Practical

"Many practitioners find it indispensable in the treatment of neuroses, and consider that the dream is a function whose psychic importance is equal to that of the conscious mind itself" (Jung 87).

Is dream analysis practical? From a psychological standpoint, it's essentially a meeting with your psychiatrist. Dreams are strung together from the random, profound images and striking situations your subconscious picks up as you are conscious. This background process is said to influence our lives, the way we act. The subconscious rules our conscious thinking and instinct. Using, psychoanalysis, one can discover what these drives or motives are, through dreams, one of the most visual and profound manifestations of latent content and drive.



"Others, on the contrary, dispute the value of dream-analysis and regard dreams as a negligible by-product of the psyche" (Jung 87).

Yet, what is the ultimate point of learning how one works from dreams? If all we learn about ourselves from dreams is how we work, what we are afraid of, or what we may do or encounter because of our actions, why bother? Why should we spend significant time and effort to discover ourselves, when we can simply live out those motives and drives? What difference does knowing how we work make in how we live? If we know how we work from dreams, will that make us act differently? Could dreams really just be random images tied together as items in memory are sorted through while we sleep?

I came into the world of dreams, half unsure about them; whether they were really just random images, and any meaning applied to them were just fabricated by my conscious mind. Tonight, I continue on, after keeping track of my dreams since September, knowing that dreams do have some purpose. They are entertainment; they fulfill our wishes or our fears. And they are teachers of ourselves, about things we cannot admit to.