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Perchance... To Dream
You are sitting on a boat next to two other people. The one to your left looks over to you and informs you that you are naked. Next thing you know, you are standing in the middle of a jungle which resembles the backyard of your uncle's house. Everyone else is naked and they are carrying jello molds. So what does this mean? If it happened while you were awake, you may have some serious problems, but, most likely this scenario, or one like it, would arise in a dream. So what do dreams mean? Well, that depends on who you ask. A Freudian analyst would tell you that the dream represents a subconscious wish. A Jungian analyst would most likely tell you that the characters in your dream represents archetypes. However, psychology is not the only field that studies dreams. You might talk to a proponent of the Activiation-synthesis model of dreaming, a recent biological approach, who would assure you that the dream was nothing more than random firings of neurons in the brain stem, and that it carries no significance at all. Of course, if you are religious you might want to speak to your spiritual leader. Whether you are a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist or Jewish, to name a few, your faith may lead you to look deep into your dream for signs of communication from higher sources. For the more New Age thinker, there are many books to interpret what each element of your dream symbolizes, which are based on an amalgam of ancient Western and Eastern beliefs. So where does this leave you? At one time or another you will be wondering, "what did that dream mean?". If there are so many different answers to the same question, how will you ever figure out which one is right? Don't be under the impression that you will find a right answer. Thinkers dating back to Aristotle have grappled with the issue in one way or another. Experimentation has been preformed, both psychological and biological, yet no one can definitively state what purpose dreams serve, or what they mean. Since there is no one answer to the question of dream interpretation, the best you can hope for is to learn about several of the existing approaches and determine what you will choose to believe.
All of the approaches to understanding dreams reflect the movement of societal thought. The initial beliefs involved gods, temples, and faith. At the times when the cultural beliefs on dreams were established the explanations for most worldly events involved these elements. As time passed society, particularly Western society, became more individual oriented. With this came the psychological approaches to dreams. These approaches reflect the general tenets of the psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They look for answers to the workings of the human psyche by delving into the subconscious, which was presumed to be shaped by either childhood experiences, repressed desires, or a collective unconscious. Finally, the scientific approaches to dreaming represent the current worldwide trend of using technology to provide solid data which can then be incorporated into hypotheses which view dreaming as another function of evolution.
Historical Cultural Perspectives on Dreams
It is probably safe to assume that every culture in the history of mankind has had views and beliefs regarding dreams. It is certainly true of some of the most prominent Western civilizations of the past including the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews, and early Christians.
Ancient Egyptians viewed dreams as messages from divinities and used them to predict the future. The importance of dreams in their culture is obviated by physical evidence which remains today, including the Sphinx which had been partially buried in sand, and was unearthed by Pharaoh Thutmose IV as a response to a dream in which a divinity told him to do so. In Egypt several temples to Serapis, the god of dreams, still remain intact. People would come to these temples to sleep with the intention of receiving a dream from the gods that would answer a particularly important question they had. This practice, known as incubation, was widespread in the ancient world. Additionally, the oldest extant work on the interpretation of dreams is the comes from ancient Egypt. Written on Papyrus circa 2000 BC, the book contains two parts. The first is a list of dreams which portend a good outcome and the second is a list of dreams which prophecy ill fortunes.
The ancient Greeks had what is considered the most complex lore of dreams. The beliefs of the Ancient Greeks often overlap with the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, as well as numerous other civilizations of their time. Dreams were broken down into two fundamental categories; true and false. Within the class of true dreams several distinctions existed. One class is the horama, or visions, which predict the future through symbolism, and can not be understood without interpretation. Another class of significant dreams are the Chrematismos, or oracles, which reveal without symbolism what will or will not happen, or what should or should not be done. Like the Egyptians, Ancient Greeks also believed that their dreams were messages from the gods. the largest and most complete compilation of dreams to survive from the ancient world is The Interpretation of Dreams , written in the second century by Artemidorus of Daldis. The author spent years traveling and studying the dreams of those he met in order to develop rules regarding the portents of dreams. The book is like an encyclopedia which lists thousands of possible dreams, and how to interpret them as omens. Dreams were also viewed as a source of healing, and many ancient Greeks would go to dream temples to incubate dreams in order to heal themselves.
The Chinese notion of dreams is rooted in the distinction they make between the material soul, which regulates the mechanical body, and the spiritual soul, which, among other functions, creates dreams. The spiritual soul, according to traditional belief, leaves the body when it is sleeping and travels to other realms where it encounters other souls - both the souls that are still attached to sleeping material bodies and the departed souls of those whose bodies have died. As with several of the aforementioned Western societies, the Chinese practices dream incubation, . Until the sixteenth century government officials were required to visit dram temples to to receive guidance and insight prior to making important decisions.
Religious Perspectives on Dreams
One of the most common means of communication between God and the ancient Israelites, according to the Old Testament, was through dreams. The bible contains numerous accounts of dreams which predicted future events for the people of Israel. For the biblical Jews dreams had the function of summoning up events from the past and opening channels into the future. There were two types of dream accounts in Israel, auditory message dreams and symbolic message dreams. These are the divisions found more generally in the Near East. Unlike most other ancient peoples the Jews did not try to incubate dreams, believing that this practice would lead to false divinations.
Early Christians gave dreams a mixed review. While they felt that God sometimes communicated through dreams, these communications were given less credit than the ones that occurred while waking. Hence symbolic dreams were taken less seriously than waking visions. They were also careful to note that dreams were often no more than eruption of irrational emotions. However, there are also accounts of early Christians being converted after a vision came to them while dreaming. Essentially, the early Christian view on dreams displayed balance.
Though Buddhism has no supreme divinity, it is still believed that dreams can represent messages from divine agencies. For example the earliest Buddhist scriptures tell the story of how the future///buddha's mother had a dream in which four kings carried her bed to a mountain peak where four queens greeted her with jewels and escorted her to a place of gold. There a white elephant with six ivory tusks painlessly pierced her side. She awoke and realized that she had immaculately conceived. In The Questions of King Milanda, an early Buddhist text, it is said that people who dream do so either under the influence of a deity, under the influence of their experiences, or the dream is a prophetic. However, in the Theravadin tradition of Buddhism dreams were regarded as resulting from worldly attachments, and thus considered distracting.
Tibetan Buddhists, on the other hand, have developed some of the most fascinating beliefs and practices regarding dreams. Buddhist tantras (texts dealing with techniques and rituals, including meditative and sexual practices) assert that there are four states; waking, dream, deep sleep, and "the state beyond the first three."Through techniques practices by Tibetan Lamas this fourth state, which is a combination of the other three is reached. In addition, lucid dreaming, in which one is aware of the act that they are dreaming is discussed in a number of ancient Tibetan Buddhist texts, and it is one of the six yogas performed by some Tibetan Buddhists. Overall, the Tibetan Buddhist approach to dreaming is incredibly proactive. In order to reach higher spirituality they master their own minds through meditation and controlled dreaming.
Many religions deal with the subject of dreams in one way or another. The three religions discussed have some commonalites, and some obvious differences. The Judeo-Christian beliefs that dreams are communications from God, and that they may prophesize the future overlap with Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. However, the Tibetan Buddhists active approach to dreaming is quite unique. One common belief between these religions, and others is that the coming of their great prophets was believed to have been foretold in dreams.
It may be difficult for the modern thinker to accept these approaches to dreaming. They involve great leaps of faith and operate under many assumptions that no longer apply today in our current society. The Greeks and Egyptians also believed in large pantheons of gods who played direct roles in human affairs, something which seems unbelievable to our mostly monotheistic ways of thought. But no one has yet to prove that these ancient gods are any less real than the God most Western religions worship. Similarly, there is no evidence to suggest that their methods for interpreting dreams are any more or less valid than those that followed them. It is also obvious that the people who followed most of these ancient practices gained greatly from their dream experiences and found ways to incorporate them into their waking lives.
Psychological Approaches to Dreaming
One common skeptical response to religion is that it is the "opiate of the people". Essentially, these skeptics are saying that religion gives people a sense of order in a chaotic world, thus keeping them relatively content. The problem, then, with religious views is that they require faith. As time passed, and society progressed, we developed new ways of approaching our questions which relied less on faith. Indeed, many established beliefs were overturned. One common example is the Christian notion of people being possessed by demons. We have since learned that people who once would have been deemed possessed suffer from various psychological disorders such as schizophrenia. Psychology is one of the fields of science that looks to find new answers to old questions regarding the workings of the human mind. Naturally dreams, and the interpretation of their meaning came under Psychology's gaze. As with religion, there are many different schools of psychological thought. As a field psychology continues to change constantly. However, it is still strongly influenced by the research and opinions of Sigmund Freud and his student Carl Jung, each of whom studied dreams extensively to gain insight into the human psyche.
The Freudian Approach
The importance that Freud afforded dreams is obviated by his statement that dreams are "the royal road" to the unconscious. the underlying principle behind Freud's theory on dreams is that they represent wishes. He felt that the purpose of dreams is to allow us to satisfy the instinctual urges that society causes us to repress. The reason that our dreams are so cryptic, according to Freud's theory, is that the strong emotions that would be evoked by the literal fulfillment of these desires in our dreams would cause us to awaken. To avoid this a part of the mind, which Freud called the censor, transforms dream content ion order to disguise their true meaning. This censorship process was referred to as the dreamwork. There were five processes brought into play during dreamwork:
1.displacement . The repression of an urge which is then redirected to another object or person. For example, one might dream of their brother's car getting crushed rather than dream of their brother being murdered, because the latter would be too traumatic and cause the dreamer to wake.
2. symbolization . The repressed urge is acted out in a symbolic manner. For example, inserting a key into a hole might have a sexual meaning.
3. condensation . A process which disguises a thought or urge by contracting it into a brief dream event or image, the meaning of which is not readily evident.
4. projection . The tendency of the mind to project our repressed desires onto other people. For example, the dreamer might imagine a sibling of the same sex acting out the dreamer's own desires.
5. secondary revision . This is Freud's final stage of dream production. After undergoing one or more of the aforementioned dreamwork processes the ego reorganizes the dream so that it has a comprehensible surface meaning rather than being a random mix of bizarre images. This surface meaning is known as the manifest dream. Through psychoanalysis Freud hoped to decode the manifest dream in order to reach the latent dream, which he believed held the hidden meaning.
The Jungian Approach to Dreaming
Carl Gustav Jung is the second-most influential thinker in the field of psychoanalysis. He had been a student of Freud's but following a falling out between , they parted ways. Like his mentor, Jung felt that dreams were extremely important in terms of revealing the inner workings of an individual's psyche. He also believed that that the unconscious was particularly important in understanding the human psyche. Jung, however, divided the subconscious into two categories, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, which is a storehouse of myths and symbols which all human beings have access. Jungian dream analysis was a process of helping e dreamer to understand messages from the unconscious the unconscious.
In order to understand how Jung went about understanding the unconscious it is necessary to understand his model of the psyche. The ego represents one's self image. This self is created at the expense of certain traits which the individual had to reject in order to be accepted in society. These rejected traits come together as a counter-ego which Jung called the shadow. Another portion of the Jungian model of the psyche is the anima. This is the set of feminine personality traits that are repressed in men. The female equivalent is called the animus. Jung believed that each of these parts of the personality could appear in dreams, in various forms. The anima/animus would often be a guiding presence, while the shadow would appear as a person of the same sex in dreams. Both the shadow and the anima/animus were viewed by Jung as potential personality traits that the ego could adopt, and that is why they would come forward from the subconscious in dreams.
Jung theorized that dreams serve two functions. They compensate for internal imbalances and they assist in the individuation process by providing the dreamer with prospective images of the future. There were also two types of dreams; objective and subjective. In objective dreams the images are of the dreamer's daily life. In subjective dreams the images are of the dreamers inner life and the actors in such dreams are the personifications of the dreamers thoughts and feelings.
Another important aspect of Jungian dream analysis is the archetype. It is intertwined with his belief in the collective unconscious. He felt that the collective human experience existed in the form of archetypes which predispose us to organize our personal experiences in certain ways. Concrete manifestations of archetypes are referred to as archetypal images. Jung discovered that the dreams of his patients often contained certain images which were completely unfamiliar to the dreamer, but which seemed to reflect symbols which could be found somewhere in mythology or folklore Jung felt that once he learned the meaning of these symbols it helped him to better understand the dream.
Freud and Jung offer two more vantage points on dream interpretation. Though they differ significantly, they also resemble each other in some ways, and even seem to have some commonalites with the beliefs discussed in the previous section. Both theories revolve around the concept of the subconscious interacting with the conscious mind through dreams. Both also though that dreams were one of the most accessible means to understanding the human psyche. Obviously there are weaknesses to these approaches as well. The best evidence for that is the very fact that they disagree with each other in many places. The psychological approaches also do not allow for the possibility of certain dreams having no meaning, something that every other approach accepts. Fundamentally, Freud and Jung both attributed dream production to our own inner minds, as opposed to outside forces, as in the ancient beliefs, or internal chemistry, as with scientific approached. Those who give credence to psychoanalytic theory could find Freudian and Jungian dream analysis to be plausible and helpful as a tool, but it is important to remember that even psychology questions the views of these two founding fathers today.
Scientific Approaches to Dreaming
The study of dreams was long considered somewhat disreputable for scientists. However, following the Nathaniel Kleitman's 1953 discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the brain state in which dreaming occurs, the door to legitimate scientific studies on dreams was opened. There are many different models for dreaming floating around the scientific world today. Most of them are based in physiology, biology, and psychology. the studies are now performed in special dream laboratories.
The Activation-Synthesis Model
Of the recent dream models the most prominent is the activation-synthesis model, proposed by Hobson and McCarley in 1977. This model treated dreams as a purely physiological phenomenon. The model suggests that dreams reflect memories and associations elicited from the neocortex and associated structures by random firings of neurons in in the brain stem. The resulting electrical activity in the brain would cause a series of random, senseless images and emotions to arise. This is the activation stage of the process. In the synthesis stage, the higher mental centers, faced with a barrage of senseless information, would attempt to make order from the chaos, thus producing whatever narrative structure dreams have. Initially Hobson and McCarley proposed that dreams were inherently meaningless images.
The Reverse Learning Model
In 1983 Crick and Mitchinson developed a reverse learning scheme to account for dreams. The scheme proposed that dreams are produced by random stimuli projected to the cortex from the brain stem. These random stimuli produce random activation of cortical neural networks as well as day residue of superfluous thoughts. The random activation of these networks facilitates the deactivation of these associations through refreshing network links and thud rids the mind of of super fluos thoughts. In other words; we dream to forget. The Crick and Mitchinson scheme accounts for what is bizarre in dreams but it fails to account for dreams with highly complex narratives, which are clearly not random. For this reason Crick and Mitchinson revised their dream theory in 1986 to exclude narrative dreams, which do not fit their hypothesis.
The Strategic Rehearsal Theory
The strategic rehearsal theory begins with the observation that the majority of mammals display a prominent electroencephalographic signature when in situations highly salient to survival. The signature cycle is designated theta rhythm and it is characterized by a 5 -cycle- per second, high amplitude wave form. Cats display theta rhythm during predation, rabbits when apprehensive, and rats, during exploration. In his milestone research Vanderwolf showed that the theta rhythm also occurs during periods of rapid eye movement, that is, during periods of sleep that also correspond to dream periods in humans. In a series of papers in 1972 Jonathan Winson argued that the occurrence if theta rhythms is a species specific response contingent upon a species predominant adaptive strategy. During dreams the animal reinstates that rhythm so that a link exists between the species' predominant adaptive strategy and it dream dream activity. In other words, dreams are employed to rehearse , consolidate, and enact a species-specific adaptive strategy.
Overall, the scientific approaches to dreams have deemphasized the importance of interpreting dreams. Though there are new studies being conducted on dreaming they all tend to accept some aspects of the preexisting scientific theories put forward on dreams. It has been generally accepted that the key role of dreams is in the organization of affect, emotion, intention, and general adaptive strategy. One can find flaws in each and all of the different approaches to understanding dreams. The cultural approaches seem almost antiquated in modern society, and they involve elements of mysticism which many people are unwilling to accept today.One can easily disregard the psychological approaches as being too formulaic. The scientific approaches to understanding dreams tend to disregard the power of the dream experience over the individual dreamer by trivializing the whole phenomenon, and making it seem as if the content of dreams is basically irrelevant. On the other hand it is almost impossible to disregard any of these hypotheses on dreaming. Even the most steadfast adherents to scientific beliefs must occasionally wake up from a dream fearing that it may have been a prophesy, or curious about what a particular dream might have revealed about them self. However, it is just as likely that a psychoanalyst, trying to interpret the meaning of a dream according to Jungian or Freudian methods of analysis, and unable to find any true meaning in the dream might be tempted to dismiss a particular dream as being a completely random phenomenon. The different dream models allow us to choose how we will view our own individual dreams. It isn't necessary to strictly adhere to any one of them, if you don't fully believe in it. It is probably best to try and figure out for yourself what, if anything, your dreams are telling you. If something inside of you makes you believe that your dream is sending you a message from another plain of reality, go on and embrace that romantic notion.
Until science can find a way to prove that there is no reality besides the one we can see it is perfectly reasonable to believe that somehow dreams allow you to communicate with such a place. If you wake up in the morning and feel as though you have just looked through a window into your own subconscious, then, by all means, take that new insight and make it work for you. And if you can't make anything of your night visions, then just toss it up to random firings of neurons and adaptive strategies at work inside of the organic machine you call yourself. Beliefs rgarding dreams are very much like religous beliefs. They may be irrational or unprovable but somehow, they make sense to the believer.
Science will look for ways to prove things to the rational human mind, yet nothing they have found so far can prove or disprove the existence of heaven, God, or angels. However, it is the public, and popular opinion which decide when scientific evidence becomes strong enough to overturn our convictions. Perhaps, as they continue to research dreams they will find more solid evidence to back up their theories. It is usually difficult to discount the opinions of science once the scientists themselves come into agreement on a particular subject, since they are skeptical by trade, and not easily convinced of anything. (For example take Darwinism, which is slowly being accepted by even the last holdouts of the religous community.) This has not hapened yet with dreams, though. Until it does (if it does at all) the public jury has the right to decide what it will believe. The diverse and stalwart nature of public opinion is a tremendous factor in pushing scientists to take their research further. So go, take a nap, and see what you think.
