Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Journal

Dreams are the subjective experiences that occur during sleep, and their subject matter differs as a function of sleep stage or time of night. Dream content is reflective of the activity of brain structures concerned with information processing and memory consolidation [1]. Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychoanalytic approach and author of The Interpretation of Dreams, described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.” He believed that the dreaming and the waking mind were continuous and that dreams were reflections of conflicts between unconscious desires and the conscious mind [2]. Freud proposed that the symbolic language of reported, or manifest dreams could be decoded to reveal the hidden latent dream—the result of a forbidden wish. His work inspired further research on the meaning and imagery contained within dreams that corroborated some of his views but not others, so that we now believe that dreams are the product of more than just unconscious desires [3]. This project seeks to comprehend the local understandings of dreams and their meanings— implicit and explicit— among young people in the United States today.