Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 and he is considered the father of psychoanalysis. He believed that dreams could be interpreted and wrote a study called “Interpretation of Dreams.” Freud thought that if you could analyze dreams that you could understand the personality of someone. He believed that nothing ever happened by chance, but it happened because of your unconscious mind and how you think.

If you live in a society that is civilized, you can hold back the way that you act and not act on your impulses, but Freud believed that you had to be able to release these impulses in some way and that they sometimes came out as a disguise.

Freud believed that you could release these urges through dreams and then your unconscious mind would be content and would not do the harmful things. He believed that the unconscious mind would express itself with symbols.

He put dreams in three categories including the Id, Ego and Superego.

• The Id is the impulses and pleasures that you have and urges that you wish to do.
• The Ego has to do with your conscious mind and helps you to be more aware of your moral and your mind.
• The Superego is what censors the Id and is responsible for you being moral.

When you are awake, you have impulses and desires and they Id will not act on them because the Superego stops them. When you dream, you can get an idea of what your unconscious mind wants you to do but since your guards are not up when you dream, you have the opportunity to act on your impulses and desires through the Id.

The desires of the Id can be disturbing and since your body is no longer censoring them when you dream, your dreams might be more symbolic and disturbing. When your body takes these disturbing images, it helps you to not be shocked by the images because they come in symbols instead of regular form.

Freud believed that you have a hard time remembering your dreams because of the images being so disturbing that your unconscious mind blocks them.

Tools

Freud believed that dreams comes from different content and that there are ways that you can understand your dreams even when they do not make sense. The believes that the dream is trying to give you a look at your unconscious mind and that if you look at the content of your dream that you can figure out what your dream really means.

Using the tool called Free Association can help you to understand the symbols of your dream and you can try to figure this out and see what happens next.

When you try to interpret your dreams, you can see the interpretation like this:

• Displacement which means to desire one thing, but it shows up as a different kind of symbol.
• Projection is when the dreamer will try to get their own desires to someone else.
• Symbolization happens when the dreamer represses the urge to act out their desires in a metaphoric way.
• Condensation happens when the dream was hide what they are feeling and will have dream images. The dream images will not be obvious to the dreamer.
• Rationalization is the last stage of the dream stages and the dreams can help to organize in your mind and be more logical. This is called secondary revision.
• Freud believes that sexual dreams are the cause of what happens in your dreams. He believes that every elongated or slender object represents a phallus and any receptacle stands for the female genitalia.

Personality Development

Freud believes that there are five stages of a personality including: oral, anal, phallic, latency period and genital.

Oral/Dependency

This stage happens up the age of two and this is where the child will use their mouth to explore things. When they are not satisfied with this stage, it can lead to bad habits such as smoking or drinking because of their oral fixes. Having dreams that happen over and over again can mean that their needs were not met at this time.

Anal/Potty Training

This is the second personality stage, and this is when kids learn to control their body functions. When a child is traumatized about something during this stage it can mean that they will become anal retentive and controlling. Dreaming during this time can cause a child to have obsessive compulsive disorders. People in this situation will often have dreams that their life is out of control.

Phallic Stage

This stage happens between three to five years of age and this is when a child knows about their body and male and females. The personality is already developed, and this is also called the Electra Complexes or the Oedipus stage. The Oedipus stage is when there is a male child’s love for their mother, and they have jealousy of their father. The Electra of this stage is where the female child will love the father and be jealous of her mother. Some call this penis envy.

Latency Period

Nothing much happens during this stage and it is just getting older.

Genital

When kids are around twelve years old, they begin to go through puberty. This is a stage of sexual interest.

Freud believes that this is the stage where dream is a place where there can be fulfillment. If a person has problems with power or being out of control, this can come in their dreams and they can see what they need. This is a time where they will repress their thoughts and they will dream so they can be fulfilled.

Freud believes that each image or symbol that happens in a dream has to do with sex. Anxiety can mean that you are repressed from sex. Many believe that Freud was preoccupated with sexual imagery and he had his own relationship problems and that is why he came up with this theory.

Alfred Adler was born in 1870 and he believed that dreams would help people to control their lives, even when they were awake. He felt that dreams helped to solve problems and would come so that people could better understand the problems that they had.

Learning Your Dreams

Adler felt that learning your dreams and learning to work them into your life could help you to make a connection between the problems that you have and how you deal with them. When you dream more, Adler felt that you had more problems in your life and the less dreams that you dreamt meant that you have less problems and are healthier in your mind.

Controlling Dreams and Behavior

Adler thought that you could use dreams to control your behavior and that people that did not control their behaviors were controlled by their unconscious mind. He felt that people that wanted to work towards perfection and needed to be in control of their life did things that they did for a purpose because the unconscious and conscious mind did not work together.

Adler felt that the unconscious and conscious mind fought against each other, and they would work rather you were sleeping or awake.

Dreams and Thoughts

Dreams were the pathway to your thoughts, according to Adler and he believed that dreams brought out your real emotions and how you act. Your dreams can help you meet your desires, but they also cause people to overcompensate for things that they are not good at in life.

Feeling Accepted in Society

If you cannot stand up to your bully while you are awake, you can stand up to them while you are dreaming, and this can make you feel accepted in society and help you to have more happiness.

Final Thoughts

Knowing and understanding your dreams is important. Dreams can tell a lot about a person and about what they are thinking and feeling. When you have vivid dreams and you have strong feelings, these things can mean something important for your life.

Everyone has dreams but not everyone can remember their dreams. Some people will wake up remembering all or part of their dreams while some people will forget their dreams immediately upon waking up.

When you dream, chances are that you might remember some of these dreams.

There are different things that you will remember when you dream such as:

• Dreaming can give you information that is not there when you are awake.
• Dreaming is part of your subconscious mind and feelings you don’t realize you have.
• When you remember your dreams, it gives you knowledge of how you see yourself.
• You will be inspired with things such as joy, happiness, wisdom, imagination and more when you dream.
• When you recall your dreams, you become more confident and stronger.
• Remembering your dream can help you express your feelings.
• Dreams can help you make hard decisions and help you through struggles.
• When you remember your dreams, you can accept stressful situations easier.
• You can learn more about what you want in life when you remember your dreams.

Why Do You Forget Your Dreams?

It is thought that people can only remember their dreams if they go into REM sleep. This is a deep sleep and is a time where your body is in full rest, but your mind is still working. Most people that remember their dreams remember them once they are waken from REM sleep.

Some people believe that there are other reasons that affect if you remember a dream or not such as:

• How you live your life throughout the day.
• The sleep practices that you take.
• How much sleep you get in a day.
• How your brain works.

Why People Dream

There are many reasons why people dream such as learning a task that they did throughout the day, they have mental stimulation that makes them dream, they have emotional stimuli that happened while they were awake, and they have a hard time facing some kind of trauma or situation that happened while they were awake.

Even though dreams seem important in everything we do, studies do not prove that dreams or REM sleep affect how a person feels in their emotions.

Here are some facts about dreaming:

• You spend around 1/3 of your life sleeping.
• You would have spent around six years dreaming in a regular lifetime, that means more than 2,000 days in dreamland.
• Dreams have been written about since the Roman Era.
• People that are healthy have dreams but some do not believe this because they cannot remember them.
• People that do not dream might have a protein deficiency or even a personality disorder.
• People can dream up to seven dreams a night.
• An average person can dream up to two hours each night.
• People that are blind dream, the images that they have will depend on what their life was like from birth. Most blind people will dream about smells and sounds.
• After a dream ends, more than half of the dream is forgotten after five minutes. 90% of the dream is lost after 10 minutes.
• Dream comes from a Middle English word which means music and joy.
• Women dream about men and women equally while men will dream more about men.
• Research has shown that when women have REM dreams that they will have increased vaginal flow regardless of what the dream is about.
• People that give up smoking or other bad habits have more vivid dreams.
• People that dream will not show up in their own dreams until they are three or four years of age.
• Toddlers do not dream about themselves.
• When you snore, you are not dreaming at that time.
• Children from three years old to almost eight years old have nightmares.
• More than 60% of Americans have Déjà vu happen in their dreams.
• Most people dream about their own houses.
• More than 3% of adults have sleep apnea and this can cause them to be tired because of lack of REM sleep.
• It is normal for men to have erections during REM sleep no matter what they are dreaming.
• Nightmare is from a female spirit that bothers people at night while they are sleeping.
• Negative emotions happen more than twice as much as positive emotions in dreams and fear and stress are the most felt emotion in dreams followed by anger and sadness.

A prophetic dream can help you to see into the future. You will see that a prophetic dream can be confirmed after the thing that you have dreamed about takes place. This is one way that we can hear stories about how people can use prophetic dreams to know the future.

What Do Scientists Say?

Some prophetic dreams just seem to happen by coincidence, but scientists do not believe that there are psychic powers, and they believe that dreams come true because they are part of your conscious mind making you aware of things in your life and this causes you to dream.

Dreams can Match the Future

Other people believe that when you dream, you can change the dream so that it matches the outcome of your future. Since dreams can be forgotten so quickly, the dream that you had may be different than what you remember because you might forget important parts of the dream.

Dreams and Information

Still, others believe that when you dream, your mind is putting information together faster than your conscious mind is able to and the dreams show you what you believe will happen based on the information that you have in your mind.

Dreams and Psychic Powers

There are some people that still do believe in psychic powers and that dreams help to tell the future. People that believe in prophetic dreams realize that dreams can be linked to things such as natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes, assassinations, wars, accidents such as car accidents or plane crashes and even winning lottery numbers.

Dreams and Crimes

Many people that believe in psychic dreams believe that dreams can help to solve crimes. Even Abraham Lincoln is said to have dreamed of a coffin before he was killed. Another famous person, John Dunne claims that he dreamt of a volcano erupting in France and then later it happened.

When you have a prophetic dream, it can mean that you are having stress in your life that has to do with your future. Look at your dreams and allow them to lead you on the right path in your life.

Healing dreams come when someone is sick in their health. These types of dreams are from the Ancient Greek culture where they believed that dreams were given to people so that they could help to not live a life that would cause them to have certain health problems. They also believed that if you were grieving over something that it could cause you to be sick and these dreams would help you.

Prodromic Dreams

Healing dreams are called prodromic dreams and research has proven that people that have migraines and asthma will have strange dreams before they have an attack come on them. These dreams happen because your body has learned to communicate with your subconscious mind through dreams.

Dreams and the Physical Body

When you have a dream that tells you something about your physical body, chances are that you will either be dealing with something in your health that you are not aware of, or you are about to have an attack on your body. These dreams can happen before you see any physical signs.

Dreams and Mental Health

If you are having problems with your mental health or if you are facing stress or depression, you might have a dream that gives you some kind of clue. By having these clues, you can tell that you might need to go and talk to a therapist or talk to your doctor to help you.

Listen to these signs and don’t ignore them. Having stress and anxiety in your life can cause you to have physical health issues and you want to solve these as soon as you can.

Seeking Medical Help

Dreams such as these will tell the dreamer that they need to seek some kind of medical help such as going to the doctor or the dentist. The dreams might be ignored by someone because they might not understand what it means but if you learn to interpret your dreams then they can act as a warning to you and help your body to heal.

Dreams have messages and when you have dreams that happen over and over again and you remember them, chances are that you are having messages in your dreams. Most people will wake up from a dream and as the day progresses, they will forget what they dreamed but if it is a powerful dream or if it seems like it is trying to tell you something, chances are that you will remember it.

Noticing Your Dreams

If a dream happens repetitively, you will pay more attention to the dream. When this happens, you need to confront what is going on in the dream because chances are that it is trying to tell you something.

Dreams and Nightmares

Some dreams like these can be nightmares and they can be scary and cause you to pay more attention to them. It is common for people to have the same dream over and over again depending on what is going on in their life.

Dreams and Problems

Dreams that continuously happen are sometimes triggered by things in your life such as a problem or when you are trying to transition to something else. The dreams might happen every day, once a week or even every couple of months.

Same Content Dreams

No matter how often the dream comes, a dream that is recurring will have most of the same content and these dreams will show something that you are afraid of, something you are not able to accept, or it will point out a weakness that you have in your past or present life.

Understanding Life with Dreams

The dreams that repeat over and over again will reveal things in your life that are important and information or problems that need to come into your attention. When things are left unresolved it can cause your subconscious mind to bring these to your attention in your dreams.

When you have had nightmares, the truth is that they are very normal to have. Nightmares happen because when you have emotions that are frightened or very strong, it can cause you to have a nightmare.

Why Nightmares Wake You Up

Nightmares cause you to wake up because they can be scary, and you are more likely going to remember a nightmare in more detail. A nightmare will have an impact on you because they have strong images, and you might remember them all day.

People with Strong Imaginations

Research shows that people that are sensitive, have a strong imagination or are full of intuition have more nightmares than other people. This can happen because they have stronger emotions and are more in tune with their environment.

Nightmares Show You Things

One reason that nightmares get your attention is because they are sometimes known to show you that a problem is about to happen so that you can avoid it. Make sure that you confront the issue and that you listen to the warning because it might protect you from an accident or from bad health.

What is Bothering You?

Nightmares can also show that something is bothering you and be part of your subconscious mind. If you can learn to understand and discuss your nightmares, chances are that you can figure out what is bothering you and work through your conflicts.

Conclusion

If you find that you are having nightmares, you need to get to the bottom of what is causing you to have these dreams. People have different dreams for different reasons and if you want to know what your nightmare means, find out more about it online. You can find more about interpretation and dreams on our website.

When you can control your own dreams, you are lucid dreaming. This allows you to be awake in your mind while your body is sleeping. You are able to confront things in your life that you are usually not able to confront, and it can help you to be brave and confident.

Dreams as a Rehearsal

You will achieve lucid dreaming and then you can use it as a tool to rehearse things such as speeches, to study for tests and to fulfill the fantasies that you have. This happens when you need to practice things like the athletes do such as their golf game or swinging a bat.

Dreaming to Ask for Things

You can use lucid dreaming to ask your boss to give you a raise or to ask out your first love. This can help you to get rid of writer block and can help you to rehearse things in your mind before you even do them.

Dreaming to Get Rid of Fear

Lucid dreaming can help you to not be afraid of things and to face your fears before you really have to face them. This is part of your imagination.

Dreaming for Practice

The brain will go in a state that allows you to practice things because you are able to control what is going on in your dream., Even though you are on a dream state, you will be able to train and prepare for things that you will actually be awake for.

Prepare Yourself with Lucid Dreaming

This can help you to have patterns in life that you can prepare for. Most adults have had a lucid dream in their life, but many have not ever reported them whereas others have reported their dreams without knowing that it was lucid dreaming. When you practice lucid dreaming, you will achieve what you want to do in your life.

This is when you are both awake and asleep and it can happen up to 120 minutes each day. Daydreaming will happen when you are using your imagination and you let your mind wander. This can happen in different levels, and it can cause you to be less aware of what is going on in your life.

False Awakening Dreams

If you have ever thought that you were awake, but you are up doing things that you do on a daily basis such as brushing your teeth or eating breakfast, this can be false awakening. This can happen when you are thinking that you are doing something to realize that you are just dreaming.

Lucid Dreaming

These happen when you are sleeping but you are aware that you mind is awake. This can happen when you realize you are dreaming, and some people practice this as a skill so that they can influence the dream without waking up.

Nightmares

When you have a nightmare, this can be a scary dream that will cause you to be afraid or to wake up stressed. This can happen because of situations in your life that have been stressful. People can have PSN or Post Traumatic Stress Nightmare. This can happen when you refuse to accept things in life that are negative.

Some people have a history of nightmares, and some might even consider suicide to get rid of their nightmares.

Recurring Dreams

Recurring dreams are dreams that repeat themselves. The story can be different and most of the time the story line is positive, but it can cause you to have nightmare themes. The dreams can happen because of conflicts in your life that are being ignored. Once you figure out how to solve your problems the dream will probably stop happening.

Healing Dreams

These are dreams that come with your health in mind. These were labeled by the Ancient Greeks as prodrome which means having to do with health. Some believe that these dreams can help you not to have health problems and can heal you when you are sick in your mind or body.

Some people believe that if you have migraine or asthma that you will have dreams before an attack comes. Your body will help you to communicate with your mind and will let your body know when things are not right like they should be.

Some believe that healing dreams come as a warning to help advice you to get help.

Prophetic Dreams

Prophetic dreams are considered precognitive or psychic dreams because they help to tell the future. Your mind is dreaming and putting information together that you might normally overlook. This kind of dream works with your unconscious mind and helps you to know things before they happen.

Signal Dreams

Signal dreams happen so that you can make better decisions.

Epic Dreams

These dreams are also called Great Dreams or Numinous Dreams. These dreams are very interesting, and they are so vivid that they are hard to ignore. These dreams can have goodness and make you feel that you have found something that you were missing in your life. These are life-changing dreams.

Progressive Dreams

These kinds of dreams come in sequences in different nights. The dream will continue where it left off and these dreams help you to solve problems and figure out different situations.

Mutual Dreams

Mutual dreams happen when two people have the same dream. These can be planned such as two people working to have the same dream.

Mutual dreams can also be spontaneous, and you might have these dreams with a spouse, a friend or someone in your family. This can be a dream that happens the same night or it can happen at different times.