Dreams have fascinated Man from the
beginning of time. Some of us may claim have not dreamt
for a long time, but the truth is, everyone has about
four or five bouts of REM sleep every night. However,
if the sleeper is not awakened while the dream is
in progress, then the dreams are lost into the depths
of our unconsciousness forever. An experiment carried
out by yours truly has proved this for a fact-strangely,
we will remember the dreams that were interrupted.
Since ancient times, people have regarded dreams as
important, using them to prophesy the future or decide
whether to go to war. In this century, Sigmund Freud
proposed a very influential theory about dreaming.
He said that dreams arise out of inner conflicts between
unconscious desires (primarily sexual ones) and prohibitions
against acting out these desires, which we learn from
society. He called dreams "the royal road to
the unconsciousness", because they are one of
the few ways we have of allowing the unconscious to
be expressed. According to Freud, although all dreams
represent unfulfilled wishes, their contents are disguised
and expressed symbolically. The latent content of
the dream (from the Latin word for "hidden")
is transformed into the manifest content (the actual
story line or plot). Taken at face value, the manifest
content is innocuous, but a knowledgeable psychoanalyst
can supposedly recognize unconscious desires disguised
by symbols in a dream.
Foreword
