In Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote that “the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.” In other words, the impulses that we repress during the day are lived out, without consequences, at night.
A founding father of psychoanalysis, Freud’s idea was pervasive during the first half of the 20th century. Alfred Hitchcock even based the 1945 film Spellbound on his theory of dream analysis. But in the 1950s, an American psychologist named Calvin Hall challenged the prevailing narrative; perhaps dreams weren’t cryptic expressions of our hidden desires. Instead, Hall suggested that dreams were a continuation of our conscious life — unconscious manifestations of our day-to-day experiences and emotions.
