Freud focuses on symbolism, symbolism in dreams played a major role in understanding, this gave the dreamer a better understanding of there dream and left no room for what this symbol meant: “Symbols are stable translations, they realize to some extent the ideal of the ancient as well as the popular interpretation of dreams, from which, with our technique, we had departed widely.” Another analysis is he claims we have a ‘manifest dream’, this is the part of the dream that we choose to remember. The ‘latent dream’ is where there is hidden meaning. Also along with symbolism, is the sexual symbol on our dreams, like an oven represents a child in the womb and trees and umbrellas can be related to male genitalia. Children and siblings in dreams can be seen as animals.
A criticism on Freud’s work claims, “We are not, aware of everything that is going on in our minds, only that we are aware of little that is going on in our minds, only a small portion of our mental life is accessible to us.” We don’t know what these dreams means, which relates to the ‘manifest dream’, were the unconscious disguises the dream so we don’t know and never will know the inner meaning. Many people criticize Freud’s theory and say it’s “ridiculous”, “pencils and cigars as penises is simply absurd.” I believe this in trying to relate my dreams to what goes on in my life just doesn’t make sense. I try to just think of my dreams as media, just made imagery from my mind, something to keep me sleeping throughout the night, ‘sleep entertainment’, much like the entertainment we watch on television. If I dream of a an oven and baking, does this relate to birth (bun in oven), I don’t think so, I use my oven everyday to cook “an oven is just an oven,” or as the criticism of Freud says, “ Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
When fairytales plays a role with dreams it has been said that a king and queen can be related to one’s mother and father. A person looks to their parents as these powerful fairytale characters in their dreams. I have to partly disagree because i grew up without parents and it’s hard for me to make a king and queen symbolize parents when I had my grandmother raise me. As for my daughter, who has grown up with the ‘norm’ mother and father, she may dream of kings and queens and relate this to my husband and I. Freud says that dreams have narrative structure just like the movies we see, so this is why he believes they have so much meaning just as the shows we watch. The