Is there an easy, methodical, rational, and productive way to understand dreams?

Yes. When you have a complete dream to analyze, a beginning step is to divide it into four parts: the beginning; the early-middle; the late-middle; and the ending. This is a simple process in short dreams. Then assume that the beginning shows what the dreamer loves, the early-middle is desirable, the late-middle is undesirable, and the ending is hated.

A man dreamed this: “I went horseback riding. The horse took me through beautiful countryside. When it was time to go back I chose another path, became lost, and came to some barbed wire that blocked the path. The horse became restless and tried to throw me.”

In the beginning of the dream the dreamer goes horseback riding. He loves doing that. The next part is what’s desired, so it’s desirable to him to ride through beautiful countryside. The third part reveals what’s undesirable; he wouldn’t want to get lost and have the path blocked by barbed wire. Dreams end with what is hated, and we see he’d hate it if a horse tried to throw him.

But does that love-desire-nondesire-hatred pattern appear in all dreams?

The only exceptions are dreams whose plots are disrupted by external influences such as noises.

Don’t some dreams seem to have happy endings?

On a superficial level some dreams appear to do so.

A woman dreamed:

“I am in an empty old hotel. I have inherited it from someone famous--maybe Buffalo Bill. I’m standing in the bare room, oak floors, large windows, sunshine, warm breezes. I am in a beautiful white floor-length summer gown. I am in the body of an old school chum I thought was attractive. Enter a man named Henry--another school chum, but someone I was less fond of, except in the dream he’s tall, sensual, appealing. He takes me in his arms and tells me Black Bart has discovered he can make claim to the hotel if I am not married. I am upset at the idea of losing the hotel. So Henry asks me to marry him, and we go to the justice of the peace and all ends well.”

The dream ending shows the dreamer marrying, for financial reasons, a man she hasn’t particularly liked, and it seems on the surface to predict they would live happily ever after. That plot is in the hatred section, though, and the true message is that she would hate such a forced marriage. So if she were in one in real life that inner sentiment undoubtedly would cause it to turn out badly. This message from her unconscious will be worth contemplating when she’s considering marriage.

A woman told me a dream about driving on mountain roads, and ended her account this way: “And then a rock came down from the mountain and hit my windshield and cracked it, but didn’t break it.”

If that was the end of her dream, it theoretically was showing what she hated. But why would she hate the rock cracking her car’s windshield but not breaking it? Wouldn’t she instead hate her windshield being broken? Her dream seemed to have, if not a happy ending, at least one that didn’t contain a situation she hated. I wondered if the pillars of my dream interpretation universe were beginning to crumble.

It turned out the dreamer had an explanation: “Something like that happened,” she said, “and I drove with a cracked windshield for two weeks. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and had the entire windshield replaced. It would have been better if the rock had broken my windshield at the start, rather than just cracking it. That way I wouldn’t have had the aggravation of driving with a cracked windshield for two weeks.”

Some dreams contain emotional behavior such as laughter or crying. Most of that emotionality is opposite to the dreamer’s emotional reality. If a dream figure laughs, for example, it likely is about something which is painful in real life. A feeling of happiness within the dream probably will be about something in the external world with portents of misery to it. Those superficially-positive feelings about unpleasant or stressful topics surface within the last half of dreams.

A general rule is that a sentiment in a dream will only be genuine if the dream figure displaying the sentiment simultaneously speaks. For whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to happen often. Here is one instance of it. A woman dreamed in a hatred section: “I turned to a bully who had tormented me all through grade school, began crying, and said, ‘They told me to be afraid of you and I believed them.’” The words, the accompanying crying, and the location of that dream content reveal she hated and regretted the unnecessary fear she’d felt as a child and the barriers it had created within her towards the adversary, who evidently would have been responsive to affection or friendliness.

Why do dreams use symbolism?

The use of a symbol might be the best way to present an abstract message in the dream’s visual medium.

A teenage girl dreamed this in a late-middle section. “My stepmother said to me, ‘Here’s your toast,’ and handed me a plate with a few bread crumbs on it."

Dreams typically use images of food or money to deliver a message about love. In this example, the inadequate “food” in the nondesire section indicates the dreamer felt she wasn’t getting enough love from her stepmother, and that insufficient love was undesirable to her.

But why didn’t her dream use words instead? The dream could have shown her saying, “I don’t get enough love from my stepmother and I’m unhappy about that.” Wouldn’t that have been simpler and more explanatory?

I don’t have such answers. In general, there are many potential complexities to the use of speech and words in dreams. Fortunately, there are also general rules to apply which can provide clarity to the complications.

If the dreamer’s image speaks, the words reveal an orientation acceptable to or characteristic of the conscious self, while words by anyone else often will reflect an aspect of the psyche which is in conflict with the dreamer’s conscious mindset.

A pregnant woman dreamed this in the desire section: “I was back home from the hospital holding my new baby boy. An unidentified man was looking at my baby. I said something about newborn babies being ugly. The man replied, ‘I don’t think he’s ugly.’ I looked down at my infant son and saw that he had a perfectly shaped head, blue or green eyes, and was extremely beautiful.”

Her image’s words indicate she consciously was inclined to think of newborn infants as ugly. Her inner self didn’t want her to think that way and therefore had the male dream figure disagree with her. Note that the plot after that conversation shows she wanted a beautiful baby; her conscious attitude didn’t eliminate that inner desire.

Was Freud correct in saying that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious?

Yes. The dream pattern messages which can be obtained from dreams will be consistently relevant and valuable to the conduct of everyday life.