The Twilight

I still remember those summer days of my childhood. I used to spend most of my time at home. For me my home, the garden, the neem tree and the gauva tree were the most familiar things. It was a perfect solace to sit under the neem tree and to look at the beautiful flowers and butterflies flying around them. The refreshing smell of tulsi made the air blessed and heavenly . Grandmother used to prepare pala ,an oil lamp and gave it to me place it under tulsi and light it bow before the plant. It was done everyday during the twilight. When i lit the pala the whole garden became bright and beautiful. I looked at the light that burned so bright in the dark and the light fell on the leaves and the flowers making it gleaming and shiny. I wished I could stay there all night looking at the pala and smelling the sweet fragrance in the air, feeling the soothing wind blowing around me. I looked up at the sky and could see the millions of stars shining so beautifully. And I could see the crescent moon gleaming so white. God made them shine so that nobody could feel lonely and scared. I prayed for a while thanking God that I had father and mother and grandmother who loved me more than anything else in the world. It such an intense feeling I could not hold my tears. I looked at the windosa of my granmother's room and she was sitting there making cotton threads for the next day to light the palas. She used to make bundles and bundles of them. I said goodnight grandma and she blessed me and said to have a happy dream. Mother and father were waiting for me the dinner and I joined them. I told them it was such lovely outside and they nodded. We could feel the cool wind outside and fragrance in the air.

Dreams have their purpose

We are all familiar with dreams. We see various kinds of dreams everyday. Some are pleasant and refreshing. Some terrify us so much that we cry out in sleep. Some leave us totally perplexed. Many questions arise in our mind regarding dreams, about their nature, cause and utility.
The visual experiences that a person has during sleep are termed as dreams. Dreams are seen in imagaes and there is a continuity in various images that are seen. That is , one image leads to the other, somewhat as in a movie. As a rule dreams are seen more often when a person is not in deep sleep, the optimum period being a few hours before waking. This is why people see more dreams in the last phase of the night. Nightmares are seen more often than pleasant dreams. Very often our dreams seem so real that we mistake for actual happenings.
The material of most dreams is drawn from past experiences of the person. Those incidents which have occure in the recent past and which have affected us strongly are re-enacted in our dreams.
There was a student who used to dream every night that he was going to the station. A psychiatrist who was consulted explained that this was because the student had sat for a very difficult examination several times but always been unsuccessful. This had greatly upset him and triggered off the dreams.
Very often two or more experience similiar dreams at the same time. This happens when the people concerned have been subjucted to the experience of the same kind. For example, if there has been a death of a much loved person in the family, then many of the family members dream about the dead relative at the same time. Similarly, victims of natural calamities like floods or famines and war who have gone through the same horrifying experiences very often dream alike.
The external stimulations that affect a person who is sleeping exert a strong inflence on his dreamd. It has been observed during experiments that if water is sprinkled on a sleeping person without waking him, he sees dreams of being drenched in rain. Similarly, if you prick a sleeping person, he goes and dreams of sword fights, battles, operations and such things. It has been our experince that when we are hungry or thirsty in sleep, we dream of costly feasts or of drinking very large quantities of water.
Another cause of dreams is the unsolved problems of the day. Those problems that keep us occupied during most of the day induce dreams related to them. In these dreams we try to solve these problems. Surprisingly, very often we find their solutions in our dreams. If we go to sleep after reading an absorbing book, we are very likely to dream about it. Unfulfilled desires and neccesities also induce dreams. The child who has been forbidden to eat chocolates makes up for it by dreaming about eating them.
Like most things in life dreams too have their purpose. Dreams help a person in maintaining his mental stability. In the body numerous physiological an mental changes keep occuring. These creat lot of strain. Dreams remove the strain and maintain optimum mental equilibrium. Through dreams a person fulfills his surpressed desires, which he cannot fulfill in real life. Another utility of dreams is that they help in strengthening and prolonging memory. Dreams also help in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness

Freud

..... the odius egoistic impulse that had emerged in her.....

Freud was born in 1856 and he studied medicine at the university of Vienna. He live in Vienna for the greater part of his life at a period when the cultural life of the city was flourishing. He specialized early on in radiolofy. Toward the close of the last century, and far into our own , he developed his 'depth psychology' or psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis is a description of the human mind in general as well as a therapy for nervous and mental disorders. His theory of unconscious is necessaru to an understanding of what a human being is.
Freud held that there is a constant tension between man and his surroundings. In particular, a tension or conflict between his drives and needs and demandsof society. It is no exaggeration to say an important exponent of the naturalistic currents that we were so prominent toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Our actions are not always guided by reason. Man is not really such a rational creature as the eighteenth century rationalists liked to think. Irrational impulses often determine what we think, what we dream, and what we do. Such irrational impulses can an expression of our basic drives or needs. The human sexual drive , for example, is just as basic as the baby's instinct to sucle.
This in itself was so new discovery. But freud showed that these basic needs can be disguised or sublimate, thereby steering our actions without being aware of it. He also showed that infants have some sort of sexuality. The respectable middle class Viennese reacted with abhorrence to this suggestion of the 'sexuality of the child' and mad him very unpopular.
We call it Victorianism, when everything to do with sexuality is tabo. Freud first became aware of children's sexuality during his practice of psychotherapy. So he had an empirical basis for his claims. He had also seen how numerous forms of neurosis or psychological disorders could be traced back to conflicts during childhood. He gradually developed a type of therapy that we call the archeology of the soul.
An archeologist searches fot the traces of the distant past by digging through layers of cultural history. He may find knife from the fourteenth century and even deeper down perhaps an urn from the fifth century B.C. In a similar way, the psychoanlyst , with patient's help, can dig deep into the patient's mind and bring to light the experiences that could have caused the patient's psychological disorder, since accoroding to Freud, we store the memory of all our experiences deep inside us. The analyst perhaps can discover an unhappy experience that the patient has tried to suppress for many years, but which has nevertheless lain buried, gnawing away at the patient's resources. By bringing a' traumatic experience' into conscious mind and holding it upto the patient ' be done with it' and get well again.
When we came into the world, we live out our physical and mental needs quite directly and unashamedly. If we donot get milk, we cry, or maybe we cry if we have a wet daiper. we also give direct expression to our desire for physical contact and body warmth. Freud called this 'pleasur principle' in us the id. We carry the id, or or pleasure principle, with us into adulthood and adjust to our surroundings. We learn to regulate pleasur principle in relation to the' reality principle'. In Freud's terms , we develope, we develope an ego which has this regulative function. Even though we want or need something, we cannot just lie down and scream until we get what we want or need.
We may desire something very badly that the outside world will not accept. We may repress our desires. That means we try to push them away and forget about them.
However, Freud proposed, and worked with, a third element in the human mind . From infancy we are constantly faced with moral demands of our parents and of society. When we do anything wrong, our parents say ' Dont't do that!' or 'Naughty naughty, that's bad! Even when we are grown up, we retain the echo of such moral demands and judgements. It seems as though the world's moral expectations have become part of us. Freud called this is the superego .
Conscience is a component of the superego. But Freud claimed that the superego tells us when our desires themselves are bad or improper not least in case of erotic or sexual desores. And as we said earlier, Freud claimed that these improper desires already manifest themselves at an early stage of childhood.
Nowadays we know that infants like touching their sex organs. We can observe this on any beach. In Freud's time, this behaviour could result in a slap over the fingers of two or three year old, perhaps accompanied by the mother saying, 'Naughty!' or 'Don't do that!' or 'Keep your hands on the top of the covers!'. That's the begning of guilt feeling everything connected with sex organs and sexuality. Because this guilt feeling remains in the super ego, many people accoroding to Freud most people feel guilty about sex all their lives. At the same time he showed that sexual desires and needs are natural and vital for human beings. And thus, the stage is set for a lifelong conflict between desir and guilt.
Many patients that Freud experienced the conflict so acutely that they developed what Freud called neurosis. One of his many women patients, for example, was secretly love with her brother - in- law. When her sister died of an illness, she thought:' Now he is free to marry me!'. This thought was on course for a frontal collision with her superego, and was so monstrous an idea that she immediately repressed it, Freud tells us. In other words, she buried it deep in her unconscious. Freud wrote:' The young girl was ill and displaying several hysterical symptoms. When I began treating her it appeared she had thouroughly forgotten about the scene at her sister's bedside and the odious egoistic impulse had emerged in her. But during analysis she remembered it, and in a state of great agitation she reproduced the pathogenic moment and through this moment the treatment became cured.
So we can give a general description of human psyche. After many years of experience in trating patients, Freud concluded that the conscious constitutes only a small part of the human mind. The consciousis like the tip of the iceberg above sea level. Below the sea level or below the threshold of the conscious is the subconscious is the ' subconscious' or the unconscious

Dream interpretation

Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. In many of the ancient societies, including Egypt and Greece, dreaming was considered a supernatural communication or a means of divine intervention, whose message could be unravelled by those with certain powers. In modern times, various schools of psychology have offered theories about the meaning of dreams.




Early history




The ancient Greeks constructed temples they called Asclepieions, where sick people were sent to be cured. It was believed that cures would be effected through divine grace by incubating dreams within the confines of the temple. Dreams were also considered prophetic or omens of particular significance. In ancient Egypt, priests also acted as dream interpreters. Joseph and Daniel are recorded as having interpreted dreams sent from God, and indeed the Bible describes many incidents of dreams as divine revelation. Hieroglyphics depicting dreams and their interpretations are evident. Dreams have been held in considerable importance through history by most cultures.
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. One of the seminal works on the subject is The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.




Jung




Although not dismissing Freud's model of dream interpretation wholesale, Carl Jung believed Freud's notion of dreams as representations of unfulfilled wishes to be simplistic and naive (Freud returned the favor by publicly opining that Jung was fine for those who were looking for a prophet [Freud, "Introductory Lecutures"]). Jung was convinced that the scope of dream interpretation was larger, reflecting the richness and complexity of the entire unconscious, both personal and collective. Jung believed the psyche to be a self-regulating organism in which conscious attitudes were likely to be compensated for unconsciously (within the dream) by their opposites.
Jung believed that archetypes such as the animus, the anima, the shadow and others manifested themselves in dreams, as dream symbols or figures. Such figures could take the form of an old man, a young maiden or a giant spider as the case may be. Each represents an unconscious attitude that is largely hidden to the conscious mind. Although an integral part of the dreamer's psyche, these manifestations were largely autonomous and were perceived by the dreamer to be external personages. Acquaintance with the archetypes as manifested by these symbols serve to increase one's awareness of unconscious attitudes, integrating seemingly disparate parts of the psyche and contributing to the process of holistic self understanding he considered paramount Jung believed that material repressed by the conscious mind, postulated by Freud to comprise the unconscious, was similar to his own concept of the shadow, which in itself is only a small part of the unconscious.
He cautioned against blindly ascribing meaning to dream symbols without a clear understanding of the client's personal situation. Although he acknowledged the universality of archetypal symbols, he contrasted this with the concept of a sign — images having a one to one connotation with their meaning. His approach was to recognise the dynamism and fluidity that existed between symbols and their ascribed meaning. Symbols must be explored for their personal significance to the patient, instead of having the dream conform to some predetermined idea. This prevents dream analysis from devolving into a theoretical and dogmatic exercise that is far removed from the patient's own psychological state. In the service of this idea, he stressed the importance of "sticking to the image" — exploring in depth a client's association with a particular image. This may be contrasted with Freud's free associating which he believed was a deviation, from the salience of the image. He describes for example the image "deal table". One would expect the dreamer to have some associations with this image, and the professed lack of any perceived significance or familiarity whatsoever should make one suspicious. Jung would ask a patient to imagine the image as vividly as possible and to explain it to him as if he had no idea as to what a "deal table" was. Jung stressed the importance of context in dream analysis.
Jung stressed that the dream was not merely a devious puzzle invented by the unconscious to be deciphered, so that the 'true' causal factors behind it may be elicited. Dreams were not to serve as lie detectors, with which to reveal the insincerity behind conscious thought processes. Dreams, like the unconscious, had their own language. As representations of the unconscious, dream images have their own primacy and logic.
Jung believed that dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, irrational experiences and even telepathic visions.[3] Just as the psyche has a diurnal side which we experience as conscious life, it has an unconscious nocturnal side which we apprehend as dreamlike fantasy. Jung would argue that just as we do not doubt the importance of our conscious experience, then we ought not to second guess the value of our unconscious lives.

Hall



In 1953, Calvin S. Hall developed a theory of dreams in which dreaming is considered to be a cognitive process.[4] Hall argued that a dream was simply a thought or sequence of thoughts that occurred during sleep, and that dream images are visual representations of personal conceptions. For example, if one dreams of being attacked by friends, this may be a manifestation of fear of friendship; a more complicated example, which requires a cultural metaphor, is that a cat within a dream symbolizes a need to use one's intuition. For English speakers, it may suggest that the dreamer must recognise that there is "more than one way to skin a cat", or in other words, more than one way to do something.

Faraday



In the 1970s, Ann Faraday and others helped bring dream interpretation into the mainstream by publishing books on do-it-yourself dream interpretation and forming groups to share and analyze dreams. Faraday focused on the application of dreams to situations occurring in one's life. For instance, some dreams are warnings of something about to happen – e.g. a dream of failing an examination, if one is a student, may be a literal warning of unpreparedness. Outside of such context, it could relate to failing some other kind of test. Or it could even have a "punny" nature, e.g. that one has failed to examine some aspect of his life adequately.
Faraday noted that "one finding has emerged pretty firmly from modern research, namely that the majority of dreams seem in some way to reflect things that have preoccupied our minds during the previous day or two."

Primitive instinct rehearsal theory of dreaming

Two researchers have postulated that dreams have a biological function, where the content requires no analysis or interpretation, that content providing an automatic stimulation of the body's physiological functions underpinning the human instinctive behaviour. So dreams are part of the human, and animal, survival and development strategy.
Prof Antti Revonsuo (Turku university, Finland) has limited his ideas to those of ‘threat rehearsal’, where dreams exercise our primary self-defence instincts, and he has argued this cogently in a number of publications.


Keith Stevens extends the theory to all human instincts, including threats to self, threats to family members, pair bonding and reproduction, inquisitiveness and challenges, and the drive for personal superiority and tribal status. He categorises dreams, using a sample of 22,000 Internet submissions, into nine categories, demonstrating the universal commonality of dream content and instinct rehearsal. It is postulated that the dream function is automatic, in response to the content, exercising and stimulating the body chemistry and neurological activity that would come into play if the scenario occurred in real life, so that the dream does not have to be remembered to achieve its objective.
It is argued that, once a dreamer has experienced a threat in a dream (either to self or a family member), his ability to confront and overcome a real life threat is then enhanced, so that such dreams, in both humans or animals, are an aid to survival. The threat rehearsal can be specific, for instance, an attack from a savage dog, but it can also be general, in that the threat response physiology is activated and reinforced whilst dreaming.
For human reproduction, the theory states that dreams of pairing, bonding and mating stimulate the reflex to reproduce the species, with an emphasis on dreams that promote the principle of selection; the desire of the individual to find the best mate and to achieve the optimum genetic mixing. In that respect, the dream function conflicts with human values of fidelity and mating for life. Specifically, young women dream often of being pregnant and giving birth, overwhelmingly positive dreams that directly stimulate the urge to reproduce.
In terms of status, dreams of being superior to others, or conversely to being inferior, come in the two extremes. They stimulate the dreamer’s determination to improve their status within their immediate human hierarchy, either through the positive physiology of success, or the negative physiology of failure. Hence, dreaming promotes competition, the survival of the best and fittest, and a steady advance of the human species.
Finally, other dreams stimulate the determination to explore and enquire, through the extremes of exhilarating dream achievements (positive physiology) or frustrating obstructions and barriers. The latter stimulates a determination not to give up in a quest, so that, in life, the individual and the species move forward. For the dreaming wildebeest, it may be a rich pasture over the hill; for the human dreamer it may be splitting the atom.