What are dreams? This is a question i have never really given much thought. However after reading an excerpt from Freud subtitled “on dreams,” the subject of dreams really astonished me. Prior to this point i considered dreams as something unexplainable and unconscious. Never the less i was astonished to find out that dreams are actually a small reproduction of small, real, wake time events that took place in our lives. According to Freud, dream combines few events(in most cases very distinct from each other) and combines them in an odd and often unusual way in which it is hard to comprehend or make sense off. Freud states in his excerpt “i am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought process.”
In addition Freud claims that there are two contents to dreams, the latent content and manifest content. However i did not clearly comprehend this matter of the argument. Freud describes another type of dream that is very common in children and occasionalyy occur in adults. He distinguishes these dreams as wish fulfillments. Freud argues that these dreams serve primarily as wish fulfillments and help the children acquire what they long for in real life, through a dream. Hence if a kid is forbidden peanuts in waking existence, the child will dream about peanuts and therefore fulfill his or her wish.
Freud introduces the idea of condensation in his excerpt. He describes this as ” each element in the content of a dream is ‘overdetermined’ by material in the dream-thoughts; it is not derived from a single element in the dream-thoughts, but may be traced to a whole number.” Honestly i didnt quite understand the condensation idea of dreams. None the less, after reading this short excerpt i can now have a decent idea of how dreams work. In my experience i can especially relate to the wish fulfilment concept of dreams. Mostly because i have experienced really wanting something and dreamt about that. I really regreted waking up. Those wish dreams, boy do they get you excited and into the moment.