Dreams

Freud was the first one to really talk about dreams and how they are the door to our unconscious.  He believed that what we dreamed of is because of traumatic experiences that are going on such as being abused.  Even though Freud brought this theory to light in the 1900's there are still a large amount of therapist that still use this practice today.  I do believe that we as humans do dream of traumatic events that has happened in our lives even if we were not thinking about them before we went to bed.  Our unconscious mind comes out more when we are sleeping because we are in a different state of mind in my opinion.  Repressed memories comes up in dreams because as humans we repressed those painful memories to protect our sanity but when we are sleeping we do not have as much control over our memories.  This form of theory could work and get progress but you have to be careful because different therapist could interrupt the dreams differently which is why I do not believe that it should be solely what you rely on.  Some dreams that we have could be false memories because we could be watching television and start to dream about that but relate it to us, making us think that maybe that is a real memory when it in fact is not.  You have to be very careful when using this method.  The study that they conducted shined light on the fact that therapist could persuade people that things happened to them even if they do not remember them happening creating false memories.  Combining dream interruption with other therapy types would be most effective to the patient and therapist.