On average, we spend about one third of our lives sleeping. During a portion of that time, we are also dreaming. While asleep, we can gain rest and refreshment for our hard day of work. Essentially, dreams are our method of relaxing and letting our minds drift away into a distant world. Dreams help us to understand ourselves giving that we know how to interpret them. We can find out deep secrets or reveal concealed feelings towards something just by analyzing a dream correctly.

When we think about dreams we must wonder why they occur. There are several explanations for this question. It is a fact that we all must sleep. We constantly go through cycles of sleep and wakefulness. During each cycle, our minds must be active. Obviously when we are awake, we are using our minds for various actions. When we are asleep, it is not as obvious how our minds are

To this day, dream interpretation has not reached a culmination. Most importantly, Freud felt that dreams served as the primary channel for getting information from the unconscious to the conscious. Because of the fact that Freud lived during an era where sexual repression was norm, he concluded that dreams almost always were sexual in nature. Nevertheless, Freud provided a path in which all dream interpreters began to follow. As Sigmund Freud once said, "The dream is the royal road to the unconscious."

Freud believed that dreams acted as a form of fantasy, a defense mechanism against the unacceptable urges. Fantasy allows the individual to act out events in the imagination, which can satiate the urges that are repressed. Freud theorized that dreams were a subconscious manifestation of these repressed urges, and that they served mainly to satisfy sexual and aggressive tendencies. The interpretation of dreams has come to be one of the aspects of Freud's studies which are most popularized, as he took the importance of dreams far more seriously than many of those who came before him or studied after him. Yet, Freud still offered some symbols as constants, however, and felt that all people incorporated these symbols and their meanings into dreams. For a complete listing of these symbols, on may look to Chapter 10 of his primer on psychoanalytic study, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. However, the emphasis on sexual imagery is a majority of this text. This is perhaps one of his most assaulted theories. It states that there is a constant among all individuals that "object a = meaning a," but also that there is such an absurd amount of these sexual symbols that a

Some common words found in the essay are:
Lectures Psychoanalysis, Dream Analysis, Sigmund Freud, Nevertheless Freud, dream analysis, greek philosophers, interpretation dreams, id ego, minds active, sigmund freud, analysis dream, analysis dreams, freud believed,
Approximate Word count = 1137
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)