What Does Dream Meant - Essay Example

One large black carriage passes in front of me and I catch a glimpse of an old lady inside. She is wearing mourning clothes and I suddenly realize that she is my grandmother, who has been dead for about five years. The carriage moves away from me and she smiles and waves her handkerchief but I want to speak to her and so I try to follow the carriage. It disappears into the distance and I am very sad because I was not able to catch up with it. 

The scene of the busy road may be a depiction of the way that life moves along, sometimes too fast for us, and we want to hold on to things in the past rather than reach out for what is coming in the future. Freud notes that this kind of grieving dream is typical after a certain period: “Thus, after the death of someone dear to them, people do not as a rule dream of him to begin with, while they are overwhelmed by grief.” (Freud: 1998, p. 52) It is only later when the strong feelings have grown weaker, that a person remembers the lost loved one, often noticing small details and remembering incidents from the past.

In Freud’s view dreams are triggered by events, sometimes very minor ones, that occur in the hours before sleeping, and they grow out of the power of association that exists between objects, people, moods, etc that we encounter in our lives. Question 3. The activation-synthesis hypothesis suggests that our brains process information through dreams in a different way than through waking thoughts. Instead of seeking meaning in the dream, for example, my sadness at losing sight of the carriage being equivalent to my sadness at the death of my grandmother, the activation-synthesis hypothesis assumes that the brain is just firing off randomly.

Certain physical stimuli occur naturally in the deeper part of the brain that is not accessible by our conscious mind. This means that the images I recall on waking are just random snippets that I retrospectively make into a coherent story. This theory explains why some dreams just don’t make any sense, but it does not fully explain some of the emotional and memory-related content that we find in some of our dreams.