was running wildly on the beach, this could indicate that the dreamer has a very regulated life and wants to let go, wants to loosen up more and feel free. This would be an example of possible latent content.

Nobody will ever be able to interpret your dreams in a “mathematical” way. There is no rule saying that dreaming “this” means “that”, that serves everyone. Only the dreamer has all the information for the interpretation of his dream and, even then, most of it is unconscious. The most suitable person to interpret the dream is the dreamer himself. The psychoanalyst only assists in the process of introspection.

The argument with Jung was precisely about this topic. Freud saw the dreams as realizations of desires. Jung saw dreams as conversations with the unconscious mind. For Jung, not necessarily, the dream would only a desire, but it could simply be the unconscious mind trying to send you a message about what you could or could not be what you want. Jung was also a great supported of the collective unconscious. Another topic that really caused disagreements between Freud and Jung.

The difference seems silly, but it was enough to create two different lines of psychoanalysts.

I will provide an example of one of my dreams, harmless, but it will bring give you some sense on how dream interpretation works.

Oh, and one important thing, both, Jung and Freud, agree that everything that happens in a dream pertains EXCLUSIVELY to YOU. The main character IS YOU and everything they DO indicates things that YOU would like to do. Filters in your mind may prevent your brain to assign certain actions to your own character in the dream; that its why, som times your mind uses other people in your life to represent roles that cannot be represented by YOU. The dream scenario and characters are taken from relevant events of the last 2 or 3 days before the day of the dream.

That night, I woke up scared, in the middle of the night and noted the dream because I had no idea how to start interpreting it (yeah… I’m noting all my dreams now, it turned into a hobby 😴). I asked my psychologist for help and we reached a somewhat embarrassing conclusion, but I managed to overcome it. Once again, this was a DREAM, it didn’t actually happen:

“I live in city in the valley, I was with a sick relative and called one of my sisters to take the sick person with me to a doctor in the coast. Then, I’ve felt that I picked up the relatives, put them in the car and drove them to the coast. But, after that, there was a blank. The dream goes to the next day , when the people at the office were telling me how I had taken the relatives to the other city. They were telling me what had happened, that it must had been crazy, running out and arranging everything, etc. But, although I knew I had drove them, I’ve remembered absolutely nothing from that day, neither what had happened to the patient nor how I had returned to my own city after the trip. It was a one-day amnesia in the middle of the dream.”

Let’s get to the interpretation now: The central point of the dream was this amnesia and the sick patient. It was precisely the fact that everyone was telling me about the previous day and I was totally lost that got me very confused about this dream. this memory lapse was what intrigued me the most.

Then, my psychologist began to explain: As the main events in the dream were amnesia and the patient, then, both were representing my own issues. I really used to go to a city in the coast very often. What was I doing? Seeing my psychologist. The dream was telling me that I was frequently driving to to the coast and I couldn’t feel anything happening. That is the embarrassing part, I was feeling that I was not getting much result from the psychology sessions.

My unconscious was, in fact, complaining about the therapy 🤣 That is, my dream was almost like my unconscious mind calling the Customer Service and filing a complaint 🤣

But that’s okay, I think I’m still a bit divided, one skeptical and a seeker part. I’ve believed more and more in the benefits of psychotherapy. If I have not, I wouldn’t be here writing about it 🥸

Well, there are various other sources that discuss dreams. I just wish people would use dream interpretation more in therapy sessions. In Jung’s famous “Red Book”, there are incredible passages. For me, he must had been a little “high” while writing his book.

My goal would be to get dreams with 10% of the clarity that Jung had… He not only dreamed, but he had almost a Netflix of dreams in his brain, dreams that continued every night, like TV Shows. He was able to talk with the characters in his dreams, that is, he had direct access to his own unconscious to ask whatever he wanted. He was able to have debates within the characters in the dream. I can hardly put my dream in a paragraph, Jung were used to write 10 pages of details from a single dream!!! Well, I’ll get there some day…

If you’re one of those people who say you don’t dream, you should know that this is nearly impossible. You probably have 4 to 7 dreams every night. However, yes, it may be that you never get to remember any of them. One tip I found interesting was to say a little prayer to yourself before going to sleep, asking to: dream, see, feel, hear, and as well to remember everything when you wake up.

Another tip, even more effective, is to drink one or two glasses of water before going to sleep. This will end up making you to wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and, when you wake up, you will remember the dream you were having a little before. I admit that I used this technique several times when I was more interested in noting my dreams 😊.

And, finally, always write down the dream as soon as you wake up. Don’t think that your dream was so incredible that you will remember it for the rest of your life because, truly, you will start to forget it while you are still writing. You need to be very quick to write down while you still remember. The short time between getting out of bed and going to the bathroom is enough to forget the entire dream. Be quick and SWEET DREAMS 😴