If you’ve recently spoken to someone you know, that person may have been expressing behavior which your active mind hasn’t taken note of, but your subconscious has, and is now implementing its concern into your dream world. 8. Sex Vaillancourt-Morel M, Daspe M, Lussier Y, Zadra A. Targets of erotic dreams and their associations with waking couple and sexual life. Dreaming. 2021;31(1):44-56. doi:10.1037/drm0000160

Such changes in the quality of unbearable horror from which patients suffer are indicative of positive changes in psychotherapies. They are difficult to capture because they must be held unconscious by defenses to make them reasonably bearable. However, as we have tried to show here, they can be made visible through the analysis of dreams, both the latent contents of dreams in the psychoanalytic situation and manifest dreams elicited in an experimental as well as in therapeutic situations. Dreams are key to understanding unconscious conflicts and fantasies and can provide clues to possible transformations in psychic functioning. Often such transformations take place in a hidden way. Nevertheless, the psychoanalytic investigation of changes in long-term psychoanalytic therapies by means of a systematic clinical and extra-clinical approach of changes in dreams offers the possibility to capture such changes beyond symptom reduction in a clinically relevant way (see also Leuzinger-Bohleber, 2015b; Leuzinger-Bohleber and Fischmann, 2018). We thus hope to have made a valuable contribution to such comparative outcome studies. Another hope is that we could show that a dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences is fruitful in comparative psychotherapy research (see Fischmann et al., in preparation). Data Availability Statement National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source and electroencephalogram (EEG) . Exactly such unbearable, traumatic situations characterized the nightmares of the patient X. from the LAC study and his dreams of the first 6 months of psychoanalysis: The dream-self is captured in an extremely dangerous, live threatening situation. He is flooded with panic and anxiety and has lost any capability to liberate himself from this situation (see e.g., Varvin et al., 2012). Here just one example from a dream of Mr. X. in one of the sessions during the beginning phase of his psychoanalysis.We only cite reputable sources when researching our guides and articles. These include peer-reviewed journals, government reports, academic and medical associations, and interviews with credentialed medical experts and practitioners.

The experts greatly disagree on this one. Wallace views teeth as a symbol of power and confidence. This dream is supposedly a sign that something happened in the dreamer’s life that has caused him or her to lose confidence. According to Grant, teeth are a bad omen and represent a broken relationship. Lawrence has a Freudian answer to this dream. For women, she believes the dream is an example of wish-fulfillment—they want to become pregnant. For men, it is a desire for sexual stimulation. 3. Showing up to work or school naked If somebody else is behind the wheel, usually they are a person who has made you feel uncomfortable at a certain time, and for whatever reason reminds you of the chaos you are experiencing in your actual life. If no one is behind the wheel, it means you don’t feel as though you can get help from anyone, as there is no one to rely on. This may be true to a certain level, but there are always people waiting to help, and always kind advice if you seek it from the right places. 10. Pregnancy Freud, the most cited psychologist of the 20th century, published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. This book represented a significant milestone The LAC study was supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Tiefenpsychologie (DGPT), Heidehof Foundation, German Research Foundation (several conference supports), and a specific support of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD) by M. von der Tann. Institutional supports also have been given by the participating Institutes and Universities. The Frankfurt fMRI/EEG Depression (FRED) study (of which the laboratory dreams were taken) was funded by the Neuro-Psychoanalysis Society—HOPE (M. Solms, J. Panksepp et al.) and the Research Advisory Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Conflict of InterestPerformance and creativity: According to the overfitted brain hypothesis, the typical experiences of daily life do not prepare the brain for unexpected events. Dreams offer people a hallucinatory narrative that serves to improve cognitive performance and boost creativity during waking hours. Both the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and its extra-clinical research have been enriched and inspired, but also challenged, by various interdisciplinary dialogues in recent decades. To mention just one example: it was long held in psychoanalysis that, following Sigmund Freud’s dream theory [1900 (1961)], it was the analyst’s task to investigate the latent meaning of a dream by systematically exploring the associations to a patient’s dream during an analysis session. As will be discussed in the following article, both experimental dream research and dialogue with neurobiological memory research have critically challenged this limitation and have opened new doors to the systematic exploration of the manifest dream. As will be briefly illustrated by an example of a patient from the LAC study (Long-term Analysis of Chronic depression; Leuzinger-Bohleber et al., 2019a, b), this opens up, among other things, the fascinating possibility of systematically investigating the changes of (manifest) dreams in psychoanalyses as indicators of the transformations of the unconscious micro-worlds ( Moser and Hortig, 2019). If systematic changes can be detected in dreams, they would provide a measure more akin to the mental (unconscious) transformations focused on in psychoanalysis than some criteria accepted in times of evidence-based-medicine, for comparative psychotherapy studies (almost predominantly self and other assessments of symptom reduction). Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Wait for just a second, is that me? How did I get all the way up here? Whilst most dreams represent some form of anxiety, burden, or reference to tough feelings you are yet to uncover, dreaming of flying is actually rather positive. Being that high up in the air represents the heights you feel you can reach in your career, relationship, social life, and whatever else lightens your days. You may have already reached this height, or you may currently feel ambitious, and positive enough about yourself to succeed.