What Does It Mean To Dream About The Same Person Every Night?
The history of psychology, and especially the psychoanalytic tradition that began with Sigmund Freud, is closely related to the interpretation of dreams. This makes many people wonder what it means to dream about the same person every night or at least with a relatively high frequency.
To answer this question, we must first understand what people like Freud understood dreams to be and what contemporary psychology linked to neuroscience understands by them.
For the father of psychoanalysis, dreams were a way in which the unconscious manifests itself indirectly in our thoughts. From this point of view, A good part of what we dream is actually a set of symbols about sensations and thoughts that have become confined to the unconscious because they are too stressful or unbearable to be processed by the conscious mind.
According to Freud, a portion of the contents of the unconscious that our mind tries to repress so that its existence is not very noticeable are not traumatic memories in themselves but rather desires and thoughts that must be hidden due to their immoral implications.
This has a lot to do with the theory of ego structures, according to which there is an entity called It linked to the most basic and emotional desires and impulses, another so-called superego which represents all the moral norms and impositions linked to the idea of perfection, and another called I that arbitrates the relationship between the other two so that we do not enter into crisis.
So that, dreams could be expressing repressed desires and this would be noticeable in the case of dreaming a lot about the same person.
Does this mean that there is sexual desire?
Although Freudian psychoanalysis is known for putting a lot of emphasis on human sexuality understood as psychological energy that motivates us to behave in a certain way and not another, that does not imply that dreaming about the same person every night means that we desire him, from this point of view. psychodynamic tradition. For example, it could mean that we would like to take revenge on that person, or that that figure is actually the symbol that serves to represent an abstract idea.
This means that, from psychoanalysis, There is no single, simple and universal answer to the question of what it means to always dream about someone Historically, finding an answer was one of the main tasks of psychoanalysts, and that could mean that they had to spend several sessions until reaching a conclusion. In other words, it was examined case by case, since one of the characteristics of symbols is that they can be interpreted in infinite possible ways.
Thus, to find the correct interpretation it was necessary to know the entire psychological background of a person until certain tendencies or reasonable explanations were detected based on an analysis of the whole.
All this starting from the paradigm of psychoanalysis, of course. However… What does current psychology say about it?
A science-based interpretation
Contemporary psychology, unlike psychoanalysis, is based on the scientific method, which means that it aspires to create scientific theories based on falsifiable hypotheses. This means that all those explanations that are so abstract and imprecise that they cannot be refuted by comparison with reality are rejected. And the psychoanalytic explanation of the human mind is highly abstract and based on statements that cannot be demonstrated, as criticized by the philosopher of science Karl Popper.
That is why, for the topic at hand, the explanation for the fact that we dream about a person a lot is relatively simple. We dream about that person because we keep their memory alive and we think about them frequently or in the concepts associated with it.
There are neither repressed desires nor memories blocked by something called “consciousness”: there is simply a phase of sleep in which memories of concepts that are already in our brain are “activated” in a relatively chaotic way, creating strange sequences of ideas. . And, the more times the groups of neurons that “turn on” at the same time evoke a concept, the more likely it will be that this will happen again in the future.
A matter of attention
What happens in our dreams is not a reflection of our repressed desires, but, in a general sense, of what we give importance to in an abstract sense. That is why, for example, in many of them we dream that our life or that of someone important is in danger, since death is something that worries us and that leaves a deep mark in our memory based on experiences related to this concept. The same thing happens with the people close to us: we think a lot about them, and this It is reflected in its frequency of appearance in dreams
Of course, the importance we give to these elements does not tell us anything about what we want to do or about those specific concerns that populate our mind, because this would require a part of our nervous system to “encode” messages in code. that only manifest themselves when sleeping; something that makes no sense or is useful.
So now you know: if you dream a lot about a person, don’t worry about trying to unravel hidden meanings about possible traumas or desires that aren’t really there. If there’s nothing to indicate you have a problem, chances are you don’t have one; As simple as that
