The Dream

I was awakened by my mom crying in the other room. Half awake I rushed over to see what had happened. My parents did not tell me exactly what had happened, but I knew just by looking at the room. We had been robbed. Terrified by the idea of being robbed, I thought I was in a dream. I slowly walked over to my huge piggy bank and saw that it was broken in half. Finally, I realized I was not in a dream and the robbery had actually happened.

My family was in shock for several days not knowing what to do. I still could not fully grasp what had happened. In a stage of stress, I fell asleep scared of what had happened. I began to dream as soon as I fell asleep. In my dream, I was sleeping and abruptly woke up to go to the bathroom. I sensed fear so I hesitated to go to the bathroom. When I could not wait any longer, I got up and started walking to my door. I opened my cold door knob and walked into the hallway. The minute my foot stepped out of my room I heard a familiar voice telling me to freeze. Before I froze, I turned around to see who the familiar voice belonged to. I could not believe my eyes. My parent’s best friend and their two kids, who were close friends of mine, all held machine guns pointed at me. They kept telling me what to do, but I could not make out what they were saying. Everything became a big blur. I wanted to run to my parents and warn them that their friends had guns, but I could not move my legs. Before I could find out why they were in the house, I woke up.

A dream is a naturally occurring phenomenon that occurs during someone’s sleep. Many people have similar dreams in which they can relate to while some people have dreams that are rare and hard to relate to. Even if people have similar dreams, the way someone interprets it can make the dream completely different. One can optimistically interpret the dream while the other can pessimistically interpret that same dream. Freud and Jung both revolutionized the study of dreams through their work. Even though Jung worked with Freud, both established their own ideas about dream analysis. Freud and Jung can interpret the same dream differently using their own theories of dream analysis.

Freud believes that nothing occur by chance; every thought and action is motivated by the unconscious. People tend to repress feelings and hurtful memories in order to live in this chaotic society. Repressed feelings are freed through dreams and dreams are a direct connection to the unconscious, what Freud refers to as the id. When dreaming, the unconscious acts to release the hidden desires of the id. Freud believes that a dream represents an ongoing wish along with the activities from previous days (Domhoff). Events in dreams are not made up, but are from people’s personal experiences or needs. When someone is under too much stress, repression or denial, a dream takes place in order to transform the problem into something positive.

Freud found that the mind finds a way to repress memories of painful events and to resist attempts to draw back any memory back into the conscious awareness. Freud considers that trauma is most often related to sex and sexuality. In “Oedipus Complex,” Freud refers to Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in which the unconscious desires sexual relations with the mother and hatred towards the father. Freud sees the unconscious as instinctual and sexual.

Dreams need to be over analyzed in order for it to be fully understood. If Freud did not know my family had been robbed before I had the dream, he would probably interpret my dream similar to Oedipus Rex. Since I awoke before the dream finished, Freud would make up the ending according to what I told him. The gun represents someone’s death, perhaps it being one of my parents. Since the dream was when I was very young, it could be possible that my id wanted attention from my dad or mom. If Freud knew about the robbery before I told him the dream, he would probably interpret it differently. All the repressed memories and feelings resulted in the dream. The dream provided answers to my anxieties about who could have committed the robbery. Scared and confused about the robbery, the dream portrayed my exact feelings