PicoBlog

I've always been fascinated by dreams. The fact that human beings conjure up alternate realities for themselves, with unspoken and implicitly understood rules and laws about the world, completely ridiculous things which seem genuinely real and which you don't even question until you wake up, is something that is mind-boggling when you think about, but is also so prevalent since the dawn of time that we don't stop to think twice about it.

I've always had vivid dreams and each one compelled me to find out what they actually mean. Now, I don't believe in dreams as a form of prophecy or divine intervention, but as a window into your subconscious thoughts and feelings that you aren't even aware of but that manifest themselves into other kind of brain activity, and so I feel it's important to try and understand the language your subconscious tries to communicate to you with.

A comic I drew during the lockdown last year:

I have the usual dreams from time to time, my teeth falling off, me giving a speech on stage at my school while not wearing any pants, being unprepared for an exam, trying to run but being stuck in place etc. These are usually manifestations of anxiety or shame, but it also depends on what particular event in your life you are going through, and so a blanket Google search cannot satisfactorily give you an interpretation for these dreams.

I came across Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams a couple of years ago and immediately picked it up. Published more than a century ago, it is a dense read that reads more like an academic research paper than the more contemporary non-fiction you can find today and so I've only been able to get through a few chapters since then. And although some of the ideas and examples are a bit dated, it still has some solid theories.

In this edition I want to talk about one of his central ideas from this book, which can even be considered the thesis of his psychoanalytic dream theory, that "Dreams are a form of wish fulfillment".

What Freud essentially posits from this theory is that dreams represent the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish. He explains this with an example from his life in which he eats salty food before going to bed for the night and then wakes up thirsty in the middle of the night. The waking up, however, is preceded by a dream in which he is drinking water in long draughts, which tastes "as sweet as only a cool drink can taste when one's throat is parched". The dream originates from this desire to quench thirst, and the dream then tries to fulfill this desire. This is an example of a dream of convenience, in which the dream substitutes itself for action. I have even had this exact dream before myself, and on other occasions this dream of convenience has manifested itself in other forms, in which I need to wake up early but am still sleeping, and so the dream fulfills this wish by showing me that I have woken up and am going about my tasks, when in reality I actually wake up a while later and find that I have slept through my alarm.

Now, are all dreams fulfillment of wishes? Certainly not, and there are more categories Freud talks about which contain more complex dreams and their possible interpretations. But the act of dreams being a form of wish fulfillment is one of the most basic and simplistic form of dreaming states in human beings. He talks about children's dreams being the best example for this scenario. They aren't as complex as dreams adults have, and almost all of them involve a form of wish fulfillment.

It is important to note here the difference between a wish and a want. According to Freud, wish fulfillment occurs when unconscious desires are repressed by the ego and superego. This repression often stems from guilt and taboos imposed by society. A child saying they want an ice-cream is different from them saying they wish they had one. If they want an ice-cream and it has been prohibited to them, then having an ice-cream becomes the wish of that child.

Freud recounts multiple examples of children's dreams and their supposed wish fulfillment. One of them, as paraphrased from the Freud Museum London website is given below:

Here is Freud’s account of a dream his daughter Anna had when she was very small:
My little girl, who was nineteen months old at the time, had been sick one morning so had been kept without food all day. During the following night, she was heard calling out excitedly in her sleep:
“Anna Freud, stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!”
At that time she was in the habit of using her name to express the idea of taking possession of something. The menu must have seemed to her to make up a desirable meal.
Anna’s dream of strawberries shows the wishful character of dreams. She goes to bed hungry and dreams of food.
But not just any food! Why does she specifically dream of strawberries? In fact, she mentioned two different kinds of strawberries in the dream (in German, ‘strawberries’ and ‘wild strawberries’ are different words). Freud makes an interesting observation:
The fact that two kinds of strawberries appeared in it was a demonstration against the domestic health police: her nanny had attributed her sickness to an excess of strawberries. She was thus retaliating in her dream against this unwelcome verdict.
In other words, the wish lingers on the very thing that has been forbidden. Anna’s strict nanny blamed her sickness not on strawberries as such, but on the excess of them, on eating too many strawberries. In doing so, she introduces rules of strawberry-eating.
Strawberries became subject to a kind of prohibition, and as a result became the forbidden fruit!

I tried thinking of examples from my own childhood that fit this description of wish-fulfillment and didn't have to look back too far. Suffice it to say, never go to bed with a full bladder, because your dream will fulfill the wish of your body and this wish, quite literally, spills over to real life.

The etymology of the word "dream" is quite interesting when you look at it from the context of wish-fulfillment. Colloquial usage of the word and even old proverbs corroborate this theory of dreams being the fulfillment of a wish, so much so that dreams and wishes have become synonymous with each other.

• When someone finds their expectations surpassed in reality, they happily exclaim "I never expected this, even in my wildest dreams".

• Praying for all our "dreams to come true" simply means us getting what we wish for.

• We ask children what they dream of being once they grow up, which is just another way of asking what they wish to do.

• Martin Luther King Jr. famously said "I have a dream", which suggests that a dream is a container for the fulfillment of wishes.

A dream, in other words, is simply the fulfillment of your wishes.

In the scientific literature portion of the book, Freud quotes Haffner as follows:

"First of all the dream is the continuation of the waking state. Our dreams always unite themselves with those ideas which have shortly before been in our consciousness. Careful examination will nearly always find a thread by which the dream has connected itself with the experience of the previous day."

Reading this was like an eureka moment for me, and since then I've realized that everything I dream about involved people and things that I experienced just within the previous day. This involves someone I either spoke to, thought of, or who showed up on my Instagram story who then went on to make an appearance in my dream. Most of the times the connection is not that obvious but upon thinking about it, a link can always be found. (For example, I dreamt about an old school friend out of the blue and then remembered that was because they had gone to study in Israel and I had been reading about Israel all day in the news.)

This phenomenon reminded of the song Dreams Tonite by Alvvays, whose chorus goes "If I saw you on the street, would I have you in my dreams tonight?"

This theory of wish-fulfillment corresponds to just a couple of chapters in the book. There are many more interesting topics that Freud delves into (which hopefully I can summarize in future articles too after being able to read through them). Some of them that piqued my interest are:

• Dreams as continuation of the waking state (as spoken about above)

• The sources and stimuli of dreams: External, psychological, physical etc.

• Dream distortion, where Freud argues that dreams are disguised to get around censorship.

• Freud's method of interpreting dreams which involved him inviting his patients to say whatever came to mind in relation to each element of the dream. Usually the subconscious collates and disguises seemingly opposite things into one element and the work of the dream interpreter and the dreamer is to then find out what the relation is and why they were related in the first place

• Typical Dreams, and why dreams are forgotten after awakening

For all these talks about dreams, it's still important to tend to requirements from the real world and so I'll end today's edition here.

• I added all my BoJack Horseman artworks into this wallpaper pack on my Gumroad! It contains 11 wallpapers available for your phone and tablet and can be purchased for free (Just enter 0 in the price field) (Although I absolutely wouldn't mind if you decide to pay for it too!)

• My sister helped me make a large cardboard base for my 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle (mentioned it before here) so I was finally able to make some progress with that. The puzzle was too big to fit onto any surface before so I had put it on hold

• A few weeks back, I wrote about how I was bummed that Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart wouldn't be available as an e-book until August. Well, in a wonderful turn of events, I randomly decided to check out the page for the book again and it was available (!!) so I have something to look forward to reading now until next week

• This Twitter thread about project management rethought as an important life skill. "Some people have bad project management and they misdiagnose it as moral failure. this is like a lvl 1 hero thinking he’s a bad person because the first item on his todo list is “slay dragon” and he hasn’t done it yet"

That's it for this week. Keep dreaming!

Raef

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