Dreams

Elements

BB2 From a point of view mainly phenomenological, dreams are essentially image and action.

But they are also symbols. Although dreams may have no meaning sometimes, the most of the time they have a meaning.

There are four elements described by Doctor Freud: Condensation, Displacement, Drama and Symbolization.
  1. Condensation – Is an anarchic and surrealist melting of elements totally unrelated. In dreams, a character that is shown as an individual perfectly defined may also have attributes from other individuals. The synthesis of these kinds of dreams that can be described in a few lines may require very often a lot of pages to describe everything that is not only represented but also evoked.
  2. Displacement – Is the transposition of the attributes of one object to another. A character is indeed, some other character, and object can even take that shape of a person throughout the dream, until image substitutions take place, due to the change of the aspect of an individual, or due to the fact that different characters act under the same aspect. A very similar phenomenon takes place related to space and time elements. Places and ages are overlapped.
  3. Drama – Is the substitution of the concept by the animated image. Dreams become much more vivid. Although throughout the dream we may experience a variety of emotions like happiness or fear, we are unable to understand clearly the dramatic piece that we are playing. We are actors and spectators of a play whose meaning we are unable to understand, and yet intimately it moves us.
  4. Symbolization - This is the cornerstone of the Freudian Theory of dreams. Behind the image, there is a meaning. If we look back to the first three elements, we will see that they all assemble on the symbolic realization.