Dream Analysis

Dream analysis is a therapeutic technique best known for its use in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud viewed dreams as “the royal road” to the unconscious and developed dream analysis, or dream interpretation, as a way of tapping into this unconscious material.

Freudian dream analysis relies on symbolism. It is based on the notion that your unconscious mind protects you from your repressed desires by expressing those desires in dreams and hiding them away from your conscious mind.

Psychoanalysis: In psychoanalytic theory, dreams represent wish fulfilment, unconscious desires, and conflicts. Dreams contain both manifest and latent content. Manifest content includes information from the dream as the dreamer remembers it. Latent content represents the repressed, symbolic meaning embedded within the dream. So, identifying and deciding to manifest them is a process of integration of science and spirituality.

During dream analysis, the person in therapy shares the manifest content of the dream with the therapist.  After specific symbols are pulled from the manifest content, the therapist utilises free association to facilitate the exploration of repressed material.