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Wake up to your dreams is
a comprehensive but brief attempt on the part of Joan Hanger
to help the layman to be able to understand and comprehend the
essence of his dreams. She starts with a reference of the
various thoughts that have been formulated on dreams through
different cultures and eras. Thus one sees a brief sketch of
dreams from being voices of divinities to demonic influences
of the mind and with the onset of psychoanalysis, Freud’s Interpretation
of dreams being a psychic creation that can be interpreted
in relation to man’s unconscious desires, repression and
anxieties. From thereon she moves forward to describe certain
important characteristics of dreams such as their creative
aspect, morality, dreams as projections and their relation to
daily events. Her next chapter deals with the discoveries of
Carl Jung in his indepth study on dreams. For beginners this
chapter could be eye-opening but it may be very difficult to
put it into practice when attempting to interpret dreams. Joan
lays down a five stage programme for people desiring to
interpret dreams. But the most important aspect is acceptance
of the relevance of dreams. As she puts it, "Acceptance
of the contrarieties and incongruities of dreams is the first
step to comprehension. Dreams do not arise from the logical
continuity of daily experience, but are indicative of a
totally different sort of psychic activity which takes place
only in sleep. The fantastical nature of the associations made
in dreams, and their tenuous connection with what we normally
term ‘reality’, makes their narrative, such as it exists
at all, extremely unstable. When recording dreams it is
important to bear this in mind..the key to your dreams lie in
the nature of the symbols and motifs presented to you and even
more importantly, the feelings you have associated with them.
These elements, which are tied in more or less significant way
to your daily activities, provides the cornerstones of meaning
in dream interpretation." As per Joan, a persons dreams
express all their ideas, feelings and situations in a series
of images that are imbued with the personal significance of
the dreamer. Having concentrated on the various aspects of
dreams within seventy pages, the rest of the book deals with a
few dream symbols and certain commonly seen dream themes. The
relevance of taking up such an elaborate topic in such a
constrained manner is what one fails to understand. It would
have gone to Joan’s credit if she would have rather
concentrated in more detail on the basics of understanding
dreams. The aforeseen continuity of the book gets broken. Yet
the manner of approach and her style of writing goes to Joan’s
credit. She manages to enthrall the reader in the first half
in such a manner that you do not desire to break off.
Having delved into all the
various aspects of dream theories and trying to assimilate it
all in a short span, makes the book a good reading but not
very successful in having achieved the goal which the writer
desired.
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