Unlocking the Secrets of Your Dreams: A Psychologist’s Perspective
Unlocking the Secrets of Your Dreams: A Psychologist’s Perspective
Dreams can be interpreted using traditional dream books, but these interpretations are universal and may not reflect personal experiences. In reality, dreams often hold deeper meanings. We spoke with practicing psychologist Anastasia Urlik to understand why it’s important to analyze your dreams and how this understanding can help you manage your emotions in life.
Dreams from a Psychological Perspective
Dreams are images that occur during sleep. In them, a person experiences a movie-like scenario with a plot, emotions, and sensations. Dreams can include not only visual images but also sounds, smells, and tactile sensations. Interestingly, blind people also experience dreams. Those who lost their sight later in life continue to see images in their dreams, while those born blind or who lost their sight in infancy experience dreams with sounds, sensations, and smells, but without visuals.
In psychology, there are many viewpoints on what dreams are. Generally, a dream is a subjective interpretation of events and experiences in a person’s life. Dreams reflect only what is significant to us. Psychologists do not use dream books for analysis because they do not consider the context of a person’s life, and all images are interpreted the same way. The main difference between psychological dream analysis and traditional methods is the individual approach: it’s important to consider what happened in the person’s life before the dream, the overall context of their life, and the meaning they attribute to what they saw in the dream. Dream books do not account for any of this.
It’s not accurate to say that psychology considers every dream unique. For example, numerous studies have shown that anxious and depression-prone individuals are more likely to dream of monsters, blood, and experience negative emotions. It’s also important to consider the culture in which a person was raised. People who grew up in similar traditions and conditions will have dreams with similar meanings.
Why It’s Important to Analyze Dreams
A dream is a reflection of experiences, existing problems, or desires, so it’s important to analyze it. People often face various limitations: prohibitions on expressing certain emotions, violations of their boundaries, or the inability to fulfill their desires and dreams. Through dreams, the psyche tries to show that in real life, there are experiences that we hide from ourselves or others, cannot cope with, or do not want to notice. Sometimes, dreams become the only way for the psyche to process a crisis or psychological trauma. On this topic, I recommend reading Marilyn Murray’s book “A Different Kind of War,” which shows how a tragedy experienced by a little girl was reflected in her dreams.
Types of Dreams
- Nightmares: These are dreams in which a person experiences horror, fear, panic, despair, or anxiety. During or after a nightmare, a person may wake up with a racing heart, sweating, and struggling to breathe. These dreams signal that a person is under stress, experiencing severe shock, or is in a state of crisis. Sometimes, nightmares indicate that a person does not want to confront a part of their personality, often one that they are ashamed or afraid to show in real life. For example, monsters in dreams can symbolize a fear of expressing aggression towards someone due to upbringing.
- Process Dreams: These dreams can occur before changes or when a person starts something new in real life. Such dreams are symbolically reflected, for example, in uncertain driving that becomes more confident as the dream progresses or in subsequent dreams. These dreams can also resemble movies with developing plots.
- Liberation Dreams: Our psyche does not like to be cluttered; it wants to get rid of the unnecessary. Through dreams in which we see past events and experience them again, a kind of “cleansing” occurs, making room for new experiences. This is how the psyche signals that a person is ready to move forward without looking back at the past. Usually, such dreams repeat once or twice and then do not recur.
- Recurring Dreams: These can be not only recurring nightmares but also vivid, pleasant dreams. Through them, the psyche experiences what a person could not do in reality. This indicates that a situation is stagnant, a feeling is not processed, or a desire is not fulfilled.
How to Analyze a Dream: Basic Rules
Analyzing a dream with a specialist is easier because they have experience and can see things more clearly from the outside, but you can also analyze your dream independently. I recommend following these basic rules:
- Record the Dream’s Content: From my experience and that of my clients, I know that without this step, it’s impossible to fully analyze a dream. It’s important to write down everything you remember: images, movements, colors, emotions you felt during the dream, and after waking up. Additionally, recordings help prevent distortion of the content.
- Recall What Happened Before: Sigmund Freud noted that we often dream about events or images we encountered during the day. We might have seen, felt, or talked about them. It’s also important to consider if any new event occurred before the dream. For example, some psychotherapists report that their clients dream about their first consultation. These dreams might seem to reflect old experiences, but they are actually related to the new event of the first consultation.
- Only What is Significant is Dreamed: Even if a dream seems very clear, simple, and related to an event from the previous day, what was seen has significance.
