Dreams are defined as the subconscious imaginings which contain images and sounds among other sensations while one sleeps. Many people have come up with different theories to try to explain dreams. However, I will be focusing on Freud’s dream theory. Freud theory focused on two things: one is the idea that each dream is a fulfillment of a wish on the part of the unconscious mind; provided that the state of sleep is not disturbed, and the second is of that ordinary wish to sleep which set the dream going (Holt, 1989).
Freud in his theory of dreams argues that a dream can serve two purposes, while bringing up the idea of a conscious mind versus the unconscious mind. One of it is the fulfillment of a wish. He argues that a dream has much in common to do with stories a person achieves with their heart desires. In Mc Carthy’s Dream of his wife, the dreamer narrates how his pale bride went to him out of a leafy and green canopy. He describes how his wife had dressed and admitted how it is easier to have a life in dreams than to live in reality. This is a wish to rewrite his wife’s death. He does not want to come to terms with the reality that his wife chose to end her life and instead dreams that his wife was sick and he cared for her. He finds it difficult to remember that his wife passed on alone and that he is facing the guilt of not stopping her. His wishes can be explained in two ways. One is that there was a want he had; that he would have been there to stop his wife from taking her life and, two is that there is a prohibition that he was not there to stop his wife from ending her life. The result therefore becomes a wish that he could rewrite the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife. This wish therefore lingers on the thing the husband could not do.
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The second purpose is that each dream is a fulfillment of a wish on the part of the unconscious mind; provided that the state of sleep is not disturbed. The dream the road by McCarthy reflects a journey taken by a father and a son after civilization has been demolished. The dream reveals the subconscious thoughts of those involved and provides a premonition of the events to come. It is a dream of a father and his son who are fighting to survive an unarmed catastrophic event that destroyed civilization and are psychologically tormented. Such dreams activate an internal response and will want to act as a rehearsal of threat evasion strategies that usually imitate those of the early man. An example is a loss of significant persons, attacks and escapes and pursuits. Those that are directly feeling threatened in their dreams activate this system more often than those that are less threatened. The author suggests that those facing valid threats have the system fully activated in an attempt to evade what would otherwise be real threats. The narrator of the dream took a study of dreams from two types of children living in a war ton Palestinian Gaza strip and those from a peaceful part of Galilee. His studies found that those children in direct contact with real threats had more frequent threats from dreams compared to those living in a peaceful area.
In the dreams of invulnerability, the narrator reveals how he wondered in a cave with a child leading him by the hand. He talks of the cave being a home of a creature which raised its mouth and stared into the light with ayes that are dead white. He says that the creature sensed they are there, but turned away into the dark moaning. From Freud’s theory of dreams, it is certain to say that even if the monster could be a premonition that there is evil around the man, the man and the child would still be protected from them.
Other theories continue to address the reasons as to why we dream. The information processing theories which tries to explain why we sleep, suggests that sleep allows us to merge and process all that our minds have collected the previous day. It suggests that as we slumber, our brains have to deal with multitudes of information that they have stored throught the day, inform of images, impressions and symbols. In Mc Carthy’s Dream of his wife, the dreamer narrates how his pale bride went to him out of a leafy and green canopy. He describes how his wife had dressed and admitted how it is easier to have a life in dreams than to live in reality. According to the information processing theory, this would be a result of seeing many women during the day, that as when that information is processed during the night; it would look like photographic images of his wife.
In McCarthy’s narration of a dream by a father after a journey taken by a father and a son after civilization has been demolished, the information processing theory would point at the many traumatizing happenings of the day and would always reflect as a photographic image of a catastrophe befalling them (McCarthy, 2009). The threats that occur during the day would activate an internal response that would imitate those happenings during the day.
From the dreams of invulnerability, the narrator reveals how he wondered in a cave with a child leading him by the hand. He talks of the cave being a home of a creature which raised its mouth and stared into the light with ayes that are dead white (Barcaro, 2010). He says that the creature sensed they are there, but turned away into the dark moaning. This according to the information processing theory is a reflection of scary things that happened during the day which the narrator managed to overcome.
Basing therefore on the two theories, I would say that the Freud theory is more effective and significant in attempting to interpret dreams than the information processing theory. This is because the Freud theory emphasizes the importance of the unconscious mind, which is a fertile ground for almost all dreams and governs behavior to a greater extent than many may expect. It aims at making the unconscious conscious.
References
Barcaro, Umberto, and Pietro Rizzi. "Preliminary description of a self-similarity phenomenon in the connection patterns of dreams." Dreaming 20.2 (2010): 136.
Holt, Robert R. Freud reappraised: A fresh look at psychoanalytic theory . Guilford Press, 1989.
McCarthy, Cormac. The road . Pan Macmillan, 2009.
