A Provisional Approach to Dream Interpretation

Using five specimen dreams

Dreams are among the strangest aspects of the human experience. They appear during our deepest moments of rest and reclusion, seemingly out of nowhere, transporting us to a kaleidoscopic world of images which defies explanation. They are everyday, or should we say everynight, miracles.

Despite the mystifying nature of dreams, a reliable approach to dream interpretation remains inaccessible. We frankly have no idea what to make of our dreams. Are they prophetic? Do they show us what’s important, or rather what’s unimportant? Do they mean anything at all?

In this article, we’ll develop a basic approach to dream interpretation which focuses on the dream’s connection to the previous day, and use this method to analyze five specimen dreams which I had over the past two weeks.

A simple starting-point

Questions about its scientific validity aside, Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams remains the most impactful contribution to our understanding of dreams. In the first paragraph of this monumental text, the following claim is made:

Every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning.