Infinite Interpretations of a Girl's Dream

 The Pathos of the Unconscious: Charlie Chaplin and Dreams goes into great detail about dreams and how they function in media. From the readings, the most evident fact about dreams in media is that it gives insight to a character’s true emotions. In fact, in Charlie Chaplin and Dreams, it mentioned, “it may be concluded that the most effective manner of analyzing character in film is by a full examination of the character's dreams.”  In movies, a “dream disrupts the film just long enough to explore an alternative reality.” The TV show Gilmore Girls has a great example of this kind of dream in a film.

Gilmore Girls is a long series about the life of a mother and daughter. The mother, Lorelai, is best friends with the man, Luke, who owns the diner in their town. Several people throughout the beginning of the series suggest that Luke has feelings for Lorelai and they also suggest that they would be a great couple, but Lorelai constantly ignores them. In a certain episode, Lorelai has a dream that she is married to Luke and is pregnant with twins. 

According to the reading about Dream Theory, it is said that dreams are not directly. In this case, Lorelai’s dream can have many different interpretations. For example, her dream could be foreshadowing that she and Luke will have a relationship in the future. It could be represented as a nightmare because she would never want this to happen, or it could mean something that you would never even think of because scholars agree that, “everything symbolizes something else.”

In addition, when Lorelai wakes up form her dream, she questions the meaning of the dream. It’s possible that Lorelai is suppressing her unresolved desires or feelings for Luke, and her “subconscious” revealed her reality to her in the dream.

Freud’s Dream Theory, however, states that the solution to the meaning of dreams is generally that “all dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes.” Therefore, his interpretation of Lorelai’s dream may have more to do with her dream as a partial fulfillment of a wish that is usually (but not always) sexual.

Freud’s Dream Theory also divides the mind into two parts, the preconscious and unconscious. The preconscious contains all the ideas and memories capable of becoming conscious while the unconscious is made up of the desires and wishes of a mostly sexual and sometimes destructive nature. The beginning of the dream consists of the unconscious mind at play when she destroys all of the alarm clocks while all of the memories of people mentioning Luke and Lorelai as a possible couple is a part of the preconscious mind.

There are many different ways to analyze dreams as shown above. Right now, we have no way of knowing which interpretation is correct, but the ideas are fascinating.