DREAM

An illusory or hallucinatory psychic activity, particularly of a perceptual-visual nature, that occurs during sleep. It is essentially a psychological phenomenon with many philosophical, religious, and moral implications.

Meaning and Interpretation

People have always been fascinated by the mysterious phenomenon of dreams and, throughout history, have made innumerable attempts to penetrate behind the chaotic appearance of dreams and reach their hidden meaning. These attempts at interpretation were done on several levels, such as the religious, the philosophical, the psychological, and the clinical.

Early Civilizations. Almost all primitive and ancient peoples believed in the religious character of dreams. For them, dreams were vehicles of divine revelation. They imagined that, during sleep, the soul would leave the body, converse with other spirits and with gods, and receive their communications. In the Vedic religion there was the belief that the soul could get entangled in immoral actions. Therefore, after bad dreams, special rites of expiation were prescribed.

Divination through dreams (oneiromancy) was an important religious practice among the early peoples, particularly among the Assyro-Babylonians and Egyptians. Divination was carried out through incubation dreams in temples or through the private practice of magicians and dream interpreters. To facilitate the dream analysis, special handbooks were compiled containing oneirocritical rules and catalogues of dream symbols.

Greeks and Romans. In Greek literature there are many references to dreams. The practice of dream interpretation was a significant aspect of the Greek religious life. The Greek world knew several incubation temples, dedicated usually to Asclepius, god of medicine, in which the devotee spent the night and, through dreams, obtained pertinent information about his problems. The most famous of these incubation temples was that of Asclepius at Epidaurus. There were also professional dream interpreters (oneirocritai ) for whom special manuals of interpretation were compiled from the fourth century b.c. The most famous of the preserved manuals is the Oneirocritica written by Artemidorus of Daldis in the second century a.d. Perhaps the oldest Greek treatise on dreams is a work contained in the Hippocratic corpus. Although the author of this work does not deny the religious meaning of dreams, he admits that some dreams may reflect the physiological conditions of the organism. Some Greek philosophers, such as the Pythagoreans, Socrates, the Platonists, and many Stoics, believed in oneiromancy; others, particularly Aristotle and the Epicureans, rejected it.

For plato, fantastic and lawless dreams can easily be aroused by the "wild beast in us." According to Plato, before going to bed, one should awaken his rational powers and collect himself in meditation in order to avoid the experience of bad dreams. Further, Plato thinks that prophetic inspirations are not granted by the divinity to sane people in a waking state, but to people whose intelligence is either demented or enthralled in sleep. However, only a sane man may interpret prophetic dreams.

aristotle discusses dreams in the three works of his Parva naturalia: On Sleep and Wakefulness, On Dreams, and On Divination through Sleep. Dreams are a natural phenomenon because they are experienced by everyone, even by animals. Aristotle teaches that not every psychic experience during sleep is a dream, but only those representations that are aroused during sleep by faint residuary movements left in the organism by actual sense perceptions. Dreams are illusions produced by the conceptual fantasy and easily affected by strong emotions and by bodily disturbances. According to Aristotle, prophetic dreams can be explained through coincidence or through natural causes: a plan of activity can be initiated in a dream and later carried out in the waking state; symptoms of an incipient disease can be perceived for the first time in a dream; other dreams may be explained through some natural telepathic ability.

Among the Romans, where divination through dreams was a standard practice, cicero contested strongly the divine origin of dreams in his De divinatione. He claims that there is no connection between dreams and the natural course of events; a scientific method of fore-telling the future through dreams is impossible; oneiromancy is a superstition, and dreams do not deserve the slightest degree of respect.

Christianity. The Christian attitude toward dreams was molded by the Bible and may be formulated in the following statements. (1) The dream may be a legitimate vehicle of divine revelation, in which case God Himself provides for proofs attesting the divine origin of dreams. He also takes care of dream interpretation. (2) The majority of dreams are natural phenomena lacking in any special religious meaning. (3) Superstitious divination through dreams is severely forbidden by God as an immoral practice.

The Fathers and Doctors of the Church do not add anything new to the Biblical teaching on dreams. Occasionally they attempt a philosophical or psychological explanation of dream phenomena that reflects the views of Greek philosophers, particularly of Aristotle. St. augus tine discusses the problem of dreams in one of his letters to Nebridius (Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne [Paris 1878–90] 33:71–73) and in De Genesi ad litteram (Patrologia Latina 34:470–479). He attempts to explain that superior powers produce dreams in man by energizing latenter (in a secret or unconscious way) those traces of activity imprinted by the mind in the organism during the waking state. The supernatural powers use such traces to bring about dreams reflecting their intentions. St. Augustine admits that some dreams may have a psychological significance insofar as they reflect physiological or mental conditions of the dreamer ("men … dream what they need"). St. thomas aquinas deals with dreams in connection with his discussion of superstition (Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 95.6). Dreams can be understood best by considering the four causes that produce them: first, the internal spiritual cause of dreams, namely, all the mental activities of the waking state that may recur in dreams; second, internal and corporal causes dependent on the physical disposition of the body; third, external corporal causes that include all environmental conditions, particularly those of the atmosphere; fourth, external spiritual causes—God, angels, and demons. The devil can also reveal future events in dreams to those who have entered into a special compact with him.

Jewish and Islamic Tradition. Dream interpretation through natural means and through divination played an important role in the early Talmudic and Islamic traditions. Many rabbis believed that nothing important happens to a man that is not communicated to him through dreams. They had a saying according to which "a dreamless life is a sinful life." Many of the revelations attributed to Muḥammad took place in dreams. Some medieval Islamic theologians enumerate interpretation of dreams among accepted theological methods.

Modern Psychology. From W. wundt on, psychologists have been interested in dreams, both in the psychophysiological mechanisms that regulate the process of dreaming and in the value that dreams have for the understanding of human personality. In the mid-20th century, few psychologists would deny any psychological meaning to dreams. Divergences begin when psychologists start to theorize about the meaning of dreams.

Freud's Theory. Sigmund freud bestowed scientific respectability upon dream analysis, particularly with his work on the Interpretation of Dreams (1900). An essential feature of psychoanalytical treatment is to bring to the surface the repressed unconscious experiences that are often the source of neurotic conflicts. The main method for uncovering the unconscious is free association. Dream analysis was conceived by Freud as a subsidiary technique to facilitate and expedite free association. Soon it became the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious psychic life. According to Freud, every dream has a meaning insofar as it is an attempted wish-fulfillment involving repressed sexual infantile urges. Its biological function is to preserve sleep by channeling the unfulfilled infantile wishes, which would disturb the sleep, into disguised modes of wish-fulfillment. Freud called the mechanism that regulates the disguise the censor. It consists of all the inhibitory and repressive tendencies that try to prevent the unconscious from emerging into consciousness. It is because of the work of the censor that every dream presents a double aspect, namely, the manifest content or the external dress of imagery in which the dream is recalled, and the latent content or the hidden meaning fraught with repressed infantile wishes, mostly of a libidinal nature. According to Freud, the following important mechanisms take part in the elaboration of a dream. (1) Condensation occurs when several meanings of the latent content are compressed into a single image of the manifest content. (2) Displacement takes place when the emotional charge is detached from its natural object and directed to a secondary object. (3) Dramatization consists in expressing conceptual ideas with concrete and plastic images. (4) Symbolization involves a concrete representation through an image of another concrete but hidden image, as when, in Freud's mind, a pointed object seen in a dream represents the male sexual organ. Many dream symbols are, according to Freud, independent from any individual interpretation and possess a universal meaning. (5) Secondary elaboration is a dream mechanism that attempts to bring some order and logical understanding into a dream during the process of recalling it.

Jung's Theory. C. G. jung introduced new conceptual breadth into dream interpretation. He was the first to analyze the dreams of a person in a sequential series, treating them as a meaningful whole and interpreting them on the basis of an internal consistency. For Jung, dreams reveal not only repressed infantile libidinal wishes, but manifest the whole human personality with its positive and negative characteristics, its past experiences, present attitudes, and future strivings—including the personal and collective unconscious. They have a compensatory function in the sense that tendencies neglected during waking life come into action in dreams. The Jungian interpretation of dreams is flexible, varies with every personality type, and does not rely too strongly on free association and typical symbolism.

Adler's Theory. Alfred Adler views in dreams the manifestation of a person's specific style of life, his particular way of asserting himself within the frame of his community. In contrast to Freud and in accordance with Jung, Adler stresses the value of dreams in understanding not only past experiences, but also present problems and future plannings. Dreams are particularly useful in studying the lifestyle because they are more spontaneous and uninhibited and less under the control of the reality of everyday life. At times, they may exert a harmful influence on the personality; thus, when the lifestyle is inadequate and the personality weak, the work of imagination as it occurs in dreams may consolidate wrong personality attitudes. In the interpretation of dream images, Adler stresses both the typical and the individual.

Other Trends. Freudian views and techniques have come to be considered by many psychologists and psychiatrists as too one-sided and too narrow-minded to be of real value in understanding and in helping the human personality. There is thus a tendency to enlarge Freud's theories by enriching them with insights from Jung, Adler, W. Stekel, T. French, the existentialists (L. Binswanger), and the experimentalists (C. S. Hall). The holistic concept of human personality is being extended even to dream analysis. This can be seen in the increased use of the dream-series method and in the stress on the total human experience as projected in dreams—not only past events, but even present problems and attitudes and future strivings and goals. The language of dreams is said to express the unconscious and the conscious, the id and the ego forces, and the emotional, motivational, and cognitive layers of human personality. Hall finds the analysis of the manifest content of dreams much more rewarding than the delving into their latent content. M. Ullman considers the dream as one of the many roads leading toward the understanding of consciousness. J. L. Moreno wishes to add to the manifest and latent content of dreams a new dimension that he calls the "actional" aspect of dream. Dream becomes one of the psychodramatic techniques used by Moreno: instead of telling his dreams, Moreno's patients are encouraged to act them out.

Moral Questions

None of the psychological techniques of dream analysis is by its nature immoral; a technique's goodness depends upon the total clinical context in which its methods are being applied. Moral evaluation of dreams is concerned with the problems of divination, of moral responsibility, and of use in the spiritual life.

Divination. Foretelling of the future by means of a dream is legitimate if one is sure that the dream comes from God. One's attitudes toward such dreams should be the same as in the case of private visions and revelations. When divine intervention in a dream is excluded, then divination is an act of superstition because it involves, either explicitly or implicitly, an attempt to predict the future by means of demonic powers. The gravity of sin depends upon the amount of awareness, the degree of certainly about the prediction, and the more or less explicit intention of regulating one's life according to dreams. Ignorance and an implicit belief in some infallible natural means of knowing secrets and predicting the future, such as telepathy and precognition, can easily excuse from sin.

Moral Responsibility. Neither merit nor demerit can be acquired through dream behavior. Man's critical and deliberative ability is so reduced during sleep that he is not morally responsible for whatever may happen, nor can he reasonably assume any antecedent responsibility (in causa ) because there is no specific type of activity in human behavior that has a necessary connection with any of man's dreams.

Use in Spiritual Life. The old Platonic view that virtuous people have virtuous dreams found its echo in many ascetic authors and theologians, such as St. john climacus, John cassian, and Diego alvarez de paz. Even St. Thomas Aquinas states that "the virtuous come to have better visions in dreams than those who are not virtuous" (Der ver. 28.3 ad 7). Particularly in the area of chastity, some claim that absence of impure dreams is a sign of perfect and consummate virtue. P. Meseguer seems to favor this opinion, adducing as the psychological and theological explanation the so-called law of progressive impregnation; this measures the degree according to which the law of grace succeeds in permeating man's whole nature, even his unconscious tendencies. It is not quite certain whether or not this law can be applied to dreams. A person cannot talk about dreams in general, but only about dreams as he recalls them. It is known from research that the recall of dreams is regulated by selective factors rooted in the personality structure. Until more is known about the dynamics of dreams and about the relationship between conscious and unconscious life, great caution should regulate attempts to use dreams as a technique of spiritual guidance.

See Also: psychology.

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[a. m. cuk]