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www.aeirc-edu.com                                                                                                                                                                               Volume 1- 2014 

Page | 14 
©Advance Education Institute & Research Centre-2014                                                                                             

UNDERSTANDING DREAMS 
Waseem Hassan 

Preston Institute of Management Sciences and Technology 

Corresponding Author: abadallah.wh@gmail.com 

 

“Royal road to the unconscious” as considered by Dr. Sigmund 

Freud during his dream analysis in 1900 gives a good start to the 

philosophers when it comes to satisfy their theories in psycho-

physiological manner. During the early stages of human 

evolution, there have always been physical and materialistic 

needs that were to be fulfilled as a necessity of survival. Dreams 

on the contrary, laid rest in the hands of myth and mysticism and 

hence been defined in illogical manner which were taken for 

granted by most of the scholars of the times. Time passed, and 

the exploration of human psychology became extensively useful 

for medication and cure of gradually increasing diseases. The 

point of interest and consideration of scholars were merely 

diverted to the origination of dreams and the phenomenon of 

sleeping.  It became feasible to study the psyche of behavior 

when the classification of conscious, sub-conscious, 

preconscious and unconsciousness were first made. 

Dreams have been described by various scientists/psychological 

scholars as they perceived it to be. As I know and can judge, 

dream is an illusion or projection of visuals we see every day but 

with different scenarios we have never been through. It is a 

process in which the physiological aspects of the body and its 

psychological responses by the brain are stored in a part of the 

brain called sub-conscious.  It is a part of the mind where the 

memories are saved and are highly approachable in dreams as all 

the other functions of the body are hibernated during sleep. 

Dreams work on 1+1=2 principal. It states that a specific event, 

let’s say war, was seen in a movie by a person which was stored 

in his/her subconscious. Later on after 3 days, he/she happens to 

go in a funeral and weeps a lot. Now the emotions his/her mind 

perceives from both the movie and funeral was then combined 

when he’s asleep and the brain projects a scenario where that 

person stuck in an abandoned church where people are crying 

over their dead ones and the country is on war. A survey was 

done where 30 people were asked about being injured in dream 

and suffers pain in same part/organ of the body as they wake up 

from unbearable pain. Out of all, 4 were able to state that 

something hit/bit them on the exact area while they were asleep 

while others were unable to find a reason. Cause and effect is it 

called where both physiology and psychology is merged in a 

dream in a single moment of time. The observation was then 

conducted on a group of 10 people which were pinched while 

they’re asleep. Every subject was pinched with increasing force 

to see at what point they wake up of pain. Each and every subject 

explained a different type of scenario from a knife cut to a 

gunshot in the same part of the body which resulted that each 

subject undergo pain with their own psychological aspects of 

bearing specific amount of pain by predefined object which 

they’ve either been through in their life or have ever imagined to 

go through. Now the fact about time; the pain which was injected 

for 3-5 seconds was felt for minutes in dream. This notifies that 

the time duration in dream and in this physical world is different 

from each other. One other aspect, which is still unsolved part of 

this puzzle, is that either the pain was expected before it is 

injected and brain projects similar scenario where subject is 

exposed to pain and the subject feels pain in reality and dream 

altogether. Or that the subject feels pain in real and it is projected 

in dream bits of seconds later. Out of all the types of dream 

which fascinates both psychophysiology and philosophy is lucid 

dreaming. It is such type of dream in which the person is fully 

aware that he is dreaming and hence controls his/her actions in 

dream. Lucidity is a state in which a person accesses his 

consciousness in unconscious state, i.e. in dream. Most of the 

lucidity is experienced when a person undergo a false 

awakening. A false awakening is a state in which a person wakes 

up in a dream and is convinced that he/she has woken up in 

physical reality. It usually occurs when a person experiences a 

dream within a dream. As soon as the dreamer realizes that 

he/she is still dreaming, the consciousness is activated within a 

dream. Another fact which is attained by lucid dreaming is: As 

the level of dreaming increases, (dream within a dream within a 

dream and so on), the dreamer gradually loses controls on his/her 

basic senses. For example, a person cannot feel intense pain or 

shock in a dream and hence is awakened. Similarly, the sense of 

pain is unable to experience in 2nd level of dreaming and as a 

person go deeper in dream, the basis senses would start to 

disappear/decrease gradually. Dreams: From the eyes of Scholars 

and Researchers: Since the beginning of the understandings of 

dreams to date, dreams have been divided in several types 

according to the behavior and nature observed by researcher’s 

globally. Dr. Sigmund Frued (1900) said that dreams are useful 

in establishing the contents of the unconscious. Since the 

foundation of unconscious is built in early years of life, before 

the age of five or six, and consists of repressed material from the 

psycho-sexual stages, dreams analysis constitutes only a few 

methods for studying early psychological development. Frued 

separated the dreams in two kinds of contents: the manifest 

(conscious) content, a content in which a person dreams 

something and remembers it, and the latent (unconscious) 

content, which is then discovered by means of free association. 

Another study was conducted by Beck and Hurvich (1959). They 

predicted that depressed patients are likely to have more manifest 

dreams with masochistic content than other non-depressed 

patients. They collected a number of dreams from both depressed 

and non-depressed patients who were scored, and their 

hypothesis was confirmed at an appropriate level of significance. 

Carl Jung (1960) was convinced that there was sufficient 

evidence in dreams and other types of material, e.g., myths and 

religion, which validated the concept of collective consciousness. 

While Frued used dreams to study the beginning formative years 

of a person’s life, Jung used them to explore the psychological 

development of the race. Jung also observed, in contradistinction 

to Freud, that dreams are oriented to the past as well as to future. 

They mark out for the individual, the proper path to a more 

complete actualization of personality and help reveal poorly 

developed parts of the personality. 

 

CONCLUSION:  

Dreaming is a wider and yet partially unknown aspect of human 

psychology which is still under exploration as the technology 

prospers. The above mentioned observations and theories play a 



REVIEW ARTICLE  
www.aeirc-edu.com                                                                                                                                                                               Volume 1- 2014 

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©Advance Education Institute & Research Centre-2014                                                                                             

small part in a wider perspective of human evolution throughout 

time. It is to be understood that as technological and physical 

boundaries are being enhanced, the psychological aspects of 

dreaming and brain accessing is equally important. What my 

motto is, my observations and research about dreaming would 

become another step to conquer the complete understanding of 

dream psychology. As lucid dream makes a perception that we 

control the specific amount of senses in that dream and consider 

the dream as our reality, and realizes that we have more than 

these senses when we wake up, would it be possible that this 

physical reality is also a dream we are living and understanding 

this fact, would we be able to control more senses than we do 

now?  

 

REFERENCES: 

 Freud, S. (1953). Distortion in Dreams. The standard 

edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund 

Freud. 

 Beck, A. T., & Hurvich, M. S. (1959). Psychological 

correlates of depression: 1. Frequency of" masochistic" 

dream content in a private practice sample. Psychosomatic 

Medicine, 21(1), 50-55. 

 Jung, C. G. (2010). Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting 

Principle.(From Vol. 8. of the Collected Works of CG 

Jung)(New in Paper) (Vol. 20). Princeton University Press. 

 


