A Dream is series of thoughts and images taking place while one is sleeping.
To explain I can give you an example.
Omer, a thirty-three-year-old accountant, dreams he is a gladiator in the ancient Roman Colosseum.
He kills an opponent in combat.
He awakens from the dream in a state of excitement.
There is a lingering feeling of fear.
A moment ago he was in danger of losing his life! There is also a sense of satisfaction associated with his success in a fight to the death.
Omer smiles and thinks to himself, 'It seemed real.
' There have been many attempts to explain the meaning of dreams.
One of the most famous is Freud's dream theory.
Freud said that a dream is the expression of a forbidden wish in life.
The dreams exists on two levels: the manifest content and the latent content.
The manifest content is the actual thoughts and images of the dream, the surface of the dream.
The latent content is the meaning of the dream and contains the forbidden wish.
The manifest content is a disguise for the forbidden wish, a kind of censorship imposed by the ego.
Omer's dream is fairly transparent in Freudian terms.
The manifest content of his dream makes him a killer under permissible conditions.
The latent content is a repressed wish to inflict harm or injury against some other person in his life, perhaps some one who is frustrating him and toward whom he has built up hostility.
The identity of this person is masked in the dream because the knowledge is too threatening to Omer's ego.
There are, of course, other explanations of the meaning of the meaning of dreams than Freud's.
I will discuss this in some other article.