Robert L. Van de Castle, Ph.D
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Commentary on Dreams
"The images and ideas that dreams contain cannot be explained solely in terms of memory. They express new thoughts that have never reached the threshold of consciousness." | |
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On the basis of extensive laboratory research, scientists have now confirmed that everyone dreams, everyone dreams every night, and everyone dreams for about 100 minutes and has several separate dreams during a normal sleep cycle. During the night, you turn into an imaginative playwright who creates a series of unique plays, decides which stage props to use, hires the cast of characters, crafts their lines for them and determines whether the play will have a happy or sad ending.
Each playwright, like Shakespeare, will have his/her own signature style, just as every individual will have his/her own distinctive and unique fingerprint. It might be said that in order to establish the meaning of any dream, it is first necessary to become familiar with the individual dreamer's dreamprint. Each of us develops our own associations to experiences that have had an emotional impact upon us. That is why dream dictionaries are of minimal, or no, use when trying to understand the often puzzling symbols that appear in our dreams. Consider, for example, the symbol of a snake. Freud claimed that such an image represented the penis. A snake could also be associated with healing, because the two entwined snakes appearing on the staff of a caduceus represent the healing profession of medicine. Temptation might also be associated, since it was a snake that tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. As snakes grow in size, they shed their skins, and could therefore be considered a symbol of growth and transformation. A person who cannot be trusted because he/she behaves in secretive, sabotaging ways is known as a "snake in the grass". Someone who engages in venomous, verbal behavior toward others might be characterized as a rattlesnake, while some partner who clings to you so tightly that you feel you are smothering might be represented as a python. This list could easily be extended. The purpose of these examples is to demonstrate that the meaning of a snake must first be determined for each individual before it becomes possible to work with that individual's dreams when a snake appears in the content. In order to assist you better if you decide to utilize my dream consultation services, it is very important for me to know some background information about you and to have you answer some "projective" questions that I have found to be helpful in attempting to determine your dreamprint. Go to the page called "Dream Consultation Information" where these questions appear if you want to explore the possibility of having me work with some of your dreams. | ||
The entire contents of this site and every sub-page thereof are Copyright © 2006 by Robert L. Van de Castle. Hand-encoding of this site by Robert Johnston.
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