Keep your dreams to yourself!

The ABC radio news awakened me this morning from a long and extremely detailed dream, which for once I was able to 'fix' before it was forgotten (usually they slip through one's consciousness like fish and wriggle away before one can actually remember them). In another life, I would very much like to have researched dreams much more thoroughly than we did for the two books we wrote on the subject. It's clear that dreams can be 'interpreted' - are revealing, critical, helpful, though I'm sure occasionally (though rarely) meaningless. Maybe in time someone will invent a means of accessing and recording them - though this might be extremely embarrassing from time to time, and maybe new privacy laws would be necessary! Their sexual content still often shocks people, revealing tastes which in waking life they would reject as unreasonable or even offensive. Neither Freud nor Jung seemed to get this quite right - Freud indeed becomes laughable on the subject, when making such assertions as 'The tie is always a sexual symbol!'
For those whose first language is English, puns are often central to the interpretation of a dream. Once when we were for a time appearing on morning TV interpreting viewers' dreams, a young woman had dreamed that she was pulling a sweater overher head, and her head fell off. Clearly (and she admitted it) this referred to the fact that the 'wool had been pulled' over her head by a man over whom she had 'lost herr head'. In another case, a girl kept dreaming that she was desperate to go to Bristol, though in waking life she knew nothing about Bristol and certainly had no intention of going there. But she admitted to wanting breast implants - and in Cockney rhyming slang (and she was a Cocknet) Bristol = Bristol Cities = titties, i.e. breasts!