Question

According to Freud why do we dream? What did the study of dreams lead freud to conclude about the mind? can you include a real life example to understand his conclusion..

Answer 1

Sigmund Freud, father of "Psychoanalysis", always put more importance on the unconscious part of the mind than the conscious. According to him, all of our actions and thoughts could be traced back to repressed unconcious desires. Because we are not aware of the happenings taking place in our unconscious part of the mind, he said that "Dreams are the royal roads to the unconscious." Dreams acted as an outlet or rather an interface between our conscious and unconscious to let us be aware of that exactly our desires/goals were. However, Freud also believed that our unconscious thoughts were too harmful to be understood directly and that is why through dreams we get an indirect interpretation of the unconscious.
   Freud spent a lot of his time in dream analysis and wrote that particular patterns of dreams had specific meaning. He divided dreams into manifest content - what the person remembers of the dream and latent content - the underlying, symbolic meaning of the dream. Through psycho-analysis Freud wanted to find out the connections between both.
   For example, if a person dreams that he is climbing up the stairs and suddenly falls down; the interpretation to his real life could be that he failed in his attempts to reach a particular goal.