What does it mean to dream every night with the same person?
The history of psychology, and especially of the psychoanalytic tradition initiated with Sigmund Freud, is closely related to the interpretation of dreams. This makes many people wonder what it means to dream every night with the same person , or at least with a relatively high frequency.
To answer this question one must first understand what people like Freud understood to be dreams and what from contemporary psychology linked to neurosciences is understood by them.
- Related article: The Theory of the Unconscious of Sigmund Freud (and the new theories)
Freud and the interpretation of dreams
For the father of psychoanalysis, dreams were a form in which the unconscious manifests itself indirectly in our thoughts. From this point of view, a good part of what we dream is actually a set of symbols about sensations and thoughts that have been confined to the unconscious because they are too stressful or unbearable to be processed by the conscious mind.
According to Freud, a portion of the contents of the unconscious that our mind tries to repress so that its existence is not very noticeable are not in themselves traumatic memories but desires and thoughts that must be hidden by their immoral implications.
This has a lot to do with the theory of the ego structures, according to which there is an entity called It linked to the most basic and emotional desires and impulses, another call Superego that represents all the norms and moral impositions linked to the idea of perfection, and another call I that arbitrates the relationship between the other two so that we do not enter into crisis.
So that, dreams could be expressing repressed desires , and this would be noticed in the case of dreaming a lot with the same person.
Does this mean that there is sexual desire?
Although Freudian psychoanalysis is known to put a lot of emphasis on human sexuality understood as psychological energy that motivates us to behave in a certain way and not another, that does not mean that dreaming each night with the same person means that we want it, from this psychodynamic tradition. For example, it could mean that we would like to take revenge on that person, or that that figure is actually the symbol that serves to represent an abstract idea.
That means that, from psychoanalysis, There is no single, simple and universal answer to the question of what it means to always dream of someone . Historically, finding a response was one of the main tasks of psychoanalysts, and that could mean that they had to pass several sessions until reaching a conclusion. In other words, it was examined case by case, since one of the characteristics of the symbols is that they can be interpreted in infinite possible ways.
Therefore, to find the correct interpretation it was necessary to know the psychological background of a person until detecting certain tendencies or reasonable explanations based on an analysis of the whole.
All this starting from the paradigm of psychoanalysis, of course. However… What does current psychology say about it?
An interpretation based on science
Contemporary psychology, unlike psychoanalysis, is based on the scientific method, which means that it aspires to create scientific theories based on falsifiable hypotheses. That means that all those explanations that are so abstract and imprecise that they can not be refuted from the contrast with reality are rejected. And the psychoanalytic explanation of the human mind is highly abstract and based on statements that can not be proved, as criticized by the philosopher of science Karl Popper.
That is why, for the subject at hand, the explanation to the fact that we dream a lot with a person is relatively simple. We dream about that person because we keep his memory alive and we often think about it or in the concepts associated with it.
There are neither repressed desires nor memories blocked by something called "consciousness": there is simply a phase of the dream in which memories of concepts that are already in our brain are "activated" in a relatively chaotic way, creating strange sequences of ideas . And, the more times you activate the groups of neurons that "conjure up" at the same time evoke a concept, the more likely it is that this will happen again in the future.
A matter of attention
What happens in our dreams is not a reflection of our repressed desires, but, in a general sense, of what we attach importance to in an abstract sense.For that reason, for example, in many of them we dream that our life or that of someone important is in danger, because death is something that worries us and leaves a deep mark in our memory from experiences related to this concept. The same goes for people close to us: we think a lot about them, and this it is reflected in its frequency of appearance in dreams.
Of course, the importance we give to these elements does not tell us anything about what we want to do or about those specific concerns that populate our minds, because it would require a part of our nervous system to "code" encrypted messages that only manifest when sleeping; something that does not make sense or is useful.
So you know: if you dream a lot about a person, do not worry about trying to unravel hidden meanings about possible traumas or desires that really are not there. If there is nothing that indicates that you have a problem, it is more likely that you do not have it; As simple as that .
