Dreaming and the Subconscious

"The most common ones [night-time dreams] include fear, helplessness, anxiety and guilt."
"A dream can be a fascinating window into another person's private life, and I've learned that paying attention to dreams can help us understand ourselves."
Alice Robb, The Times

"Dreams are a valuable tool for uncovering parts of ourselves of which we are often unaware."
"Dreams can be a window into the myriad thoughts, feelings and impulses that drive our behaviour. Every character in a dream, in addition to representing people in our lives, also always represent parts of ourselves."
"Dreams can guide us to our parts unknown."
Stephen J. Levitan, psychoanalyst, Columbia University, New York

"During the day we 'drive shafts' into our fresh chains of thought, and these shafts make contact with 'dream thoughts'."
"This is how night and day fertilize each other. This -- I've come to believe -- is how creativity is born."
"Think of it, perhaps, as a form of scenario planning."
Marina Benjamin, insomnia sufferer

Seb Oliver/Getty Images

"If you close your eyes and dive into yourself you can see a different world."
"It's like exploring the cosmos, but inside yourself."
"You go to a different place, where it's very dangerous and scary, and it's important to know the way back."
Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist

By closing his eyes Mr. Murakami stirs his imagination to lead him to the creation of scenarios, characters, and in the process finds grist for the mill of his novel writing. This process, he reveals, leads him to places within his mind delving deep into places he has little conscious knowledge of, trusting his subconscious to treat him kindly and feed his writerly muse. He has no need of dreams, he says, being able to channel his mind deep into himself dredging up what he has no way of knowing is there, but valuing the process and profiting from it.

Many people invite their dreams to happen and feel as though in their dreams they enter another world, both familiar and unfamiliar. To them, it may be akin to reading an interesting novel, watching an exciting play, taking part in a mysterious process that takes them to unique places they would otherwise not be aware of. Many other people consider their dreams hostile to their waking well-being and feel fear when they dream, considering many of those dreams to represent nightmares.

Yulia Popkova/Vetta/Getty Images

It can be the difference between finding yourself in an atmosphere that allows you to glide or fly, giving a sense of freedom and satiating curiosity about just what it might be like to view everything from above as a bird would. Still other people can find themselves in precariously dangerous situations, or that they're being pursued by something or someone threatening them, while others discover themselves to be in strange surroundings they want to flee from but cannot find their way to freedom.

When dreams inspire trepidation and fear the preference is to give them short shrift, forget their details as swiftly as possible, consider them as being of meaningless content, the result of a tired, overactive mind. According to Ms. Robb who wrote "Why We Dream", dreams and their content can be interpreted in many ways, including forewarning of what is to come and perhaps that forewarning can be used to prevent an unhappy outcome.

She cites scientific studies indicating that the interpretation of dreams can be useful, that in fact that dreaming has evolved to aid people to "work though our anxieties in a low-risk environment, helping us practice for stressful events and cope with trauma and grief." Just as Dr. Levitan feels that the interpretation of dreams can be a useful tool for patients in psychotherapy.

Didier Robcis/The Image Bank/Getty Images

Ms. Benjamin who suffers from insomnia wrote a book about her experiences in which she claims to believe that her sleeplessness might represent a portal between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, referencing a section in Ms. Robb's book discussing how people can train themselves to dream lucidly, giving "directorial control over the night brain's filmic productions", suggesting that insomniacs might be able to perform similar effects.

She mentions the awareness of a process described in 1899 in "The Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud on making connections with dreams during waking hours.

"When Freud famously started analyzing himself, he used his dreams quite frequently in the process. Always a vivid dreamer, Freud had by this time also noticed the impact of dreams on his patients, including psychotic patients whose hallucinations were similar to dreams. Between his own experience and that of his patients, he concluded that dreams are almost always expressions of unfulfilled wishes."
verywellmind

Hulton Archive/Getty Images