Psychology, 150 (Dream Interpretation)

As someone who generally cannot recall past a mild impression of an idea from their dreams, interpreting them is a rather difficult task to attend to. I've never held much stock in dream interpretation. The whole psychoanalytical scheme reminds me more of a soothsayer telling your your past, present and fortune based on a few generic inquiries, or a medium claiming to contact a dead relative of an audience member who has some connection to the letter “A”. It's an act of preaching to the choir, appealing to those who already follow the same school of thought and manipulating the details to force a meaning assigned to them.

That being said, I do acknowledge that dreams are obviously going to be affected by the individual's thoughts. The same could be said about writing a short story, or painting an abstract image. The raw materials must be in your head to be able to create the final product, but that doesn't necessarily mean that being able to conceive the idea correlates to one's want or ability to. In the same mechanic, the best sort of detective is one who can take the perspective of sort of character they are pursing while also not having the intention of following suit.

I like to apply waking psychological theories to dreams. There have been studies which show that your brain filters out irrelevant sounds and background noises. In these studies, they postulated that the brain may take these noises and try to sort sense out of them, giving the impression of disembodied voices or sounds that did not actually happen. It would not be far fetched, as supported by the biological view, that your brain could do this while also sleeping, taking queues from your surroundings and integrating them into the inner cinema evolving during REM sleep. So not only do you pull from your own past experiences, knowledge, creativity, but also from the world around you.

The cognitive view suggests that your brain uses REM sleep as a time to sort through the data of the day and file it away. It would therefore make sense for your experiences during the day to bleed into whatever absent minded thoughts you would fabricate while sleeping. A full REM sleep is the same concept as a daydream, it is up to your creativity and personal experiences as to what will fill these dreams. Any meaning you may wish to assign to it is up to you, but in the end, it's just an amalgamation of whatever stimuli you have interacted with and the correlations your thought patterns may related to those experiences.

In the end, as I stated at the beginning, I do not support the idea of dream interpretation. At this point, since dream interpretation is well known within out society, one could even argue that this has a placebo effect on those more liable to the idea, leading them to fabricate meaning from fragments. Dreams are a just an assessment of your day, a story your brain creates to amuse itself while doing some paperwork. Meaning, or lack thereof, is up to the dreamer to decide.