NUR 640

David Wallace

Module 2 Discussion: Dream Interpretation

Dreams are interesting to interpret due to how they can possibly help patients and practitioners understand why they feel the way they do. The average person probably does not understand that dreams are interpretations of experiences that our brain has changed into a way that is digestible for us. According to Corey and company in Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy, the aspects of a dream that are hidden or symbolic with unconscious motives or fears are considered the latent content (Corey, 2023). This is the content that a therapist will try to unpack and decipher. Your dream turns this into something called manifest content, which is your unconscious minds way of creating a more acceptable form of information to dream about (Corey, 2023). Free association seems to be the most effective way to unpack the latent content of one’s dreams and explore the association with the specific dream. This dream was one of significant during the early years as an adolescent. During this discussion, I will create a detailed explanation of a dream that has stuck to memory as being very memorable without a good understanding why.

When I was a young child, there was a reoccurring dream of me being in one of my classrooms. The specific age, I cannot recall. However, this seemed to occur during the later years of elementary school. I remember specifically being in the back middle of the classroom with approximately 8 students in front of me with two rows on both sides of me. The teacher’s desk was to the front left and the door was to the front right, with respects to the students. This specific teacher was the kind who would tell all of us, “If 70 percent of the class understands the subject, I am moving on”. I was often within the 30% who did not understand what was going on. The white board did not have any information on it. Every student was talking to each other and not paying attention to me. Nobody seemed to notice me. It was like I was not there. However, the biggest issue was an impending fear of needing to leave the classroom but finding it hard to do so. What I noticed was the fact that I was not completely clothed.

Our uniform consisted of blue khaki dress pants, white socks, brown or black dress shoes, a long sleeve buttoned down shirt with a school tie. We had the option of wearing an embroidered school sweater or an embroidered sweater vest. However, in this dream, I only had my khaki pants on and one sock. I was not wearing my shirt, my tie, missing one sock and was not wearing my shoes. My goal was to get out of the classroom before the teacher or any of the kids noticed me. It seemed impossible to leave the classroom in this situation. If recalling correctly, I was able to get to the front of the classroom without having anybody notice me, to only get stuck behind the podium and not be able to get to the door and escape. I would always end up waking up being stuck there. It is important to note that this was a recurring dream. Sometimes, when I would have this dream, I would get noticed after I made it to the front podium and people would laugh. This would cause me to wake up and notice this dreadful feeling of disgust in myself. I would feel an overwhelming amount of self-doubt and

uncomfortably in friendships that I had with some of the students that saw me, especially the teacher.

From this, interpreting the meaning can be hard for the one who had the dream. This could be an unconscious thought that can only be interpreted in the form of imaginative expression. According to Calvin Hall, Dreaming is simply thinking during sleep, but that the concepts of dreams are expressed as visual images as opposed to waking thoughts (Skidmore, 2018). Then, if this was just a thought, why would it have been so recurring while also causing more or less distress depending on the outcome of the dream? This dream could be fears or problems that stem from a combination of suppressed childhood experiences. This could give me the opportunity, as Clara Hill points out with her cognitive experiential model, to utilize my dream as a therapeutic tool to since I have now bypassed my psychological defenses and gained more genuine self-awareness (Skidmore, 2018). Overall, dreams can grant us the opportunity to aid in the understanding of our patient’s history in a way that bypasses the struggle they have due to psychological defenses.

Stacy Weiner

Module 2 Discussion

We all have dreams, and the dreams we can remember or have an impact on us can have an underlying meaning. Dreams can be interpreted as feelings and fears that have not yet been acknowledged or verbalized by us, and often, the feelings of our dreams when we awake, stay with us. Sometimes those feelings are peaceful, and others, such as in my case, are feelings of sadness. When I look back at the dreams I had in my childhood, I realize they take on even greater significance, since children have an intuition of feelings that have not yet been understood by them. One of the most vivid dreams, or I suppose I should say nightmares, I experienced in my childhood was around the age of 12, which occurred months before I knew that my mother was seriously ill.

In the dream, my family and I were all together in a hospital waiting room. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening—no doctors bursting in, no talking, and no apparent reason for us to be there. However, the one thing that stood out about the waiting room was the atmosphere it exuded. It all felt heavy, quiet, and still. Everyone looked very sad, almost to the point of exhaustion, as if we were waiting for some bad news that we all knew was on its way anyway. Nobody was talking, and I cannot forget the overwhelming feelings of sadness and depression that I felt during this dream. Even after I woke up, this feeling remained with me. I’m not sure

how this dream affected me the way it did because nothing like this was happening in my real life.

Approximately six months later, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. My mother’s illness went on for two years before she passed away. After all that had happened, my dream became much more significant to me. What could this mean? For years, I pondered on this dream, and although my dream was not a prediction for me personally, it is as if my mind was already dealing with my fear before my conscious mind realized what was occurring.

Freudian psychodynamic theory would interpret the following dream as a manifestation of unconscious anxiety about attachment and the fear of loss (the loss of my mother). Freud (1917) thought that dreams were a way of giving meaning to experiences that were too overwhelming or confusing to confront in a conscious state of awareness. As a child, I may have been attuned to subtle shifts in emotions, such as stress, vulnerability, or unvoiced concern, though I was not conscious of them. The hospital environment in the dream is a symbolic representation of illness, powerlessness, the threat of death, and the collective sadness of my family is a manifestation of the unconscious fear of a potential loss of a basic attachment object, that of my mother. Modern studies in psychodynamics have found that Freud’s concept of the manifestation of emotional concerns in dreams about attachment, illness, and loss holds true (Scalabrini et al., 2021).

The act of waiting in the dream is also important. Waiting is about powerlessness and a lack of control, and this is a typical experience for children when something is not right but cannot be understood or changed. The silence in the dream reflects an emotional experience of uncertainty and fear that had not yet found expression in words. Instead of working through this experience in words, it was expressed in a way that was emotionally true, even if it did not make literal sense at the time.

A Jungian interpretation provides an additional level of understanding. According to Carl Jung, dreams are symbolic communications from the unconscious that help people prepare to cope with meaningful emotional events. The hospital may be understood or interpreted as a place where transitions and vulnerabilities are experienced, where I had to face hard truths about emotions. The picture that emerged was of my family together, which indicated a collective experience and, by extension, the significance of being together during moments of fear and the comfort I find in my family. According to Jungian psychology, dreams are believed to be essentially compensatory and to provide a way for the psyche to begin processing emotions that have not yet reached conscious awareness (Roesler, 2020). It is possible that my dream was my psyche preparing me for loss much earlier than I was consciously aware that it was a possibility.

In conclusion, this dream illustrates the importance of dreams and their meanings, particularly in relation to a child. No matter how one interprets Freud’s views on the fear response or Jung’s views on symbolism and emotional readiness, it is important to note that this dream expressed a realization about vulnerability and loss that I was not emotionally prepared to express. This is a testament to the idea that a dream can provide a profound insight into the emotional landscape, not random or arbitrary.

David Wallace

Module 2 Discussion: Dream Interpretation

Dreams are interesting to interpret due to how they can possibly help patients and practitioners understand why they feel the way they do. The average person probably does not understand that dreams are interpretations of experiences that our brain has changed into a way that is digestible for us. According to Corey and company in Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy, the aspects of a dream that are hidden or symbolic with unconscious motives or fears are considered the latent content (Corey, 2023). This is the content that a therapist will try to unpack and decipher. Your dream turns this into something called manifest content, which is your unconscious minds way of creating a more acceptable form of information to dream about (Corey, 2023). Free association seems to be the most effective way to unpack the latent content of one’s dreams and explore the association with the specific dream. This dream was one of significant during the early years as an adolescent. During this discussion, I will create a detailed explanation of a dream that has stuck to memory as being very memorable without a good understanding why.

When I was a young child, there was a reoccurring dream of me being in one of my classrooms. The specific age, I cannot recall. However, this seemed to occur during the later years of elementary school. I remember specifically being in the back middle of the classroom with approximately 8 students in front of me with two rows on both sides of me. The teacher’s desk was to the front left and the door was to the front right, with respects to the students. This specific teacher was the kind who would tell all of us, “If 70 percent of the class understands the subject, I am moving on”. I was often within the 30% who did not understand what was going on. The white board did not have any information on it. Every student was talking to each other and not paying attention to me. Nobody seemed to notice me. It was like I was not there. However, the biggest issue was an impending fear of needing to leave the classroom but finding it hard to do so. What I noticed was the fact that I was not completely clothed.

Our uniform consisted of blue khaki dress pants, white socks, brown or black dress shoes, a long sleeve buttoned down shirt with a school tie. We had the option of wearing an embroidered school sweater or an embroidered sweater vest. However, in this dream, I only had my khaki pants on and one sock. I was not wearing my shirt, my tie, missing one sock and was not wearing my shoes. My goal was to get out of the classroom before the teacher or any of the kids noticed me. It seemed impossible to leave the classroom in this situation. If recalling correctly, I was able to get to the front of the classroom without having anybody notice me, to only get stuck behind the podium and not be able to get to the door and escape. I would always end up waking up being stuck there. It is important to note that this was a recurring dream. Sometimes, when I would have this dream, I would get noticed after I made it to the front podium and people would laugh. This would cause me to wake up and notice this dreadful feeling of disgust in myself. I would feel an overwhelming amount of self-doubt and

uncomfortably in friendships that I had with some of the students that saw me, especially the teacher.

From this, interpreting the meaning can be hard for the one who had the dream. This could be an unconscious thought that can only be interpreted in the form of imaginative expression. According to Calvin Hall, Dreaming is simply thinking during sleep, but that the concepts of dreams are expressed as visual images as opposed to waking thoughts (Skidmore, 2018). Then, if this was just a thought, why would it have been so recurring while also causing more or less distress depending on the outcome of the dream? This dream could be fears or problems that stem from a combination of suppressed childhood experiences. This could give me the opportunity, as Clara Hill points out with her cognitive experiential model, to utilize my dream as a therapeutic tool to since I have now bypassed my psychological defenses and gained more genuine self-awareness (Skidmore, 2018). Overall, dreams can grant us the opportunity to aid in the understanding of our patient’s history in a way that bypasses the struggle they have due to psychological defenses.

Stacy Weiner

Module 2 Discussion

We all have dreams, and the dreams we can remember or have an impact on us can have an underlying meaning. Dreams can be interpreted as feelings and fears that have not yet been acknowledged or verbalized by us, and often, the feelings of our dreams when we awake, stay with us. Sometimes those feelings are peaceful, and others, such as in my case, are feelings of sadness. When I look back at the dreams I had in my childhood, I realize they take on even greater significance, since children have an intuition of feelings that have not yet been understood by them. One of the most vivid dreams, or I suppose I should say nightmares, I experienced in my childhood was around the age of 12, which occurred months before I knew that my mother was seriously ill.

In the dream, my family and I were all together in a hospital waiting room. Nothing out of the ordinary was happening—no doctors bursting in, no talking, and no apparent reason for us to be there. However, the one thing that stood out about the waiting room was the atmosphere it exuded. It all felt heavy, quiet, and still. Everyone looked very sad, almost to the point of exhaustion, as if we were waiting for some bad news that we all knew was on its way anyway. Nobody was talking, and I cannot forget the overwhelming feelings of sadness and depression that I felt during this dream. Even after I woke up, this feeling remained with me. I’m not sure

how this dream affected me the way it did because nothing like this was happening in my real life.

Approximately six months later, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. My mother’s illness went on for two years before she passed away. After all that had happened, my dream became much more significant to me. What could this mean? For years, I pondered on this dream, and although my dream was not a prediction for me personally, it is as if my mind was already dealing with my fear before my conscious mind realized what was occurring.

Freudian psychodynamic theory would interpret the following dream as a manifestation of unconscious anxiety about attachment and the fear of loss (the loss of my mother). Freud (1917) thought that dreams were a way of giving meaning to experiences that were too overwhelming or confusing to confront in a conscious state of awareness. As a child, I may have been attuned to subtle shifts in emotions, such as stress, vulnerability, or unvoiced concern, though I was not conscious of them. The hospital environment in the dream is a symbolic representation of illness, powerlessness, the threat of death, and the collective sadness of my family is a manifestation of the unconscious fear of a potential loss of a basic attachment object, that of my mother. Modern studies in psychodynamics have found that Freud’s concept of the manifestation of emotional concerns in dreams about attachment, illness, and loss holds true (Scalabrini et al., 2021).

The act of waiting in the dream is also important. Waiting is about powerlessness and a lack of control, and this is a typical experience for children when something is not right but cannot be understood or changed. The silence in the dream reflects an emotional experience of uncertainty and fear that had not yet found expression in words. Instead of working through this experience in words, it was expressed in a way that was emotionally true, even if it did not make literal sense at the time.

A Jungian interpretation provides an additional level of understanding. According to Carl Jung, dreams are symbolic communications from the unconscious that help people prepare to cope with meaningful emotional events. The hospital may be understood or interpreted as a place where transitions and vulnerabilities are experienced, where I had to face hard truths about emotions. The picture that emerged was of my family together, which indicated a collective experience and, by extension, the significance of being together during moments of fear and the comfort I find in my family. According to Jungian psychology, dreams are believed to be essentially compensatory and to provide a way for the psyche to begin processing emotions that have not yet reached conscious awareness (Roesler, 2020). It is possible that my dream was my psyche preparing me for loss much earlier than I was consciously aware that it was a possibility.

In conclusion, this dream illustrates the importance of dreams and their meanings, particularly in relation to a child. No matter how one interprets Freud’s views on the fear response or Jung’s views on symbolism and emotional readiness, it is important to note that this dream expressed a realization about vulnerability and loss that I was not emotionally prepared to express. This is a testament to the idea that a dream can provide a profound insight into the emotional landscape, not random or arbitrary.