After all, what is dream How are dreams formed? Why do we dream about certain things and not others? What do dreams reveal about us? To answer these questions, Freud studied them in his work "The Interpretation of Dreams". For Freud, a dream is the main access to contents that have been repressed in our unconscious .

During the dream, what was hidden from ourselves comes to the surface. But it is necessary know how to interpret a dream Hence, there is a whole line, sometimes scientific, sometimes mystical, of identifying hidden meanings in dreams.

A reflection on what dreams are

One can consider dreaming as a sequence of phenomena of the mind that occur involuntarily in sleep. In other words, it is possible to verify when a person dreams. After all, the body presents physiological responses in this state of consciousness, such as:

• rapid eye movement;
• loss of muscle tone;
• presence of sexual arousal;
• irregular breathing and heartbeat;
• presence of unsynchronized brain waves.

Understanding what the dream is can lead the subject to find a psychological cure

Dreaming is a natural activity for all mammals, and on a regular night's sleep people live about four to five dream periods They last an average of five to twenty minutes each, but we do not always remember them, that is, when we say that we do not dream we are only referring to the fact that we do not remember the contents.

The importance of dreams has been considered by health professionals, especially psychologists and psychiatrists. The dream is a language of the unconscious that brings answers to conscious life experiences.

Necessary for maintaining health and mental balance, him:

• restores the brain's electrochemical balance;
• prevents overloading of neuronal circuits by eliminating superfluous associations;
• In addition, it processes the day's waste: it stores, encodes and integrates these contents.

Dreaming is natural

The act of dreaming should be seen as a natural psychological healing system For this, it is enough that the contents are worked with specific techniques that promote self-knowledge. Besides this, it is possible to notice that creativity is inherent to the process and aims at finding solutions. Another aspect to be emphasized refers to the occurrence of information related to future events or paranormal information in dreams.

Dreams come from three different paths

Recalling and writing down one's dream life is a valuable self-knowledge tool to be used to increase understanding about our life experience. It brings about problem solving, creative processes and is also good for working during a psychoanalytic session. After all, during a psychoanalysis session, people seek accessing the contents that are stored in the patient's unconscious This is why for Freud, dreams are a road to the unconscious.

It is worth remembering that we use words and gestures to express our thoughts, communicating different kinds of subjects. According to Freud, it can arise from three distinct paths: sensory stimuli, daytime leftovers and repressed unconscious contents

Paths

• Sensory stimuli: The first, Freud called "sensory stimuli" For example: A person dreams that he is in Alaska, having a very cold and unpleasant experience. That is, when he wakes up, he realizes that his feet are bare on a winter's night.
• Daytime remains: The second form in which the dream occurs is in "daytime leftovers" A person who has had a very hectic life or a repetitive type of work, may dream of situations similar to what happened to him during the day. An example is a person who spends a whole day just counting glass balls to fill a certain container. Therefore, he may dream of the same situation.
• Finally, Freud called "repressed unconscious contents" Thus, a person who hates his boss may have a dream in which his boss is his employee and he is always humiliating him.

Dream distortions and verbal language types

The theme that appears in a dream may be linked to the act of sleep itself. After all, these are everyday occurrences and particular situations, such as conflict presentation, that are otherwise unconscious to the person. In this sense, dreams are an excellent tool to be used to work on creative processes and problem solving.

However, after listening to the patient narrate his oneiric experience, we have only the dream report and not the dreamer's original experience. Thus, in Freud's words: "It is true that we distort dreams in trying to reproduce them. This is a natural process in the use of language. Therefore, it is possible to know that verbal language presents two types of structures : the superficial and the deep.

They operate with linguistic universals called generalization, distortion and elimination which can be rescued by using appropriate questions.

The importance of repetition of the patient's free association process

By getting the answers to these questions, we will have a more complete picture of the dream report, which will favor a more appropriate analysis.

Freud used the resource of asking the person to repeat the dream report. At the point where the report was different, Freud used it to start the work of analysis.

Final considerations

By analyzing what is dream Looking at my patients, I sometimes subject this assertion to the following test, which has never failed me. When a patient's first report to me is about dreaming, it is very difficult for me to understand and I ask the person to repeat In doing so, he rarely uses the same words. However, the parts of the dream that he describes in different terms are seen.

Sometimes it is not always possible to solve the interpretation of a dream in the same session. Many times the psychoanalyst, even knowing the concept of dream and the way of dream elaboration, will feel exhausted. He will fail, as if he were in a dead end. In these cases, the best thing to do is to leave the dream analysis for another occasion. Because in the future he will be able to present newlayers and thus complete its task.

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This procedure, Freud called "fractional interpretation of the dream."

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