What does it mean to dream every night about the same person?

Does it happen to you often? This is the scientific explanation to this phenomenon of the unconscious.

The history of psychology, and especially of the psychoanalytic tradition initiated by Sigmund Freud, is closely related to the interpretation of dreams. This makes many people wonder what it means to dream every night with the same person, or at least with a relatively frequent frequency.or at least with a relatively high frequency.

To answer this question first it is necessary to understand what people like Freud understood that they were the dreams and what from the contemporary psychology linked to the neurosciences is understood by them.

Freud and the interpretation of dreams

For the father of psychoanalysis, dreams were a way in which the unconscious manifests itself indirectly in our thoughts. From this point of view, a good part of what we dream is actually a set of symbols about sensations and thoughts that have been confined to the unconscious because they are too stressful or unbearable to be processed by the conscious mind. that have been confined to the unconscious because they are too stressful or unbearable to be processed by the conscious mind.

According to Freud, a portion of the contents of the unconscious that our mind tries to repress so that their existence is not very noticeable are not themselves traumatic memories but desires and thoughts that must be hidden because of their immoral implications.

This has a lot to do with the theory of ego-structures, according to which there is an entity called the Ello linked to the most basic and emotional desires and impulses, another called the Super-ego. Superego which represents all the moral norms and impositions linked to the idea of perfection, and another one called the I which arbitrates the relationship between the other two so that we do not enter into crisis.

Thus, dreams could be expressing repressed desires, and this would be noticeable in the case of dreaming a lot about the same person.and this would be noticeable in the case of dreaming a lot about the same person.

Does this mean that there is sexual desire?

Although Freudian psychoanalysis is known for putting a lot of emphasis on human sexuality understood as psychological energy that motivates us to behave in a certain way and not in another, this does not imply that dreaming every night with the same person means that we desire it, from this psychodynamic tradition. For example, it could mean that we would like to take revenge on that person, or that this figure is actually the symbol that serves to represent an abstract idea.

That means that, from the psychoanalytic point of view, there is no single, simple and universal answer to the question of what it means to always dream about somebody. Historically, finding an answer was one of the main tasks of psychoanalysts, and this could mean that several sessions had to be spent until a conclusion was reached. In other words, it was examined on a case-by-case basis, since one of the characteristics of symbols is that they can be interpreted in an infinite number of possible ways.

Thus, to find the correct interpretation it was necessary to know the whole psychological background of a person until certain tendencies or reasonable explanations were detected from an analysis of the whole.

All this starting from the paradigm of psychoanalysis, of course. Now then... what does current psychology have to say about it?

A science-based interpretation

Contemporary psychology, unlike psychoanalysis, is based on the scientific method, which means that it aims to create scientific theories from falsifiable hypotheses. That means that all those explanations that are so abstract and imprecise that they cannot be refuted on the basis of contrasts with reality are rejected. And the psychoanalytic explanation of the human mind is highly abstract and based on assertions that cannot be demonstrated, as the philosopher of science Karl Popper criticized.

That is why, for the topic at hand, the explanation for the fact that we dream a lot about a person is relatively simple. We dream about that person because we keep his or her memory alive and often think about him or her or the concepts associated with him or her. or the concepts associated with them.

There are neither repressed desires, nor memories blocked by something called "consciousness": there is simply a phase of the dream in which memories of concepts already in our brain are "activated" in a relatively chaotic way, creating strange sequences of ideas. And, the more times the groups of neurons that "fire" at the same time to evoke a concept are activated, the more likely it is that this will occur again in the future.

A matter of attention

What happens in our dreams is not a reflection of our repressed desires, but, in a general sense, of what we attach importance to in an abstract sense. That is why, for example, in many of them we dream that our life or that of someone important is in danger, because death is something that worries us and that leaves a deep mark in our memory from experiences related to this concept. The same happens with the people close to us: we think a lot about them, and this is reflected in their frequency of appearance in our dreams. is reflected in the frequency of their appearance in our dreams.

Of course, the importance we give to these elements does not tell us anything about what we want to do or about those specific concerns that populate our mind, because that would require a part of our nervous system to "encode" coded messages that only manifest themselves when we sleep; something that makes no sense and is of no use.

So now you know: if you dream about a person a lot, don't worry about trying to unravel hidden meanings about possible traumas or desires that aren't really there. If there's nothing to indicate that you have a problem, chances are you don't; simple as that..