Psychoanalyst and broadcaster Michael Murphy has released a book for anybody who has ever woken up in a cold sweat dreaming they were running naked through O'Connell Street. Michael Murphy’s Book of Dreams: Unlock the Hidden Meaning of your Dreams takes some of the most common dream tropes and deciphers their messages. First of all though, Ray D'Arcy is curious to know if everybody dreams.
"Everybody dreams every night. You dream several times a night and rapid eye movement is the time you're actually dreaming and if you think about it, you'll often see the dog in front of the fire twitching. The dog’s dream. Horses dream. All the higher animals dream and it obviously has some survival mechanism."
Freud called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious" and Michael says that if you get an invitation down that road, you shouldn't ignore it.
"When you have a vivid dream it can stay with you. You're meant to pay attention to that and the feeling that it leaves you with… Examine what that feeling is about and connect it to the drama that you were dreaming… The dream is the truth. We have difficulty with the truth. We are ambivalent, we deceive ourselves, we pretend to ourselves but you know the dream is pointing you towards the truth all the time."
So what truth does the dreaded Leaving Cert dream point us towards?
"You're back in your old desk and you can barely fit into it and all the young people, eighteen-year-olds, around you can do the maths questions… and you haven't a clue!… It's warning you're not prepared and you need to work… If you suddenly have this dream that panics you, it says, look, you really need to get your skates on."
What about the infamous naked-in-public dream?
"It means that you're out in public and you haven't enough security. You might be at work and you're revealing all about your home life to your colleagues and the dream is telling you, listen, you need to have some kind of privacy. Don't be sharing your innermost secrets with everybody."
Michael says that no matter how traumatic, our dreams are working for our good, trying to restore balance, bringing necessary messages to our attention – the more intense the dream, the more important the message. He also says that every dream, no matter how innocuous, has a sexual element, whether overt or otherwise.
"Sex is the most intimate thing you can do with somebody so a sexual dream means you're really trying to incorporate them in some way if it's their qualities or they're beautiful people or whatever. You would examine what the sex means in that context."
Dreams aside, Michael has some very exciting news to share. His partner Terry joined him on air to discuss last-minute nerves ahead of their wedding due to take place the very next day. After thirty-three years together, they're looking forward to finally tying the knot. While they have been civil partners since 2011, they're thrilled to be "going for the upgrade!"
"It's also paying homage to our fellow citizens who went out there and voted in an extraordinary way two years ago and we're sort of saying thank you, thank you, thank you and we're so pleased"
Click here for the full interview.