When thinking of the psychology of dreams, everyone’s favorite cigar-smoking, late-19th-century psychotherapist Sigmund Freud is likely to come to mind. Speaking of long cylindrical objects like cigars, the very maternally-attached Freud (another story) would say that such an item represents a penis, as Psychology Today explains. Additional phallic symbols — there are a lot — include knives, umbrellas, tall buildings, and things that pour liquid. And you think that’s a king in your dreams? Oh no, that’s your father come to dominate you and repress your sexual desire for your mother. Water, in Freudian psychoanalysis, is shorthand for birth, while journeys mean death, clothing indicates vulnerability, small rodents represent children, and much more.
No matter how much you buy into Freud’s very specific psychosexual interpretation of dreams, his impact within and without the world of psychology has been absolutely immense. At this point, is it possible to talk about human motivation by discussing the unconscious, that bundle of below-the-surface fears, hates, and desires that propel our conscious decision-making? Probably not. GoodTherapy says that Freud called dreams “the royal road” to the unconscious, like an unfettered pathway revealing truth. He wrote about this and more in his 1900 “The Interpretation of Dreams,” from which we get his particular, sexually-focused method of dream analysis. But even if someone finds Freud’s preoccupations off-putting, dreams can still be an assortment of symbolic images and situations meant to convey information abstractly — and which are open to interpretation.
