Myth 20: Researchers Have Demonstrated that Dreams Possess Symbolic Meaning

Dream dictionaries are books that help people explain the symbolic meaning to their dreams. These books promise to change your life very quickly. Websites exist for this purpose, so do software programs. Dream interpretation is good business. Unfortunately, it’s all bullshit. 

Why do people have these beliefs? Some movies and television shows capitalize on the popular belief that dreams have symbolic meanings. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano’s friend appeared to Tony in a dream as a talking fish. You see, “fish” is slang for informant, so Tony suspected that that his friend was an FBI informant. 

How many people people believe that dreams have symbolic meaning?

..the results of a recent Newsweek poll revealed that 43% of Americans believe that dreams reflect unconscious desires (Adler, 2006). Moreover, researchers who conducted surveys in India, South Korea, and the United States discovered that 56% to 74% of people across the three cultures believed that dreams can reveal hidden truths (Morewedge & Norton, 2009). In a second study, these investigators found that people were more likely to say they would

avoid flying if they imagined they dreamt of a plane crashing on a flight they planned to take than if they had the conscious thought of a plane crashing, or received a governmental warning about a high risk of a terrorist attack on an airline.

These findings show that people take their dreams seriously, and see dream symbols as prophecies of the future and as portals for personal insight. 

Most psychiatrists (more than two thirds) are not Freudians. Most psychologists (More than 85 percent) are not Freudians. The belief that dreams have real-life value comes from the Freudian tradition – from Freud and his followers. They think that dreams, if they are well interpreted, can surrender the innermost secrets of the psyche. 

According to Freud, dreams are the via regia—the royal road to understanding the unconscious mind —and contain “the psychology of the neurosis in a nutshell” (Freud in a letter to Fleiss, 1897, in Jones, 1953, p. 355). Freud argued that the ego’s defenses are relaxed during dreaming, leading repressed id impulses to knock at the gates of consciousness (for Freud, the “ego” was the part of the personality that interfaces with reality, the “id” the part of the personality that contains our sexual and aggressive drives). 

But these raging impulses never become aware. They are instead transformed by “dreamwork” into symbols that disguise forbidden and hidden wishes – this keeps the dreamer from waking up. This censorship is necessary so that sexual and aggressive material does not erupt onto the surface of awareness.  

Dream interpretation is one of the linchpins of the psychoanalytic method. Yet according to Freudians, dreams don’t surrender their secrets without a struggle. The analyst’s task is to go beyond the surface details of the dream, called the “manifest content,” and interpret the “latent content,” the deeper, cloaked, symbolicThe analyst’s task is to go beyond the surface details of the dream, called the “manifest content,” and interpret the “latent content,” the deeper, cloaked, symbolic meaning of the dream. 

A scary monster in a dream (manifest content) may symbolize a threat by a boss that is feared (latent content). Dream symbols are generated from a wealth of life experiences, including very recent events (a day before). On this point, Freud was correct. But he adds childhood experiences to the list. 

Freud thought that dream interpretation should be guided by free associations made by the patient themselves to different parts of the dream. Even though Freud didn’t think that dream symbols don’t have a one-to-one relationship to psychologically meaningful objects, people, or events, he came very close to violating this rule by interpreting the symbolic meaning of dreams with little to no input from his patients. 

For example, in his landmark book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud reported that even though a woman generated no associations to the dream image of a straw hat with the middle piece bent upwards and the side piece hanging downwards, he suggested that the hat symbolized a man’s genitals. Moreover, Freud noted that penetration into narrow spaces and opening locked doors frequently symbolize sexual activity, whereas hair cutting, the loss of teeth, and beheading frequently symbolize castration. So despite his cautions, Freud treated many dream symbols as essentially universal.

Freud’s writing paved the way for an industry devoted to dream analysis to emerge with no signs of dying off. But most contemporary scientists reject the idea that certain dream images carry universal symbolic meaning. A close examination of dream reports reveals that many dreams don’t seem to be disguised by symbols. In the early stages of sleep, before our eyes go into REM, most of our dreams reflect the daily concerns and activities that occupy our minds. 

During REM sleep, our highly activated brains produce dreams that are sometimes illogical and charged with emotion (Foulkes, 1962; Hobson, Pace-Schott, & Stickgold, 2000). Does this occur because repressed material from the id somehow escapes censorship? Psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson doesn’t think so. In fact, Hobson’s theory of dreaming, which has garnered considerable scientific support, is so radically different from Freud’s that some have called him “the anti-Freud” (Rock, 2004). Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, at Harvard’s Laboratory of Neurophy-siology, Hobson, along with Robert McCarley, developed the activation synthesis theory, which ties dreams to brain activity rather than the symbolic expression of unconscious wishes (Hobson & McCarley, 1977).

But Freud may have been right on two important points: Our daily thoughts and feelings can influence our dreams, and emotion plays a powerful role while dreaming. But just because the brain’s emotional centers become supercharged, and logical thinking shuts down doesn’t mean that dreams are attempts to fulfill the wishes of the id. Nor does it mean that dreams use symbols to disguise their true meaning.


If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.

"A gilded No is more satisfactory than a dry yes" - Gracian