Dreaming And Fantasizing

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Dreaming is often perceived as one of the most mysterious phenomena in our psyche. In dreams, we find ourselves in some unusual places, incredible events happen to us, dream figures can transform - some people turn into others, etc.

There are a huge number of theories of what a dream is (I am now only about psychological theories, not about mystical ones) and the most famous of them, of course, is psychoanalytic. The first major work of Sigmund Freud, with which psychoanalytic theory and Freudian metapsychology actually began, was called The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud called dreams "the royal path to the unconscious." Many psychoanalysts - Carl Gustav Jung, Hanna Sigal and others - have worked on the questions of what a dream is, what mechanisms of the psyche work in a dream, why they (dreams) are needed.

One of the common explanations is that the psyche needs to process the day's material, analyze it, "sort it out" and, finally, predict the future, relying on both the material of the day lived and previous experience, and predict how to live the next day.

And in this respect, a dream is very similar to a fantasy. Fantasizing is also predicting the future, making plans for the future. In fantasies, our desires and needs are manifested, sometimes explicit, sometimes not. It is clear that fantasy can go very far (“it would be nice to build a house so that you can see Moscow from the balcony” - as Manilov fantasized) and never be realized. However, we have many examples of the realization of a seemingly impossible dream.

How does fantasy relate to dreaming? In fact, this is one and the same process of visual and verbal (and not only) processing of life experience, "daytime material", which includes daytime experiences, observations, thoughts, assessments of people and events, etc. However, if the dreaming process is completely unconscious, then fantasizing has both unconscious and conscious components. We may well interfere in the process of our own fantasy, evaluate our own thoughts and ideas.

If we close our eyes and begin not only to “listen”, but to “observe” our fantasies, we will quickly discover that they consist not only of thoughts, in turn, consisting of words (ie, the symbolic level), but also images. Fantasies are accompanied by visualizations. Dreaming about a trip to the sea, for example, we not only think thoughts like: "But it would be nice to go to the sea", but also imagine this sea, maybe the same as it was on our previous trip, perhaps it is some kind of fictional picture - with islands and palm trees. And we do not just see it as a picture, perhaps we hear the lapping of waves, feel smells, the skin "recalls" how it was washed by warm water. That is, all our senses are involved.

The same in a dream - we may well dream that we are on some beach or swimming in the sea, while experiencing the whole complex of feelings: visual, tactile, etc. In a dream, we take everything that happens as reality - it is not different from reality. But if in the daytime, when we “think over” our trip to the sea or fantasize about it, we may think - “you need to be careful with your passport, do not forget it,” then in a dream this fear can turn into a fragment of a dream when you are standing in front of the plane and suddenly, in horror, you realize that you forgot your passport at home.

Of course, everything is much more complicated with dreams and fantasies, and thinking in general - there is still a lot of room for research. We have taken only a narrow aspect - the connection between dreaming and fantasizing. Actually, I wanted to show that these are not two different, but one and the same process of thinking - the processing of incoming life material (not biological, namely, experience and impressions) and planning, both short-term and long-term (dreams) of their further behavior. Our brain does this work both day and night, only during the day can we control this process (partially, since most of this work is done unconsciously), and at night this process also takes the form of dreams (sometimes very bizarre).

So enjoy your fantasies and dreams, and the realization of your dreams.