Every night we return to a primal state, both physically and mentally, and dreams become an important tool for exploring the unconscious by projecting our inner world and revealing feelings and desires that are difficult to detect.
Every night, we remove the clothes that wrap around our skin and hang them on the wall. This act is more than just a way to relieve the fatigue of the day. It’s also an act of letting go of the roles and responsibilities of everyday life. In addition, many of the tools we use to assist our bodies, such as glasses, wigs, and dentures, are also removed when we go to sleep. The removal of these physical tools can be seen as a process of deconstructing the different elements that make up the self. Taking off what is attached to the body can also be seen as a time to shed social masks and return to being fully yourself.
Taking this a step further, we can say that we also take off our consciousness and put it aside, similar to the act of undressing when we sleep. In both cases, we are returning to a situation very similar to the one we were in at the beginning of our lives. On a physical level, falling asleep is like returning to the peace and comfort of the womb. In fact, many people adopt a fetal-like position when they sleep. This fetal position is an expression of the instinctive safety-seeking that is inherent in humans from birth and can be interpreted as an unconscious attempt to return to the most primal form of the self.
Similarly, the mental state of a sleeping person is one of almost complete withdrawal from the world of consciousness, and attention to the outside world seems to cease. During wakefulness, when consciousness is active, responding to the outside world is important, but in sleep, it all stops. It’s a moment when the noise of consciousness subsides and we can listen to the subtle cues that can only come from deep within. This is when we explore our inner world, as if groping in the dark.
By closely observing dreams, we can learn about our mental state during this period of sleep. For example, we know from our research that dreams are thoroughly egocentric, and that the person who plays the leading role in the dream world is always the dreaming self. The dream self may appear different from the waking self, but its essence is still deeply rooted in the self. We can simply call this sleeping narcissism, a phenomenon that occurs when the mind shifts its focus from the outside world to the self.
This also explains the diagnostic power of dreams, which people have long considered a mysterious phenomenon. It was realized that in dreams, all senses are greatly exaggerated, so that mental or physical abnormalities are detected faster and more clearly than in waking life. Dreams act as a kind of warning signal, bringing to the surface issues that would normally be ignored or unrecognized. This exaggeration in dreams also comes from the return of mental energy from the outside world to the self. Subtle mental and physical changes that would be difficult to detect in waking life are made perceptible in dreams.
Through this process, we also learned that dreams serve to externalize our inner world. This is called projection. In dreams, we become sensitive to internal needs or complexes that we normally suppress, and through projection we materialize them in an external form. For example, a man who survived a war may continue to dream of his dead comrade for months afterward. This can be seen as an allusion to the guilt that is latent within the survivor, but which he or she never wants to acknowledge when awake. This projection is an important process of releasing feelings or desires that have been trapped in the unconscious, which can restore psychological balance.
The reason why dreams are so important to us is that they translate this unconscious world into something concrete and understandable. Through dreams, we not only learn that something is going on that is disturbing the person’s sleep, but we also learn what to do about it. Such things are difficult to recognize when we are awake. This is because our waking consciousness hinders our observation of our inner world in the same way that warm, colorful clothing hides our body’s wounds and imperfections. We have to wait for the mind to take off its clothes before we can enter the person’s inner world. In this way, dreams can release feelings and thoughts that we suppress during waking life, and provide clues to resolve latent problems. They allow us to confront our inner truths and explore our more authentic selves.
