Dream material source

Dream material source

On the question of the origin of dreams, it is generally accepted that the first source of dream material is the experience of daytime life. As the so-called 'day has a thought, night has a dream', the following dream example to show that the dream material comes from the residual thoughts of the day.

In a dream, a doctor saw a mother and daughter walking down the street. The girl was a patient. The Dreamer recalls that the source was that one of the patients treated by the Dreamer had complained to him that her mother did not approve of her continuing the treatment that night.

Someone dreamed of writing an academic monograph on a certain plant. Through association, I knew that the source was an academic monograph on grasses that I came across in the bookstore that morning.

The study found that some of the sources of the experience did not occur the day before the dream, but occurred farther away; But he must have thought of it the day before. You could say something brought back memories the day before. If two or more dream-inducing experiences occur in a day, it is possible to combine the two events into a whole in the dream.

For example, someone at a certain time and place meets two friends at the same time, one is a prestigious colleague, the other is the child of a woman patient of social status, and they do not know each other. The man then talks to two people at the same time. He recommended a young man to his colleague for help; Later, the child of the woman patient was asked about his mother's health, and it was heard that she was critically ill at that time. That night the man had a dream in which he found himself in a beautiful drawing-room, where the young man he had recommended was with some of the most important people in the world. Which means his recommendation paid off. He also learned that a memorial service for the patient was being held in the same hall. In fact, the female patient is not dead. How to interpret this dream? This is because the relationship between this person and her is not good, so the dream will dream that she has died.

Sometimes a psychologically significant experience, not recent, is replaced in the formation of a dream by another recent, but psychologically unimportant, event. Therefore, a dream whose content seems insignificant on the surface can be found to have important content by careful analysis. For example, a young woman dreamed that she put a candle on the candlestick, but the candle was broken and could not be straightened, and a girl next to her scolded her clumsy actions. She replied that it was not her fault...

The day before the dream, she had put a candle on the wax table, but it did not break. It was just an everyday thing she didn't pay attention to at the time, but it was woven into her dream. After analysis, the candle is an item that can make the female sexual organs excited, broken can not stretch, in men refers to impotence or impotence. It's not her fault, of course. But how could this well-educated young woman, who was usually unfamiliar with such obscenities, use the symbol of a candle in her dream?

Through the young woman's memory, she remembered once boating on the lake, a group of schoolboys rowing past her, singing a lewd song: 'The queen of Sweden, lying in the closed curtain, holding Apollo's candle...' She didn't understand at the time, but only after her husband explained it. In addition, she recalled that when she lived in the school dormitory before going to school, she was ridiculed by her classmates for closing the curtains and laughing at her clumsy movements. The relationship between masturbation and impotence has also been heard from others.

These long ago events, though psychologically significant in the young woman's mind, were replaced by the trivial matter of lighting candles the day before, and she fell asleep.

The second source of dreams is childhood experience, which means that childhood experiences that are no longer remembered in the waking state are reproduced in dreams. The more we analyze dreams, the more we believe that much of the material for dreams comes from childhood experience. Look at a dream a female patient had during treatment:

She was in a large room with all kinds of instruments, as if she were in an orthopedic rehabilitation hospital. She heard the doctor tell her that he had limited time and could not see her alone, but wanted her to be treated with five other patients. She refused. She refused to lie down in bed and insisted on standing alone in the corner, waiting for the doctor to tell her, 'What I just said is not true.' At this point, the other five patients laughed at her for being so stupid.

The orthopedic hospital in this dream comes from what the doctor said while treating her. At that time, when talking about the time required for psychological treatment and the nature of the disease, the doctor once made an example of this disease like orthopedic disease, treatment needs a long time and patience. He added, 'I can only give you a little time now, but later I will gradually increase it to an hour and a half for treatment.' The woman patient is the youngest of six children in the family. When she was young, she was the most painful to her father, but she still felt that her father spent less time with her alone. In the dream she asked the doctor to treat her alone, and the doctor replaced her father. The 'what was just said is not true' thing in the dream comes from a recent experience: One day, the son of one of their hourly workers told them that his mother (the hourly worker) was ill and could not come, and she thought that the hourly worker was ill and must need money, and it happened that she should pay her bill in two days, so she gave the hourly worker's salary to the hourly worker's son in advance and asked him to give it to his mother. Later, she had to pay again, and her husband made a joke on her, saying, 'That is to pay again.' So she anxiously asked her husband repeatedly, hoping that he would say, 'What I just said is not true.' The dream words exposed the hidden danger of her stinginess: she wanted the doctor to spend twice as much time treating her, but not charge twice as much for the treatment. At the same time, the doctor changed to her husband. 'Standing in a corner' and 'unwilling to lie in bed' all come from her childhood experience: she was once made to stand in a corner for wetting the bed, was scolded by her father, and even her five brothers and sisters laughed at her.

In every dream, whether of a neurotic or a normal person, its manifest meaning is related to recent experience, and its hidden meaning to experience long ago. In other words, what determines the hidden meaning of a dream is a desire or impulse that is suppressed in the unconscious. These unconscious desires are always active and never go away. It can be said, therefore, that the wishes presented in adult dreams must be those of childhood.

Desires suppressed in the unconscious can be fulfilled and realized, which may be painful for themselves, so it is transformed into anxiety and even wakes the dreamer up. At this time, because the desire to be suppressed is too strong and can not be overpowered by the monitoring function, the dreamer may wake up temporarily, and after waking up, he will understand that 'the original is a dream' is not really terrible. Then, like a fly that disturbs sleep, they continue to fall asleep. Therefore, it can be said that even anxious dreams are the protectors of sleep.

Another source of dream material is physical stimulation. The physical stimulation can be classified into three categories: first, the objective sensory stimulation from the outside world, such as the external bell, the light shining on the eyes, and the foot stretching outside the quilt to be stimulated; The second is the internal, subjective feeling of excitement, such as thirst, hunger, etc.; The third is internal sensory stimulation of internal organs, such as bladder fullness and sexual organ excitement.

It can be said that physical stimulation is real stimulation, indeed important; But with all these stimuli, I can't sleep. When the physical stimulation is strong, the dreamer can wake up, and it is not necessarily incorporated into the dream. As the material of dreams, the physical stimulation can only be combined with the psychological desire to fall into a dream. Here is an illustration of a dream:

A writer who was on vacation in his villa once woke up in the morning and remembered having a very brief, imageless dream about the death of a famous person. He had read in the newspaper a few days earlier that the famous man had died and was puzzled. The slight connection is that I read in the newspaper a few days ago that the famous man had a slight illness. After waking up that day, the writer's wife said that before he woke up, the car horn was blaring outside, and the husband did not hear the sound at all. The sound entered the dream and became the material of the dream, weaving it into the above dream, so that he could go on sleeping without being disturbed by the sound and satisfy his desire to sleep. Thus, all dreams can negate or alter external stimuli so that sleep can continue.

In short, the causes of dream formation are very complex. Because many reasons can cause dreams, and any object can also be used as the material of dream images, there are sometimes many difficulties in the specific analysis of the formation of a dream example, a dream image and its mechanism. For example, because thought can cause a dream, but sometimes will 'want to lean single pillow dream, dream and not lamp and do'; For example, the body is subjected to certain stimuli during sleep can cause dreams, but why some people cause dreams, and some people do not cause; The question of why some people cause this kind of dream and others that kind of dream, and so on, shows that the causes of dreams and their mechanisms remain to be further studied.