For ages people have tried to analyze our dreams, and make sense of them. The reason why people are so interested in this phenomenon is because there seems to be many meanings behind the actual dream. The difference though, is the conscious, and the subconscious. Many respectable people have gathered thoughts about this topic, and have written works about it as well. In A World of Ideas by: Lee A. Jacobus, the section about "Mind" has five excellent views on the conscious and the subconscious. These five are Plato, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Howard Gardner and Francis Crick. They all discuss the differences between the conscious and the subconscious. Although they discuss the differences between the two, I feel that a person's most inner thoughts and feelings can only come true through their subconscious. .
In our dreams we perform many unthinkable tasks that would normally be impossible in the "real world". There are two very intelligent thinkers who support this part of my argument; they are Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney. Dr. Sigmund Freud begins his rhetoric with an example of how he dreamt of drinking a glass of water because he was thirsty. ( 331) What he is saying here is that he was thirsty before he went to bed, since he did not have anything to drink before he went to bed, his dreams became about drinking water to quench his thirst in his sub-conscious state. Freud explains this type of dream as being a "wish-fulfillment". Freud explains his analysis of dreams by saying,.
For even if we are prepared to find that every dream has a meaning and a psychical value, the possibility must remain open of this meaning not being the same in every dream. Our first dream was the fulfillment of a wish; a second one might turn out to be a fulfilled fear; the content of a third might be a reflection; while a fourth might merely reproduce a memory. ( 330).
These four types of dreams are the ways we go about accomplishing tasks that are unthinkable in the real world, which is why we have dreams in the alternative state of mind called the subconscious.
