ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which we discover meaning in dreams. It explains dreams as signs in a social context and provides some of the psychological and social processes of dreaming. Importantly, a distinction must be drawn between the complex mental processes that create dreams and the outcome of those processes. Perhaps the most influential Western tradition of understanding dreams comes through twentieth century psychoanalysis which puts dreams at the centre of access to the unconscious and its processes. Dreams, while experienced by a sleeping individual person, have always been discussed and shared and meanings have been created through this sharing. Social dreaming is an expression of dream sharing with the intent to formulate or discover new hypotheses about the community. Raw emotional data – beta elements – are transformed through alpha function into dream thoughts and alpha elements and the distinction between conscious and unconscious is made possible.
