Dreaming
Dreams
When you begin to reflect on the nature of dreams, you feel like you’ve been placed into another world. You feel like you’re in the midst of an ocean full of so many mysterious phenomena because everything is extremely encrypted.
Nightmares
Nightmares seem to have some connection to stress, fear of failure not to mention repressed traumatic experiences of the past, especially when, for instance, terrifying images before exams are experienced by the dreamer as real, anxiety-inducing situations where the outcome remains uncertain. The fear of falling into a deep abyss or of being in a state of free fall, with no way of knowing if you’ll end up landing safely, represents a common theme. Similarly, dreams of being pursued and threatened by evil people, with no guarantee of survival, are often accompanied by this same kind of fear. Freud stated that "dreams are wish fulfillments," and that "repressed desires and drives from the unconscious" enter into consciousness during sleep, triggering a wide range of emotions. Dreaming has also been described as being a kind of repair shop for the soul, where unconscious issues stemming from everyday life are processed. Carl Jung regarded dreams as being "valuable symbolic messages from the unconscious that serve the self-regulation of the psyche." In other words, what we unconsciously think about in everyday life but cannot process ends up being made more acceptable to the psyche in the form of dreams. Nightmares seem to serve as a kind of warning signal from the psyche whenever we are feeling overwhelmed by issues that occur in ordinary life.
Wishful Thinking
In the case of wishful thinking, we long for how wonderful things might be if only life were a wishful dream, where everything would run smoothly without any resistance or any moral obstacles. Everything would happen so easily and harmoniously. Wishful thinking seems to entail positive visions, as Lenin himself said, "without dreams, there is no revolution." In wishful thinking, our self-esteem and our propensity for action find themselves strengthened. We experience ourselves as being capable agents or as shapers of the future. Material desires, such as winning the lottery, the fulfillment of sensual desires in terms of love and sex, personal recognition and a positive self-presentation seem to find a place of their own within wishful thinking too.
Image: Unsplash: Marissa Rodriguez, 2026
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