Children's Dreams: A Novel Interpretation

Freud's seminal work on dreams seems like a comfortable theoretical habit. Freud established our modern understanding of dreams as a form of symbolic disguise of repressed unconscious content seeking its expression when its warden; the ego, is off duty. Given the Freudian legacy, dreaming, at least as a psychological phenomenon inviting the researcher to find meaningful regularities in mental content seems a closed case. Is it? This chapter presents a meeting point between theory and practice that aims to examine the Freudian dogma. In the chapter we introduce a new interpretation of children's dreams. Basically, while Freud believed that we dream in order to sleep, a rivaling hypothesis by Bion was that we sleep in order to dream. According to Bion, dreaming is necessary for mental functioning and growth through the transformation of unstructured, fragmented, and emotionally loaded particles of experience into a "digestible" and meaningful form. The way this transformation is conducted is far from trivial. Our work suggests that dreams involve a process of "symmetrization," described by Matte Blanco as the hallmark of the unconscious. This process of symmetrization, in which the "I" is equated with threatening imaginary beings such as monsters, is a process through which the "self" emerges as a hypothetical and ever-changing pattern. This interpretation follows C. S. Peirce's idea of the self as an invented construct not in the sense that it emerges ex nihilo, but in the sense that it is hypothesized as an explanatory tool rather than as a metaphysical entity.