Dream
Analysis:
The
Exploration of the Subconscious Mind
A Brief History and Exploration into the Ages Old Attempt to Interpret Ourselves
Dreams
have always been a source of an enormous amount of philosophical and even
scientific speculation. They seem to take us to another world inside of
ourselves where our unconscious is laid bare. Some people believe that dreams
are prophetic and can reveal future events. Some say that dreams can tell you
about your body, and reveal the nature of illness and afflictions. Freud
believed that our dreams were representations of dark, unspeakable sexual
lusts. Others believe that dreams are just a recollection of the day in
abstract form. The oldest notion of dreams was that they were divine messages
or instructions from deities. There is an infinite array of ideas and theories
that have unfolded over the ages, yet we do not seem to be very much closer to
any certainty about the purpose or nature of dreams than we ever were. Perhaps
none of the theories are right, perhaps they are all partially right, or perhaps
there is no one right answer.
Dreams
happen when our sleeping mind becomes active as though it was awake, but the
body is paralyzed while dreaming, which is why we do not act out our dreams
physically. Contrary to popular belief, blind people do dream in spite of their
lack of sight, even those who are born blind, though what they see in their dreams are often different
from what most people are used to. Their other senses are depended on much
more, just as they are in the waking world. Some people dream in color, while
other people report that they only dream in black and white (PPA). The average person
spends six years of their life dreaming and has four to ten dreams each night.
Most animals are believed to dream as well. Some people can dream lucidly,
which means that you have more control over your dreams because you are aware
that you are dreaming. Lucid dreaming helps people remember what has been dreamt,
but most people forget 90% of what they dream within ten minutes of waking up
(Crowl).
Throughout
history dreams have been a source of mystery associated with magic and the
supernatural. Dreams were originally thought to be messages from the gods sent
to the people usually as a message of good fortune or a warning for some
misfortune to come. As far as historians
can tell, the attempt to interpret one’s dreams goes back at least as far as
the ancient Egyptians and they published books on some of the conclusions they came to
about the symbols often found in dreams.
In ancient Egypt there was a process called "dream
incubation", wherein a person having troubles in their life, would sleep
in a temple so that the gods would communicate with them through their dreams.
When they woke up the priest, called the Master of the Secret Things, would be
consulted for the interpretations of that person’s dreams (Thingquest).
Greeks were among many who believed that dreams
were messages from the gods, and were the means by which the divine beings
communicated their wishes to mortal men. Greeks spoke in terms of seeing a dream rather than having a dream as we do. The belief in
the divine source of dreams was adopted by the ancient Greeks, and then by the
Romans. Such sentiments are reflected in works like The Odyssey in which Homer declares the presence of two gates from
the underworld admitting dreams to mortals, one of horn and one of ivory, that
were responsible for truthful and misleading dreams. Dream-oracles were common,
wherein people were subjected to dream incubation in the hopes of receiving a
prophetic dream much like the ancient Egyptians. In the cult of Asclepius, such
practices were a part of medical treatment (Barbera).
Democritus
is best known for being the first to conceive the notion that the universe is
composed of atoms. According to Democritus, all things release a constant
stream of “eidola”, or fast-moving layers of atoms. He believed that the effect
of eidola on the soul was responsible for dreams. Democritus said that, “The
eidola penetrate bodies through their pores and when they come up again cause
people to see things in their sleep; they come from things of every kind,
artifact, clothes, plants, but especially from animals, because of the quantity
of motion and heat they contain” (Barbera 907). By his reasoning, dreams are
externally created from the energy permeated from objects and people we come
into contact with. Democritus had the most naturalistic approach to dream philosophy
at this point in history (Thinkquest).
Aristotle
was one of the first who rejected the idea that dreams were messages from the
gods. Aristotle suggested that dreams are the work of perception, but only of
its imagining ability (Barbera). He studied
the dreaming process in a rational way, and in his De divinatione per somnum, he stated that "most so-called
prophetic dreams are to be classed as mere coincidences," and then he went
on to write that "the most skillful interpreter of dreams is he who has
the faculty of absorbing resemblances. I
mean that dream presentations are analogous to the forms reflected in water"
(Thinkquest n.p.). Aristotle suggested
that dreams are a reflection of the day’s events. Aristotle also believed that
someone’s dreams could reflect the condition of the dreamer’s health. This idea
proposed that doctors could make diagnoses based on someone’s dreams. Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine
supported this theory, and there are still some doctors today who believe this
theory has validity to it (Thingquest).
Around the early nineteenth century Europeans
started becoming wildly fascinated by dreams again and Robert Cross is credited
with starting the dream craze. He
published a very successful book, The
Royal Book of Dreams under the pen name Raphael. Later a French doctor by the name of Alfred
Maury led the way into modern dream interpretation. He is said to have studied over 3000
different dreams and their symbols. He
believed that external stimuli are the catalyst to all of our dreams
(Thingquest).
Sigmund
Freud is one of the most well-known people from the nineteenth century to have
tried their hand at interpreting dreams and building a dream philosophy. He
considered his book, The Interpretation
of Dreams to be the most significant contribution he made to the field of
psychology. He said that “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to
knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Hergenhahn and Olson 46).
He believed that although dreams may be prompted by external stimuli,
wish-fulfillment was the most important aspect of our dreams. Freud's idea was
that our dreams were reflections of our deep, hidden yearnings going back to
our childhood. No dream was superficial
to Freud; they all held significant meanings and most of those meanings were
related somehow to sexuality (Thingquest).
Freud
insisted that dreams served the purposes of releasing psychic tension caused by
unconscious desires and of preventing sleep from being disrupted. Freud said
that:
One of the most common types of
dream-formation may be described as follows: a train of thoughts has been
aroused by the working of the mind in the daytime. During the night this train
of thoughts succeeds in finding connections with one of the unconscious
tendencies present ever since his childhood in the mind of the dreamer, but
ordinarily repressed and excluded from his conscious life. By the borrowed
force of this unconscious help, the thoughts, the residue of the day’s work,
now become active again, and emerge into consciousness in the shape of a dream.
(Moorcroft 200)
Freud
believed that symbols in dreams are usually condensed and/or displaced. Condensation
occurs when a symbol in a dream has multiple meanings. Displacement occurs when
symbols stand for something that is otherwise unacceptable or shameful to the
dreamer’s conscious mind so it takes the form of something else. For example,
Freud often interpreted long, cylindrical items in dreams such as poles, trees,
tall buildings, or baseball bats in dreams as being phallic symbols. Round
objects like balls, bags, melons, or hills Freud saw as being symbolic of
breasts (Hergenhaun and Olson). However, Freud’s theories about dream
interpretation may well have been best suited for Freud himself. Considering
his own preoccupation with sex and sexuality, it would make sense that many of
his dreams were in fact indicative of repressed sexual desires. This may not be
true of every dreamer though.
Even though Carl Jung was a student of Freud’s
for a long time, he disagreed with his idea that erotic urges were the basis of
most of our dreams. In 1913 Jung split from his correspondence with Freud when
his views started taking on a radically different form from his mentor’s. To Jung, dreams are intended to be used for
psychological self-healing to enhance emotional balance and over all well-being
(Moorcroft). Jung believed that dreams
reminded us of our aspirations, which allows us to understand the things we intuitively
long for, and aids us to achieve our own desires. While Freud believed that the desires from
our dreams are too outrageous for reality, and thus are concealed in the
subconscious as a form of repression, Jung believed that dreams are messages to
ourselves, and from ourselves, and that we must understand to them for our own
benefit. Freud did not believe that anyone could interpret their own dreams
either, while Jung believed it not only possible, but vital to do so. Most
psychologists today seem to place more credence on Jung's theory, which is a
far more positive view of dreams and makes dream interpretation something useful
to our everyday lives (Thingquest).
Alfred
Adler was also one of Freud’s students who differed on Freud’s theories over
time. He theorized that the emphasis of dreams is on the dreamer’s routine and
relate to the dreamer’s daily existence. Psychotherapists can use dreams to
learn of an individual’s characteristics philosophies, behaviors, and outlooks,
and free association, he said, should be used for looking at the emotional
context of the dream. However, in solving actual problems dreams are
usually ineffectual in Adler’s eyes because they are self-protective fantasies,
meaning that they reinforce the dreamers’ preconceived notions of self-worth. This
is a subconscious form of ego defense. Interpretation of dreams can be helpful
to see failures that are in need of work. However, according to Adler, dream
interpretation requires a trained therapist, and the interpretation process is
more of an art without structure rather than anything that could be analyzed
with exact scientific logic. He believed that dreams anticipates the imminent
future, yet seldom are specific solutions for personal problems carried from a
dream to waking life, so in a sense, dreams fail. Contrary to Jung, Adler
believed there are no universal symbols in dream (Moorcroft).
According
to Thomas French and Erika Fromm, every dream is an unconscious interpretation
of a real personal conflict. The remembered dream exposes what the conflict is
and in what way the dreamer is attempting to resolve it. They both believed
that interpretation required a trained professional with empathetic
imaginations who can take into account the unique personality of the dreamer
when trying to make conclusions regarding a dream’s meaning. Whether the
interpretation is deemed successful or not depends primarily on the dreamer and
their comfort and confidence that the therapist is correct in their
interpretation (Moorcroft).
A
psychologist at Brock University in Canada named Harry Hunt took a broader
approach than many other psychologists preceding him by maintaining that there
are many types of dreams. Personal-mnemic dreams contain ordinary matters from
the dreamer’s waking life. Medical-somatic dreams reveal potential
health-related issues, particularly illness. Prophetic dreams are said to foretell
the future. Archetypal-spiritual dreams are encounters with supernatural forces
and they are especially intense and overpowering, often supplemented by strong
perceptions. Nightmares are just terrifying and upsetting reflections of personal
fears. Lucid dreams occur when one is conscious of dreaming while in the dream,
which usually allows for more freedom of choice in the dream (Moorcroft).
Some
of these kinds of dreams occur regularly, such as the personal-mnemic dreams,
while others, such as the archetypal-spiritual dreams, are rare but typically
intense and not likely to occur in a sleep laboratory. Each kind of dream has
its own arrangement of cognitive processes and different purposes. Hunt also says
that dreams are not limited to being either stories or imagery because they are
both. He took a holistic view and claimed that the study of dreaming should
take evidence from a myriad of sources. For Hunt, dream statistics come primarily
from anthropological studies, dream diaries, and distinctive dreams that tend
to be noticed and easily recalled. He believed that dreams people have at home,
not the ones from the lab, really tell what dreaming is all about (Moorcroft).
Some
psychologists use dreams in an attempt to treat those suffering from severe
cases of addiction. It has been found that many insights can be made from the
dreams of an addicted mind. For instance “relapse-pending dreams” usually
involve dreams wherein the dreamer is using their substance of choice. They are
associated with the pleasure from consuming followed by distress upon awakening
to find that they are not high:
The
sobriety-affirming dreams are associated with guilt, worry in the dream and
afterwards, and relief upon awakening. On the one hand, pleasure or acceptance
in the dream, and/or disappointment upon awakening that it was just a dream
warns of high relapse potential; that is the dreamer is still heavily allied
with the addiction. However, reporting such a dream to the therapist reflects
and will support the other side of the patient’s ambivalence. The therapist
might work with the client about his or her ambivalent motivation. Such dreams
can be part of the mourning process of recovery. (Flowers and Zweben 197)
Psychologists
who use dreams in addiction therapy also teach clients to interpret their own
dreams. Giving patients the ability to translate their dreams allows them to
monitor their own needs in recovery without the presence of a therapist being
necessary. This relieves the inconvenience of not always having a therapist
present as well as gives the client a sense of power and control over their own
healing process. Using these inexpensive psychodynamic methods to aid a
person’s psychological well-being are far preferable to the increasing use of
medication as a less expensive treatment, which is not always appropriate in
addiction recovery (Flowers and Zweben).
Gillian
Finocan created a study that looked into what role dreams had in women’s lives
in particular. The study was designed to better understand the different ways
in which women try to understand their dreams and the effects of such
techniques. This study focused on self-help books verses face-to-face support
groups called “dream groups” which are gatherings of people who share and
attempt to interpret dreams for themselves and others. Her conclusions were
that, though a great number of women seek self-help books to help them
interpret their dreams, these books usually fail to do the job intended.
Instead, they create disappointment and frustration so the user eventually
loses interest altogether (Fincan).
This
study claims that dream groups are a far more satisfactory method for
interpreting dreams and helping them play a more central role in women’s lives.
It takes time to gain trust within the group, so at first amusing and
light-hearted dreams were the dreams shared. The dreams with more intense
emotions could were reserved for when the dream group had developed more of a
relationship with each other. She states that sharing in a group is more
effective at producing fulfilling conclusions as to the nature and meaning of
each other’s dreams and can more objectively take into account the subjects’
unique personalities. Her conclusions of the study emphasize a real personal, human
element being necessary for a more detailed and accurate understanding of one’s
dream world (Fincan).
Some
books and theorists attempt to concretely establish that the symbols in dreams
are mostly universal, thus can be interpreted. This seems like a far-fetched
notion since each person’s frame of reference is entirely unique. For instance,
Russell Grant in his book The Illustrated
Dream Dictionary states that cats in dreams are a bad omen that means a
lover is unfaithful, illness is coming, or romantic disappointment for men.
However, these symbolic implications are greatly based on traditional, cultural
preconceptions that are not applicable to many people (Grant). To people who
have and adore cats in their home, this symbolism could represent trust, home,
comfort, or something entirely different. Cultural and personal implications can
change the meanings of symbols in dreams drastically. For example, in Buddhism
the horse is symbolic of energy and effort of practicing dharma. Horses
symbolize the air or “prana” which channels through the body and is the vehicle
of the mind and the "Wind-Horse" is symbolic of the mind (Choskyi). However,
in Celtic regions horses were associated with war, victory, longevity, and
fertility (Noodén). The personal meaning an individual has towards a symbol
needs to be taken into account for an accurate interpretation.
Dr. Volney Gay, a professor of psychiatry,
anthropology and religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and believes
that symbols like horses can be
interpreted but that "It's important to look at the dream in the context
of what you're feeling during the dream and as you remember it” (Braeuner n.p.).
He believes that a dream in which you're feeling the jubilant freedom of riding
a horse in a dream naturally means something completely different than being
trampled by a raging stampede of horses. In other words, the symbol has to be
taken in context with the dreamer and the details in the rest of the dream. He
also believes that sometimes dreams are just reflections of the previous day’s
thoughts and experiences. Gay said, "For example, we may have a discussion
about a movie, and I may dream about a character or situation from that movie
when I sleep” (Braeuner n.p.).
For
centuries the dream world has been a fascination for all of mankind, and I
doubt the obsession shall ever cease. Dreams have been a source for academic
speculation, philosophical wonder, and artistic inspiration for countless
people throughout human history. Attempts have been made to try and make sense
of our dreams, which seem so otherworldly and illogical much of the time, but
perhaps there is no way to make a solid interpretation of the elements in
dreams because we can never fully take into account the impact of the
individual’s subjective reality. There is no one theory that fits for every
individual and the dreams that they have. To have any hope of understanding the
significance of one’s dreams, the unique personality of the individual needs to
be taken into account. However, our dreams are most certainly passageways into
the complex labyrinth of secret or unknown thoughts, desires, and fears. Dreams
are doorways into the soul, if you will, and we should seek to understand them
so that we may better understand ourselves.
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Braeuner,
Shellie. "Dreams About Horses: Dream Meanings Explained." Huffinton
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Choskyi,
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