dreams

Even interpretations based on depth-psychological dream theories often meet with some success; this despite the fact that their assumptions are purely speculative, while conclusions drawn from those assumptions, such as the posited relationship between "latent" and "manifest" dream contents, have no basis in fact.Experience teaches, by the way, that patients who assume a observer's stance while dreaming, distancing themselves from active participation with others, require especially stubborn, persistent therapists.Positive declarations of what something "means" tend to force the therapist into the role of authority figure, at the same time thrusting the patient into subordinate, infantile behavior.Both Freud's original "depth-psychological" dream theory and all others that have imitated it in defining dreams as attempts at self-deception inevitably end up in a series of logical impasses...Notwithstanding the immense expenditure of theoretical labor in past decades, today - three-quarters of a century later - critical opinion is increasingly eroding depth-psychological theories of dream interpretation. The most skeptical of these critics come from the ranks of the analysts themselves.Because the natural scientific approach from which all depth-psychological dream theories spring is gradually relinquishing its absolute hold on the human imagination, in the future more and more patients will refuse to pass blindly over the inconsistencies hidden in traditional dream theories. Increasingly, they will defend themselves against depth-psychological dream interpretation...The dream reinterpretations posited by depth-psychological theories are not just theoretically untenable; they also prohibit the therapist from gaining the understanding of the dreaming he needs if he is to help the patient.
I wept in my dreams. I dreamed you lay in the grave;I awoke, and the tearsstill poured down my cheeks.I wept in my dreams,I dreamed you had left me;I awoke and I went on weeping long and bitterly.I wept in my dreams,I dreamed you were still kind to me;I awoke, and stillthe flow of my tears streams on.
You make your own dream. That's the Beatles' story, isn't it? That's Yoko's story. That's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself. That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.
"Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now,Thus much let me avow--You are not wrong who deemThat my days have been a dream;Yet if hope has flown awayIn a night, or in a day,In a vision, or in none,Is it therefore the less gone?All that we see or seemIs but a dream within a dream."
In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings, utterly vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in, so to speak, upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one’s dreams if one is not to be troubled by them; there is a way of separating one’s dreams from one’s life which so often produces good results that I ask myself whether one ought not, at all costs, to try it, simply as a preventive, just as certain surgeons make out that we ought, to avoid the risk of appendicitis later on, to have all our appendices taken out when we are children.