Dream interpretation
Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. In many ancient societies, such as those of Egypt and Greece, dreaming was considered a supernatural communication or a means of divine intervention, whose message could be interpreted by people with these associated spiritual powers. In the modern era, various schools of psychology and neurobiology have offered theories about the meaning and purpose of dreams.
History
Early civilizations
The ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia have left evidence of dream interpretation dating back to at least 3100 BC. Throughout Mesopotamian history, dreams were always held to be extremely important for divination and Mesopotamian kings paid close attention to them. Gudea, the king of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, rebuilt the temple of Ningirsu as a result of a dream in which he was told to do so. Gudea dreamed of a huge and powerful figure who looked part god, part bird, and part storm, with lions beside him to show his strength. This figure told Gudea to build a temple, but Gudea did not fully understand the message. Ningirsu also promised to send gentle rain and good weather so the building would be successful, which shows that people at the time believed dreams were important messages that came during sleep when the mind was quiet and open.The standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh contains numerous accounts of the prophetic power of dreams. First, Gilgamesh himself has two dreams foretelling the arrival of Enkidu. In one of these dreams, Gilgamesh sees an axe fall from the sky. The people gather around it in admiration and worship. Gilgamesh throws the axe in front of his mother Ninsun and then embraces it like a wife. Ninsun interprets the dream to mean that someone powerful will soon appear. Gilgamesh will struggle with him and try to overpower him, but he will not succeed. Eventually, they will become close friends and accomplish great things. She concludes, "That you embraced him like a wife means he will never forsake you. Thus your dream is solved." Later in the epic, Enkidu dreams about the heroes' encounter with the giant Humbaba. Dreams were also sometimes seen as a means of seeing into other worlds and it was thought that the soul, or some part of it, moved out of the body of the sleeping person and actually visited the places and persons the dreamer saw in his or her sleep. In Tablet VII of the epic, Enkidu recounts to Gilgamesh a dream in which he saw the gods Anu, Enlil, and Shamash condemn him to death. He also has a dream in which he visits the Underworld.
The Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II built a temple to Mamu, possibly the god of dreams, at Imgur-Enlil, near Kalhu. The later Assyrian king Ashurbanipal had a dream during a desperate military situation in which his divine patron, the goddess Ishtar, appeared to him and promised that she would lead him to victory. The Babylonians and Assyrians divided dreams into "good," which were sent by the gods, and "bad," sent by demons. A surviving collection of dream omens entitled Iškar Zaqīqu records various dream scenarios as well as prognostications of what will happen to the person who experiences each dream, apparently based on previous cases. Some list different possible outcomes, based on occasions in which people experienced similar dreams with different results. Dream scenarios mentioned include a variety of daily work events, journeys to different locations, family matters, sex acts, and encounters with human individuals, animals, and deities.
In ancient Egypt, priests acted as dream interpreters. Hieroglyphics depicting dreams and their interpretations are evident. Dreams have been held in considerable importance throughout history by most cultures.
Classical Antiquity
The ancient Greeks constructed temples they called Asclepieions, where sick people were sent to be cured. It was believed that cures would be effected through divine grace by incubating dreams within the confines of the temple. Dreams were also considered prophetic or omens of particular significance. Artemidorus of Daldis, who lived in the 2nd century AD, wrote a comprehensive text Oneirocritica. Although Artemidorus believed that dreams can predict the future, he presaged many contemporary approaches to dreams. He thought that the meaning of a dream image could involve puns and could be understood by decoding the image into its component words. For example, Alexander, while waging war against the Tyrians, dreamt that a satyr was dancing on his shield. Artemidorus reports that this dream was interpreted as follows: satyr = sa tyros, predicting that Alexander would be triumphant. Freud acknowledged this example of Artemidorus when he proposed that dreams be interpreted like a rebus.Middle Ages
In medieval Islamic psychology, certain hadiths indicate that dreams consist of three parts, and early Muslim scholars recognized three kinds of dreams: false, pathogenic, and true. Ibn Sirin was renowned for his Ta'bir al-Ru'ya and Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tabir al-Ahlam, a book on dreams. The work is divided into 25 sections on dream interpretation, from the etiquette of interpreting dreams to the interpretation of reciting certain Surahs of the Qur'an in one's dream. He writes that it is important for a layperson to seek assistance from an alim who could guide in the interpretation of dreams with a proper understanding of the cultural context and other such causes and interpretations. Al-Kindi also wrote a treatise on dream interpretation: On Sleep and Dreams. In consciousness studies, Al-Farabi wrote the On the Cause of Dreams, which appeared as chapter 24 of his Book of Opinions of the people of the Ideal City. It was a treatise on dreams, in which he was the first to distinguish between dream interpretation and the nature and causes of dreams. In The Canon of Medicine, Avicenna extended the theory of temperaments to encompass "emotional aspects, mental capacity, moral attitudes, self-awareness, movements and dreams." Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah states that "confused dreams" are "pictures of the imagination that are stored inside by perception and to which the ability to think is applied, after has retired from sense perception."Ibn Shaheen states: "Interpretations change their foundations according to the different conditions of the seer, so seeing handcuffs during sleep is disliked but if a righteous person sees them it can mean stopping the hands from evil". Ibn Sirin said about a man who saw himself giving a sermon from the mimbar: "He will achieve authority and if he is not from the people who have any kind of authority it means that he will be crucified".
China
A standard traditional Chinese book on dream-interpretation is the Lofty Principles of Dream Interpretation compiled in the 16th century by Chen Shiyuan. Chinese thinkers also raised profound ideas about dream interpretation, such as the question of how we know we are dreaming and how we know we are awake. It is written in the Chuang-tzu: "Once Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly. He fluttered about happily, quite pleased with the state that he was in, and knew nothing about Chuang Chou. Presently he awoke and found that he was very much Chuang Chou again. Now, did Chou dream that he was a butterfly or was the butterfly now dreaming that he was Chou?"Modern Europe
In the 17th century, the English physician and writer Sir Thomas Browne wrote a short tract upon the interpretation of dreams. Dream interpretation became an important part of psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century with Sigmund Freud's seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams.Psychology
Freud
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud argued that all dream content is disguised wish-fulfillment. According to Freud, the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the "day residue." In very young children, this can be easily seen, as they dream quite straightforwardly of the fulfillment of wishes that were aroused in them the previous day. Sigmund Freud believed that dreams are a way for repressed wishes in the unconscious mind to be expressed. He explained that the manifest content of a dream is what we remember, while the latent content is the hidden meaning behind it. Freud also described a process called dream-work, which uses methods like condensation, displacement, and symbolization to hide unacceptable desires while still allowing them to appear in dreams.In adults the situation is more complicated since, in Freud's analysis, the dreams of adults have been subjected to distortion, with the dream's so-called "manifest content" being a heavily disguised derivative of the "latent dream-thoughts" present in the unconscious. The dream's real significance is thus concealed: dreamers are no more capable of recognizing the actual meaning of their dreams than hysterics are able to understand the connection and significance of their neurotic symptoms.
In Freud's original formulation, the latent dream-thought was described as having been subject to an intra-psychic force referred to as "the censor"; in the terminology of his later years, however, discussion was in terms of the super-ego and the work of the ego's defence mechanisms. In waking life, he asserted, these "resistances" prevented the repressed wishes of the unconscious from entering consciousness, and though these wishes were to some extent able to emerge due to the lowered vigilance of the sleep state, the resistances were still strong enough to force them to take on a disguised or distorted form. Freud's view was that dreams are compromises which ensure that sleep is not interrupted: as "a disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes," they succeed in representing wishes as fulfilled which might otherwise disturb and waken the sleeper.
One of Freud's early dream analyses is "Irma's injection", a dream he himself had. In the dream a former patient of his, Irma, complains of pains and Freud's colleague gives her an unsterile injection. Freud provides pages of associations to the elements in his dream, using it to demonstrate his technique of decoding the latent dream thoughts from the manifest content of the dream.
Freud suggests that the true meaning of a dream must be "weeded out" from the dream as recalled:
Freud listed the distorting operations that he claimed were applied to repressed wishes in forming the dream as recollected: it is because of these distortions that the manifest content of the dream differs so greatly from the latent dream thought reached through analysis—and it is by reversing these distortions that the latent content is approached.
The operations included:
- Condensation – one dream object stands for several associations and ideas; thus "dreams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts."
- Displacement – a dream object's emotional significance is separated from its real object or content and attached to an entirely different one that does not raise the censor's suspicions.
- Visualization – a thought is translated to visual images.
- Symbolism – a symbol replaces an action, person, or idea.
Freud considered that the experience of anxiety dreams and nightmares was the result of failures in the dream-work: rather than contradicting the "wish-fulfillment" theory, such phenomena demonstrated how the ego reacted to the awareness of repressed wishes that were too powerful and insufficiently disguised. Traumatic dreams were eventually admitted as exceptions to the theory.
Freud famously described psychoanalytic dream-interpretation as "the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind". However, he expressed regret and dissatisfaction at the way his ideas on the subject were misrepresented or simply not understood: