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Can you analyze dreams, and accurately?

XNine

XNine

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 7, 2005
3,154
0
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Does anyone here have experience analyzing dreams? Would anyone care to analyze one for me? I don't know the first thing about it and don't want to guess at it, but it's something someone needs to know.

Thanks,
Z
 
who really has the "authority" to decide what any persons dreams mean? it's all a science of bullsh...crap if you asked me. i dislike things like that which are so open to interpretation. <shrugs>
i can take a stab at it for you if you like, but i'd be guessing... just like any other person who says they know what dreams mean. ;)
 
Is it one where you are standing on top of a pyramid in sun god robes while thousands of naked women scream your name and throw little pickles at you?


Seriously though, my dreams are typically an amalgamation of the days events, a continuation of them or the occasional prescient flashes (Imagine getting a snapshot of something from some unspecified time in the future and never anything even vaguely interesting.)
 
iBlue said:
who really has the "authority" to decide what any persons dreams mean? it's all a science of bullsh...crap if you asked me. i dislike things like that which are so open to interpretation. <shrugs>
i can take a stab at it for you if you like, but i'd be guessing... just like any other person who says they know what dreams mean. ;)
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There are certain things that are textbook, and some things that are not. This is going to be textbook, for the most part. IT's like Psychology.

Ever listen to Love Line? Every time they talk to someone who has problems, the first question is "Where's your father?" Generally, people will say he's not around, or he was abusive. It's textbook, and after many eyars of studying the human mind, we have found certain things out that can be generalized for the most part.

So, still need someone who knows what they're doing.
 
You're going to find that there are diffferent, and competing, schools of thought among professionals re: dream interpretation depending which method/school of thought they adhere to. The problems are: There is more than one textbook, and an individual dream requires subjective interpretation. It's not a fill in the blanks answer.
 
Everyone on the internet is more experienced than everyone else at everything.

I'm sure you'll have no problems finding an arm-chair psychologist/dream-analyst here :p

Aside from that, basically, one just needs to interpret the manifest content (what actually happened in the dream) and the latent content (it's supposed meaning).

There is no scientificly accurate way to do that. Different people (professionals) will intepret each dream, and it's meaning differently. There are some generalizations, where dreams of one particular theme does seem to mean a certain thing, but it's impossible to prove that the dream does indeed mean this or that.
 
I'm not a psychologist, but I do run a psychology Web site (not that kind of psychology, though). Speaking as a layperson, since whatever psychology knowledge I've gained working on my site has no relevance to your question, I think therapists generally use dreams as a way of getting folks to talk about their real-world problems. The dreams themselves don't really signify anything, but they might point the way for a therapist to ask more questions about the non-dream world.
 
wordmunger said:
I think therapists generally use dreams as a way of getting folks to talk about their real-world problems.
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Well, actually, there is some pretty compelling evidence that the content of dreams is not completely random or meaningless, and has to do with the brain's attempts to learn by adjusting mental representations of the world and figuring out how to place experiences into that framework in a way that seems internally consistent.

But I think what you and others said is basically correct. I personally only really trust dream interpretation of the form where the link between the manifest content of the dream and the underlying meaning is made on a personal level through interaction with the dreamer and through their associative process. That is, I don't trust personally interpreting dreams by universal symbols, although if those symbols seem meaningful to the person who had the dream, I wouldn't dismiss that, either.

I haven't used dream interpretation with therapy clients so far, but I think it can be valuable for certain kinds of situations and certain kinds of people.
 
CanadaRAM said:
There is more than one textbook, and an individual dream requires subjective interpretation.
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Exactly. Your set of symbols is different to mine but archetypes do play a role... there is no fixed interpretation on the meaning of symbolic thinking.
 
But I'm willing to give my opinion (for a change, ha-ha). It's worth nothing more than that, in the sense that it's taken as entirely as subjective opinion -- do with it what you will.

PM me if you like in complete confidence. :)
 
Blue Velvet said:
Exactly. Your set of symbols is different to mine but archetypes do play a role... there is no fixed interpretation on the meaning of symbolic thinking.
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To back you up Blue - Jung studied archetypes (some of which occur in dreams) and found that there are some weird similiarities that cross geographical and cultural barriers. For instance - kids all over the world are afraid of monsters / beasts under their beds or bedrolls. And the underlying "meaning" seemed to be a universal theme of childhood ( I don't recall what it was). There are better examples but archetypes can be helpful guides.

Personally I think it takes more than helpful guides to reach meaning. For instance - me and my neighbor might both be scared of beasts under our bed, but perhaps, as a child, my neighbor found his uncle dead under a bed... the arcehtype will no longer explain all the connotations this guy will have with "things under my bed".

One last point- Jung is a brilliant thinker, a "friend" and colleague of Freud. But these guys once believed cocaine could solve any mental illness...
 
Josh said:
Everyone on the internet is more experienced than everyone else at everything.
Click to expand...

You really don't have any grounds to say that, considering how much more experienced I am in diagnosing how experienced everyone is at doing everything on the Internet.
 
MongoTheGeek said:
Is it one where you are standing on top of a pyramid in sun god robes while thousands of naked women scream your name and throw little pickles at you?
Click to expand...


ah....Real Genius. Classic. Val Kilmer is such a little kid in that movie!
 
I think the best thing when analyzing dreams is to get more than one opinion. Never depend on one person, you just need to hear what a bunch of people have to say and formulate your own interpretaion for your feelings and the feelings of others.
 
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