Psychology for Dummies (12 page)

BOOK: Psychology for Dummies

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Arriving at Work Naked: Dreams

Sigmund Freud is credited with saying that dreams are the “royal road to our unconscious.” I think that if you ask most people, they would tell you that they believe that dreams have either symbolic or prophetic importance. Dreams represent another altered state of consciousness.

Based on the restorative theory of sleep (see the “Catching some zzzzs” section earlier in this chapter), dreams are the by-product of the brain reorganizing and storing the information gathered over the course of a waking day. This explanation actually allows for the possibility that dreams can be interpreted because they relate to real events and situations; therefore, they can have meaning.

Psychoanalysis has probably provided us with the most comprehensive look at the psychological importance of dreams and dreaming. Freud and other psychoanalysts make a simple point: Dreams have deeper meanings than their surface content suggests. If I have a dream about getting a new car, it means more than I just want a new car. It could mean any number of things, but the meaning is something unique to my psychological makeup, something idiosyncratic. The car may represent a repressed desire to be free, and the car is a symbol of movement.

Psychoanalysts believe that the contents and processes of our dreams represent deep, unconscious conflicts, desires, and issues. Dreams are hard to decipher; they’re often convoluted, and they don’t make much sense. In
The Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud states that dreams often represent our attempts to fulfill wishes that we’re not consciously aware of. Through the technique of dream interpretation, a psychoanalyst helps a patient to get to the bottom of the meaning of his or her dreams.

Again, like many of the other topics in this chapter, the “true” meaning of a dream is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discover. Dreams and their meanings are very personal and subjective phenomena. Even if dreams and their symbolic meanings are difficult to analyze scientifically, it shouldn’t take away from anyone’s belief that their dreams have some deeper meaning. The process of discovering the meaning of dreams in therapy, whether factually correct or not, can be an exciting and often helpful experience.

Chapter 5

Go Ahead, Be a Little Sensitive
In This Chapter

Sensing the world

Seeing things a bit more clearly

Feeling the heat

Constructing your perceptions

S eeing is believing! I have no idea where that phrase came from, but it tells us something important about ourselves. We have an easier time understanding or comprehending things if we can see them, touch them, hear them, and so on. Why doesn’t everyone believe in ghosts, UFOs, or any number of things that most people have not experienced? That’s precisely the point, and most people haven’t experienced these phenomena with their own senses, so they don’t believe in them. How do we know if something is part of the world we live in or not and — whether it’s real?

A branch of philosophy known as
ontology
deals with the question, “What is real?” Psychologists also have searched for the answer to this question by following their own philosophy known as
materialism,
the belief that everything in the world is made of matter, of material stuff. Before I start going too far down the philosophical trail and putting you to sleep, let me tell you why this subject is important in a book about psychology.

As you can see by looking at the table of contents of this book, the subject of psychology is made up of a bunch of different areas of study that all point to the ultimate questions of why and how we humans do what we do. This chapter is about the why and how of something that we all do: sense and perceive the world around us. They’re as obvious as the nose on our faces, but we often don’t realize how important our senses are to us. We see, hear, taste, touch, feel, and so on. Psychology as the study of behavior and mental processes includes taking a look at how our senses actually work.

We’re not just little brains floating around inside of a body with no contact with the outside world. Quite the contrary; we are typically in full contact with the world around us, taking in the information that the world provides us, processing it, and using that information to navigate our way through a wide ocean of possibilities. So why is understanding materialism important? Because the way we actually maintain contact with that information is through the physical materials that it consists of.

Sensation
is the basic process of receiving raw energy/information from our environment.
Perception
is the process of organizing and making sense of this raw energy. In the following sections, I take a closer look at the ways we sense and perceive our world.

Building Blocks: Our Senses

Physicists and chemists have long pointed out that our world is made up of material stuff: particles, atoms, molecules, and various forms of energy. Basically, the universe is one big ball of energy. Everything consists of a particular configuration of energy. A working definition of
sensation
is the process by which we mentally acquire information about the world through the reception of its various forms of energy.

The forms of energy in the world that humans are most commonly in contact with are: light (electromagnetic energy), sound (acoustic energy, or sound waves), heat (thermal energy), pressure (mechanical or physical energy), and chemical energy. Some organisms are in touch with the same kinds of energy as humans, but they’re sensitive to different ranges of them. Sharks can smell chemical particles (of blood, for example) in far smaller quantities than we can, and dogs can hear much higher frequencies of sounds.

For each form of energy that we sense, a specific organ system or “device” is used to receive it. Humans have five basic senses, each receptive to a specific form of energy:

Sight:
Receives light energy