I agree with you that different dreams are produced by and signify different things; what I took away from my conversation with Dave is that demanding a concrete connection between dreams and core daylight concerns as a prerequisite for holding dreams as meaningful may be a mistaken demand.

I have much respect for psychology and psychologists in general, including Freud and his contemporaries. I just think that, as far as explaining dreams is concerned, it’s like reading literature: just because one person has a particular interpretation and another person has a different interpretation doesn’t mean that one is more ‘correct’. Maybe if you have the same ‘motif’ occur again and again in a dream you can pin it down to a sort of inner conflict. I don’t know; besides not knowing much about historical theories in psychology, I also don’t know much about dreams in general—what types of dreams people have, whether different sorts of people have had the same types of dreams, the contexts in which people have seen recurring motifs in dreams, et cetera.

But saying, for example, that ‘tall buildings signify such-and-such, a burning tree signifies such-and-such’—I think it’s wrong to generalize like that, because we know that even colours have different meanings in different cultures, so holding the meaning of specific symbols as universally constant across individual imaginations almost veers into pseudoscience like astrology, numerology, etc: straining to find connections in the coincidental.

It was amusing to read your post about nightmares and more so the discussion about it.
In your story, you avoided a more close explanation of your dreams so that means for me that you just keep it private.

As to your discussion:

If you do not mind my chiming in then I would say that I keep psychology a true science.
Even though, I too think that Freud’s obsession with “phallos” and “motherfucking” were very much farfetched, he still was the creator of a modern science.

I too, have dreams, either when sleeping or when awake

I learned to keep my conclusions at bay.
Sometimes, I was able to make connection between previous happenings and certain elements of a dream but I alwasy thought it superfluous to think about it seriously. Psychology is too young and just at the beginning in the exploration of human soul to draw hasty conclusions.

And psychologists themselves are mostly not up to their own profession, as well.
American psychologists are the worst, in my opinion, because for them, it is a living so they should make it to look big

I am very scientifically minded ( a bit by bit man) but at the same time very sensitive.
This may seem as far from each other as if they had their position at the opposite ends of a rod.

Though, if you twist the rod around in a circle the two opposite ends will just meet and coexist.

Also, I am a big believer of the Occam’s Razor principle.

If I feel the bounderies of my capacity in understanding things, there I will stop.
Otherwise, there would only be a burned out field of dilemmas in my soul.

I understand frustration, the pain of soul, fear and uncertainty.

And I advocate suffer, endurance and trust. (all in one)

Well, I was a bit farfeched by myself, too

For the sake of correctness, I must state that I do know good American psychologist though.
Dr. M. Scott Peck, whose book - The Road Less Travelled - is just a perfect example of the real science of psychology.

Also, there was a really interesting science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem in the seventies. There, he described a scientific experiment where complete human souls were recorded on vinyl-like medium and just like the turntables, pickups read the tracks that represented individual lifes. Sometimes the pickups jumped erroneously and gave some kind of prescience if they jumped forward or resulted in some kind of ESP effect if they jumped to another individuals disk. Kind of, they dreamed one anothers life as the whole setup may be considered a dream, as well.

Sometimes, we know that we were dreaming because we ate too much.
Sometimes, we can idenfify some elements of real happenings in our dreams.
Sometimes, we just do not know what and why we dream but more or less we are somehow conscious participants in our dreams. That, I experienced many times. In some way, we are the directors of our own “dream-films”.

But in the morning I wake up and I always choose to stay on the ground firmly with both foot.

Dave:
btw, methink you badly underestimate the important of dreams and subconscious expression…
Firas:
do tell. i mean, coming across a soft-spoken woman in a frankenstein mask? not even a freud-jung mindmeld can say that signifies anything sane.
Dave:
if dreams were sane and transparent metaphors for obvious daylight though processes… they would no longer be your subconscious.
Firas:
So you *can’t* relate between a subconscious thought and conscious happenings? i thought that was the whole point (hidden desire, primal concerns, mixes of past happenings and future anxiety)
Firas:
er, whole point among the ‘dreams are signals of subconscious’ camp
Dave:
people tend to stupidly equate “subconscious” with “oh gee, I hadn’t thought of that on first thought”. The whole point of subconscious is that you don’t really think of it… without getting all cheap sci-fi on you, the mere fact that you’d immediately consider a “rationale” for certain dreams, is usually a clear sign this is not coming from your subconscious, but you very conscious self trying to auto-suggest something…
Firas:
i guess i’m too turned off by the whole history of moron therapists planting fake suggestions under hypnosis in their ‘repressed memory’ patients
Dave:
well, the whole thing is that, in order to stand a chance, you’d either need to be incredibly scientifically minded and cold as ice, or helped by a neutral third party.
Dave:
a middle-ground is to write down all experiences and trying to read them alone or with somebody else, later on…
Dave:
don’t get me wrong, Freud and Jung were both libidinous nature freaks… doesn’t mean they were wrong… from a pure neuroscience POV, you’d be very narrow-minded not to admit a correlation between your brain’s underlying activity and dreams..
Firas:
like i said in the entry, i’m a political science person, not a psychology person, so my ’subconscious-bashing’ is mostly uninformed :p
Dave:
I tend to despise psy (and psy scholars most of all) even more than you possibly could.
Dave:
yet, I guess I somewhat agree with the objective neuroscientific approach. which meets with psy on a few points there.
Firas:
i like psych for what it has given us in terms of things like cognitive behavioural therapy as a substitute (or complement) for treating every issue with meds, etc. so its ‘hard science’ practitioners definitely add to knowledge, but its philosophers, as you say, are out there
Dave:
from a purely “rational” POV (i.e. not based on the libidinous elucubrations of some cigar-smoking schlock), one can easily infer the existence of different “layers” of consciousness… that’s the whole idea behind most of neuroscience and cog. sci.
Dave:
philosophers are on the fence.
Firas:
oh i definitely don’t disagree that there *is* a subconscious–just doubt the benefit of groping around in it to make sense of things
Dave:
some, like Freud, if one can call him so, have joyously jumped off the fence and into the realm of unfounded claims…
Dave:
but take Wittgenstein, or other math/logic/cog.sci guys: the whole holistic approach to consciousness requires the existence of lower layer such as the subconsious…
Dave:
one can simply view “subconscious” as one of the layer between your purely biological organism and the holistic representation of your brain i.e. your conscious…
Firas:
like what’s called ’soul’ in common usage?
Dave:
in that, listening to it is about as important as listening to the hum of your computer’s fan might be, if you want to keep running software for a long time…
Dave:
err… “soul” is a much murkier concept… unless you come from Memphis and can sing across 5 octaves.