When we sleep, we often dream about things that aren’t happening. These dreams represent our subconscious desires, fears, and anxieties. Sometimes these dreams are vivid and realistic, while others may be bizarre and nonsensical. Dreams help us to understand ourselves better by exploring our unconscious minds. Freud thought of dreams as a royal road to the subconscious and dream analysis became a fundamental part of the psychoanalysis technique.
Freud saw dreams as an expression of the unconscious mind. Because we are not limited by conscious reasoning or cultural norms in dreams we can do whatever we like – what our unconscious really wants, but our consciousness is suppressing. Even so, our dream often seems random or meaningless, and it is the job of the analyst to help us make sense of them. In addition, Jung believed that dreams contained a wealth of symbols representing aspects of the psyche that needed interpreting.