Reading the excerpt from Freud’s Interpretation of dreams reminds me of my dream of my significant other. My significant other and I are high school friends. So I dreamed of during high school anniversary festival when we sat on the school running track and chatted about high school life. After a while, she said she was thirsty and she needed to get some water, so I stayed on the running track alone and waited for her to come back. I felt very worried and very lonely, and I felt something bad was going to happen. In my dream, what I worried became reality.
She did not come back, so I looked around for he. I asked other students whether they had seen her, and I talked to teachers to find her, but no one knew where she went. She just disappeared. In despair, I remembered about the time we spent together in my dream, when we played basketball together, we went to internet café without parents’ permission, and we got new haircuts together. I felt very depressed and anxious. I hoped it was not the reality, and I woke up in despair and realized it was just a dream. This dream occurred long time ago when I just got into college. Because it gave me such deep impression, so I still remembered it, though most details might be distorted and fabricated.
In Interpretation of dreams Freud suggests that dreaming of “the death of a loved relative or friend and is at the same time painfully affected means at a wish that the person in question may die” (Freud, p.249). In my dream, I did not dream about her death, but in my unconscious mind, the disappeared of my significant other implies her death in an obscure way. Feud also suggests the wishes presented in dream are not present-day wishes, but may be wishes of the past that have been abandoned (Freud, p.249). I have never wanted the death of my friend.
However, a serious verbal fight between us left me with deep impressions. It was the last day of high school. Everyone was very sad about separation and departure, and everyone was unsure about leaving the environment that we were accustomed of. I was in deep sorrow that day because I always wanted to avoid the suffering of leaving. It was hard to imagine that I might never see some of my friends again, but I still wanted my last day of high school to be a pleasant memory. I asked her to take a picture together, but she refused, saying there was no need to take a picture because we would meet again really soon.
I was in such a bad mood that I shouted out to her that she knew nothing and she never cared about me. She was angry too and she went away to talk to other people. The small conflict transformed into a cold war. We did not get in touch with each other till I went to the US. It might be for this reason that I dreamed that she disappeared in high school and I was never able to find her again.
The second factor that lead to occurrence of such dreams, according to Freud, is “a residue from the previous day in the form of a worry about the safety of the person concerned” (Freud, p.267). The things we think about during the day come into our dreams during the night. The day before I dreamed about my significant other, we had a video chat. She complained about her dormmate’ bad habits. She said “I could not bear it any longer. My dormmate did not go to class. She stayed on her bed every day and she took a shower once a month! I’m suffering to death!”
Her exaggeration about her sentiments toward her dormmate and the word death she mentioned made me worried about her safety during the day, which eventually carries on during the night in my dream. I think it also because she mentioned how she suffered in university that I remembered the best memory I had with her during high school. Indeed, I felt the same way like her, feeling lonely and depressive in college the first year, so no wonder I would remember the time I spent together with her during high school after listen to her complaining about her life in university.
Freud also talks about anxiety in such dreams. He says “a repressed wish has found a means of evading censorship-and the distortion which censorship involves […] in just the same way anxiety-dreams only occur if the censorship has been wholly or partly over powered” (Freud, p.267). There is censorship involved in my dream about my significant other’s death. The conflicting ideas about hoping we could be as good as before and knowing that is never possible that lead to my wish that should could disappear. On the other hand, I also fill guilty about thinking about it this way, which makes me feel so depressed and anxious in my dream.