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THEORIES OF DREAMS 

I was with my three college friends and we were hiking along a dirt road. We were walking on the

middle of the road in a single file and I was at the front. When I look back, I suddenly saw a truck coming

our way. I shouted to them to run to the sides and we all did except for one. The truck hit him hard and I

thought he was dead. But he just get up and smiled and we all started laughing.  

Freud believed that we dream for psychological reason, that is dreams have its own latent

meaning that we have to decipher them in order to understand what it means. This dreams as he would

explain are our disguised wishes hidden in symbols. Since dreams are hidden in symbols, we can only

unlock them through the process of “free association”, which b y reasoning backward we get the meaning

of the symbols closely associated with the original wish (1985).  

To analyze my dream in free association, it would have showed that my “wish” to be with my

former friends was evident in my dream. The dirt road would have meant the path that we all traveled

together in school, tough times but full of fun. And we talked about going nature camping that never did

happen. The friend that was hit by a truck was going through tough times and I was hoping that

something would “struck” him to make him understand things. I also wished that he would make it through

that was probably why he lived after being hit by the truck. 

Content analysis was developed by , a psychologist by gathering thousands of dream reports from

all over the world. Through this reports he developed a cognitive theory of dream which states that

dreams express our "conceptions" of self, family members, friends, and social environment. They reveal

such conceptions as "weak," "assertive," "unloved," "domineering," and "hostile." ( 2005). 

Our “self concept” and our relationships with others can be revealed in our dreams through dream

diary where we can review in it our roles that we act in our dreams. As with the case with my dream that I

was leading and at the front of the line, it could be said that I always acted as the undesignated “leader”

of the group. 

The “activation-synthesis” theory of dreams was first proposed by in 1977. It directly opposed

theory on dream analysis. It answers all the questions about the meaning of dreams by the simple reason

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that they are all meaningless (2005). According to this theory various parts of the brain continue to

function and produce stimuli during sleep, particularly during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase. The

brain then takes these internal stimuli and attempts to make some sort of sense of them. To do this it

uses other random stimuli and memories, especially those easily accessible in the short-term memory (

2005). My own dream then would be random neurons firing signals to each other and the brain was trying

to make sense out of senseless randomness. The truck was not supposed to appear but in random

events it showed up and hit one of my friend.  

content analysis was more interesting and scientific where he based his theory on data from all

over the world. Interesting, because out of so many randomness in this world, content analysis tried to

explain the real reason of why we dream and not just part of chaos. Freud’s analysis of dreams was

unscientific, though it can’t be said that it is out of not trying. Activation -synthesis theory is a theory that

never explains much everything but the meaninglessness of dreams. Scientifically, the reason for 

sleeping up to now is still unknown, much more the function of dream. 

Read more: http://ivythesis.typepad.com/term_paper_topics/2009/11/theories-of-

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