DREAMS

DREAMS


I have been having these dreams on a consistent basis every night I go to sleep. I have had no nightmares, but I dream of places and people I have never come across in my life, apart from people I know and recognise and places I have known also appear . At times I find myself flying with ease from place to place. It appears that I am living another life in an alternate world and experiencing an alternate reality.

Freud says, “a dream is a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. The interpretation of dreams has as its object the removal of the disguise to which the dreamer's thoughts have been subjected. It is, moreover, a highly valuable aid to psycho-analytic technique, for it constitutes the most convenient method of obtaining insight into unconscious psychical life”.

While Carl Jung says, “I have no theory about dreams, I do not know how dreams arise. And I am not at all sure that - my way of handling dreams even deserves the name of a "method." I share all your prejudices against dream-interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it”.

I find Jung more truthful in his approach and I find him more acceptable to my view of life. Freud’s calling that a dream is a disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish is not always correct. When I find myself flying in my dreams I may accept that it is the fulfilment of a repressed wish. When I dream about people I know and the places I recognise it may be due to association with my present life. But what about faces I have never come across and places I have never visited? Is it due to an association with an alternate world or reality or is it due to a recollection of a past life? I know I am not mentally sick or schizophrenic, I do not remember the exact sequence of events of these dreams when I wake up, but do remember that they are not from my present past. A smile on the lips of a two month old child in its sleep cannot be the manifestation of a repressed wish or thought. I wonder what is making it smile.