Extra Credit: Dreams

The documentary that I chose to watch was the Netflix series on The Mind, Explained, more specifically the episode on “Dreams”. I find dreams to be an important aspect of our lives and I do believe that dreams have a meaning behind them. I believe that certain symbols in our dreams can tell us something about ourselves and have universal meanings. This is also a theory believed by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud as seen in the episode. However this theory is rejected by many scientists today however, there are still people who agree with Jung and Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud points out that “Dream images were ‘disguised representations’ of our innermost desires” and most of his theories about dreams were mostly sexual. Jung on the other hand believed dreams were messages from the subconscious, but not sexual. The documentary states that he believed that “dreams contained characters that represent aspects of our inner lives”. For example, a trickster represents anxiety, a maiden represents purity, and a wise old man represents wisdom. I found that these ideas shown in the documentary made great sense to my paper and overall argument, that dreams do have meaning and it does relate to the mind.

Another scene of the documentary that I find to be interesting is about a lucid dreamer named Allison McCarthy. She states that anyone can lucid dream, but is a skill that must be practiced. The first step is to practice remembering your dreams. To do this, Allison writes down every single dream through pictures she has in a book. Another thing to do is learn how to recognize when you’re in a dream. To do this, Allison says to look for dreamlike qualities in the day and ask yourself if you’re in a dream. I feel like this is such a cool concept and I definitely want to try this out myself.

Another scene I found interesting was statistics about what type of content is in a person’s dreams. “1 in 5 people have dreamed of their teeth falling out” which is definitely a lot of people, but I’ve never had this happen to me. “Men are more likely to dream about other men” and “women dream about both sexes pretty equally”. “Children are more likely to dream about animals”. “About 5% of dreams are set in locations the dreamer doesn’t recognize”. The reason for this is because dreams consist of what happens in our waking lives. Overall, this documentary was enjoyable and I gained a lot more knowledge on the subject of dreams.

Link to episode: https://www.netflix.com/watch/81062189?trackId=13752289