Dreams - Delving Into the Abyss of Memory
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International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) ISSN 2249-6912 Vol. 3, Issue 4, Oct 2013, 77-86 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd. DREAMS - DELVING INTO THE ABYSS OF MEMORY RATI OBEROI Centre for Professional Communication, University of Petroleum & Energy Studies, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India ABSTRACT Interpretation of dreams is psychological technique, every dream is a psychical structure which has a meaning. By the nature of psychical forces and their concurrent and mutually opposing action dreams are generated. Being an attribute of memory dreams interpretation is therapeutic and can lead to holistic self and community development. Dreams of warning powers draw to conscious attention moral infirmities and physical illness. In ancient societies, dreaming was considered a supernatural communication, divine intervention, or omens of particular significance. Dream interpretation was taken up as part of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century. In Namita Gokhale’s novels each dream with a latent meaning is a unique personal experience. Dreams are subjected to distortion, as the meaning manifest in the unconscious is not derived completely. Dreams are compromises which ensure that sleep is not interrupted. Sex dreams being part of self, do not involve incest or promiscuity but depict that cultural sexual repression necessitated reenactment to alleviate physical and psychic distress. Dream sequences point to inability, unresolved conflict, some urgent message in the unconscious demanding to be understood, or forgotten traumatic memories resurfacing. Daydream is a visionary fantasy experienced while awake, can be constructive and connected with some emotion. (No. of Words: 201) KEYWORDS: Dream Interpretation, Psychological Technique, Psychical Structure, Therapeutic INTRODUCTION One of the superior faculties to which dream – life, is attributed is that of memory. Dreams are defined as mental activity of the dreamer in so far as he is asleep. Every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning. The endeavour is to elucidate the process to which the strangeness and obscurity of dreams are due and to deduce from those processes the nature of the psychical forces by whose concurrent or mutually opposing action dreams are generated. Thus Havelock Ellis, without dwelling on the apparent absurdity of dreams, speaks of them as “an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts,” [Trans. & Ed. James Strachey, Interpretation of Dreams, 1998, 92] that study of which might reveal the primitive stages in evolution of mental life. James Sully, [Trans. & Ed. James Strachey, Interpretation of Dreams, 1998, 93]was more firmly convinced that dreams have a disguised meaning, more sweeping and penetrating; and that dreams are a means of conserving successive earlier personalities. Death is not a terminal event and does not exist in any real sense, the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. All possible universes exist simultaneously, perhaps this energy transcends from one world to the other. Like ancient Eastern and Western philosophical schools, Robert Lanza insist that the mind creates all reality. In the modern context, idealism has been supplemented with a brand of quantum mysticism and relabeled as biocentrism. Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. In many ancient societies dreaming was considered a supernatural communication or a means of divine intervention, whose message could be unraveled by those with certain powers. In modern times, various schools of psychology have offered theories about the meaning of dreams. The ancient Greeks believed that cures would be affected through divine grace by incubating dreams within the confines of 78 Rati Oberoi the temple. Dreams were also considered prophetic or omens of particular significance. The Greek physician Hippocrates deals with the relation of dreams to illness. Aristotle knew dreams give a magnified construction to small stimuli arising during sleep. He draws the conclusion that dreams may very well betray to a physician the first signs of some bodily change unobserved in waking. Macrobius and Artemidorus agreed with this. Dreams were divided into two classes. One class is supposed to be influenced by the present or past, but to have no future significance. It included insomnoia which gave a direct representation of a given idea of its opposite – e.g.of hunger or of its satiation – and which lent a fantastic extension to the given idea – e.g. the nightmare or ephialtes. The other class was supposed to determine the future. It included (1) direct prophesies received in a dream (oraculum) (2) previsions of some future event (visio) and (3) The symbolic dreams, which needed interpretation (somnium). [Trans. & Ed.James Strachey, Interpretation of Dreams, 1998, 37, 38]Besides pietistic and mystical writers, there are supporters theory of the supernatural origin of dreams. Dream – life is held in high esteem by some schools of philosophy, e.g. by followers of Schelling, the chief exponent of the pantheistic “:Philosophy of Nature” popular in Germany during the early part of the nineteenth century. [Trans. & Ed.James Strachey, Interpretation of Dreams, 1998, 39]Freud often referred to the question of the occult significance of dreams and like Artemidorus proposed dreams to be mantic i.e. as predicting the future. Discussions of the premonitory character of dreams and their power to foretell the future have not ended, as attempts at giving a psychological explanations have been inadequate. Each new writer examines the same problems afresh and begins again. The problem of sleep, essentially a problem of physiology must bring about modifications in the conditions of functioning of the mental apparatus. Dream interpretation was taken up as part of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century; the perceived, manifest content of a dream is analyzed to reveal its latent meaning to the psyche of the dreamer. DISCUSSIONS The process of forming dreams happen thus:. The totality of the sensory stimuli generated during sleep from various sources, arouse in the mind in the first place a number of ideas, which are represented in the form of hallucinations or more properly, illusions, as these are derived from external and internal stimuli. These ideas become linked together according to the law of association and, according to the same law, call up a further series of ideas or images. The whole of this material is then worked over, by the organizing and thinking faculties of the mind. All that remains undiscovered are the motives which decide whether the images arising from non – external sources shall proceed along one chain of associations or another. Dreams derive their basic material from reality and from the intellectual life experienced externally or internally. This connection needs to be looked for diligently, and it may long remain hidden because of a number of peculiarities of memory. The fact is that dreams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life which are so remarkable and of such theoretical importance that attention is drawn by relating to some ‘hypermnesic’dreams. [Trans. & Ed.James Strachey, Interpretation of Dreams, 1998, 47] A peculiarity, of a hypermnesic dream is that it is followed by another dream which completes the recognition of what is at first an unidentified memory. In hypermnesic dreams it is easy to trace the source of the knowledge. Dreams sometimes bring back to minds, with a wonderful power of reproduction, from beneath the deepest piles of debris, very remote and even forgotten events from earliest years, materials which are blotted out by gaps in conscious faculty of memory. These give rise to interesting hypermnesic dreams. It has often been observed that in dreams people speak foreign languages more fluently and correctly than in waking life. Nothing which is once mentally possessed can be entirely lost. Some of its components are derived from the experiences of Dreams – Delving into the Abyss of Memory 79 the previous day or its predecessor, or from the very last few days before they were dreamt. Unimportant, trivial, incidental, forgotten impressions of daily life reappear in dreams. The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly. Impressions from the remotest past are reproduced in dreams during deep sleep, while more recent impressions appear towards morning. Freud listed distorting operations because of which the manifest content of the dream differs so greatly from the latent dream. By reversing these distortions the latent content is revealed. The operations included : condensation – one dream object stands for several associations and ideas; displacement – a dream object's emotional significance is separated from its real object or content and attached to an entirely different one; visualization – a thought is translated to visual images; symbolism – a symbol replaces an action, person, or idea. Dreams help the unconscious to express the unknown contained in the unconscious through visual metaphors. The images are symbolic of conscious and unconscious mental processes. Jung explains the phenomenon of dreaming by saying that the psyche regulates itself by a process of compensation. An imbalance, between the conscious and unconscious minds, caused fragmentation of the personality, resulting in neurosis, psychosis or schizophrenia. The psyche is split into two irreconcilable energies; rational