The theory regarding the formation of dreams that I present in this section is based on my own experiences using and adapting the method outlined in Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams over many years in order to understand my own dreams. I'm fairly convinced of its truth or else I wouldn't be writing it down. However, I do want to underline that you shouldn't feel constrained to accept this theory without having had firsthand experience using it in practice to interpret your own nightly sojourns in the dream realm. The corollary is that you shouldn't reject it either without having done the same!
Let's begin at the beginning. During sleep, although wakefulness is temporarily extinguished, experience continues; the stream of consciousness flows on. Due to the conditions that are prevalent in sleep, the only available form of contextualization is the dream. That is to say, the sleeping mind converts emotional experiences into dream experiences, which are similar to waking experiences with respect to their perceptual character, but take place wholly within your sleeping mind. Another way of putting this is that dreams are a result of your mind experiencing its emotional life in sleep by means of the same mechanisms it uses to perceive the external world. If you're observant, you'll have seen this happening during hypnagogic states—those moments when you're just about to fall asleep or wake up. Your thoughts are immediately converted into vivid visual images. For example, worrying about a complicated problem might lead to an image of yourself struggling to open a lock. All dreams are formed in the same way, except that you're not even half awake, so you don't know the original thoughts that inspired the dream-images.
Commingled with the process of contextualization that produces the dream, however, is the activity of another mental agency that we can call the inner censor. As its name suggests, it works against the process of contextualization in order to prevent certain thoughts from reaching consciousness. The censor is continually active, both day and night, and its activity is completely independent of conscious awareness and volition. It creates blind spots in our conscious awareness and knowledge so that we can't make full use of what we know. It's because of the censor and its independence from conscious control that we need to turn to other people for help when we're experiencing serious mental health issues.
If this is the case, you may be wondering, how can we manage to understand any of our dreams to any extent at all? The answer is that the censor functions with different degrees of severity:
It's worth pointing out two things that follow from this: firstly, the fact that you remember a dream at all means that part of the thoughts that inspired it got past the censor, so you have something to work with. And secondly, whenever we remember a dream, we can consciously attempt to work backwards and try to reconstruct the missing content, using hints we find in the remaining parts of the dream to "fill in the gaps."
To undo the work of the censor, you have to work backwards: start with the images of the dream and then ask yourself what sort of thoughts you might have been having to produce that type of imagery. As a general rule you'll remember something from the previous day that you didn't have time to think about and that followed you into sleep. You'll also eventually find that it reminds you of something from your early years; events in daily life "hit a nerve," and that's why you dream about them.
It can also be helpful to ask yourself questions like the following:
In the process, always remember that a dream is a movie filmed in your head; regardless of whatever happens in the dream or who appears in it, in the end, you're always the star.
Once you've gone through all of the things the particular dream elements remind you of, take a step back and have a look at them as a whole. Is there a pattern starting to form? Are you seeing how they fit into the dream as a whole? It can help if you write down the entire process, from the parts of the dream that you remember to the questions you ask yourself along with whatever occurs to you in response. Pay particular attention to associations you think are unimportant, implausible, silly, or downright embarrassing. Follow the stream of your associations as far as it'll go but don't get bogged down in details. Sometimes the meaning of a dream comes to you in a flash; sometimes it emerges gradually, like a digital image fading in pixel by pixel. Sometimes you understand the whole dream; sometimes you understand it only partially or not at all.
Don't worry if you don't get the hang of it right away. The knack of interpreting dreams takes a while to develop and there isn't an easy way to learn it other than by interpreting your own through trial and error. Also, even after years of practice, many dreams just can't be figured out all the way down. All the same, interpreting your dreams is both interesting and therapeutic in itself even if you don't succeed completely every time, and that exhilarating flash of insight when you do figure out one of your dreams beginning to end will make it all seem worth it.