Saturday, March 05, 2011

The Interpretation of dreams

When my wife was seven months pregnant she told me “I had the strangest dream last night”.

I know”, I replied coyly. “You dreamt that you gave birth to a litter of puppies!

Her jaw dropped and she said slowly “You scare me. How did you know that?”

In truth, I didn’t know, I just knew that this is the most common “strange” dream of late-term pregnant women.

As an undergraduate in psychology, I slogged through the Sigmund Fraud classis book “The Interpretation of Dreams”.

This book was the foundation for psychoanalysis and it is a wealth of information on repression and dreams.

In Freud’s day, the Victorian sexuality mentality ruled and dreams of trains travelling into tunnels were correctly interpreted as sexual repression!

Freud had a huge ego and his sign in his office said “Professor Doctor Freud”, as-if one title is not enough:



Eventually it led to the public mocking Freud for believing that “anything longer than it is wide is phallic”. Sometimes, a train is just a train . . .


Pink Freud

Other common dreams (and the underlying causes) include:

- Dreams about becoming naked in public

- Dreams about floating and flying

- Dreams about forgetting a final exam