What does it all mean anyway?

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you."  ~ Marsha Norman

I had a dream last night -- I am a dreamer.  Although it doesn't happen extremely often,  I'd say I have a dream at least once a week.  (Hey, I have to get enough sleep to do that more often... and I can't say I do!)  When I was younger, I used to have recurring bad dreams about school-related anxieties.  Now that I am older, and my life is seemingly more stressful and complicated, I have found that my dreams may reflect complicated feelings, but they are almost never bad.  At least from the ones that I can remember anyway, since details can sometimes be hard to come by once I wake up.  Nevertheless, I still find myself wondering what my dreams mean.

If Freud had his way, he would say that my thoughts and actions are motivated by the unconscious, and that as a society, we repress urges and impulses we have to abide by the moral code set by others.   Remember the "id", "ego", and "superego"?  Well, according to Freud, dreams are ruled by our id - our unconscious, instinctual, pleasure-seeking aspect of our mind.  In "New Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis" he says, "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learnt from our study of the dream-work and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of this is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organisation, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."  Is this true?   Does this mean that my dreams are my subconscious response to my wishes and desires that I can't have or realize at this point in my life?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Maybe not.

"We are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams... we are also more intelligent, wiser and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake."  ~Erich Fromm

"Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison." ~Henri Amiel

"Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions."  ~Edgar Cayce

"I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long.  If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night."  ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes~

"A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul."

~Erich Fromm