Dreams

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Dreams

The connection of dreams to religion might be best summarized by the widespread notion that "the gods speak through dreams." Dreams are relevant to the experiential dimension of religion, which encompasses many phenomena involving "altered states of consciousness." The 1969 work of the same name edited by Charles Tart covers dreams, meditation, hypnosis, and mystical experience. All of these rarefied states have been cultivated through history by adepts seeking religious visions. Interest in such ethereal states of mind has grown enormously in the United States since the 1960s by seekers and scholars alike.

A few prominent dreams have been recorded in the Hebrew Bible, notably Jacob's dream (at Genesis 28:12) of the ladder reaching to heaven with angelic beings ascending and descending on it, a nice representation of the notion of the accessibility of the divine through dreams. As the history of Judaism continues and Christianity is born, we see fewer references to dreams. In the New Testament, Jesus prefers the language of parables to dreams.

There are some references to dreams in ancient cultures, attested by an Egyptian papyrus on dream interpretation, held by the British Museum (Beatty Papyrus 3) and the Oneirocritica (Art of Judging Dreams), a dream handbook in Greek by the second-century physician Artemidorus. There is also the curious practice evidenced on many steles at temples of Asclepios, of sleeping in open porticoes of the temples of the god of healing. Patients would ask the god for a cure for specific medical problems, and these would be communicated through dreams, showing nicely the therapeutic value of dreams.

Probably the greatest emphasis on dreams is found in shamanic traditions of indigenous peoples across the world. Shamans have perennially utilized dreams and other altered states to facilitate "celestial journeying" on various missions. In Australian aboriginal culture, "dream time" is considered just as real if not more so than waking consciousness. The importance of dreams is witnessed also in the extreme attention given to the dream of a child, acted out by the entire tribe, as recounted by Sioux shaman Black Elk.

The steady rise of science and rationalism in Western history seemed nearly to eclipse interest in dreams, which are so manifestly illogical. But toward the end of the nineteenth century scientists eventually began investigating dreams when French archivist Louis Maury (1817–1892) conducted several experiments, such as having his assistant hold a hot iron near his face while he slept, or perfume under his nose, and so on. Each time he noted specific dream imagery correlating well with the experimental actions, such as his dream of wandering through a Middle Eastern marketplace full of pungent smells when the perfume was held under his nose. These data led Maury to the conclusion that dreams are caused by somatic stimuli. His theory, a product of nineteenth-century scientific positivism, led to the notion that "dreaming is caused by indigestion."

A veritable revolution in dream analysis was introduced by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in his landmark work of 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud suggested that such causal agents as Maury identified still cannot account for the elaborate imagery of the dream content. Why had Maury's dream placed him in a Middle Eastern bazaar and not in some other exotic environment, for example? Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious" and thought they were produced by emotional factors. They function as a harmless release of built-up emotional tension. Dreams "protect sleep" by allowing an outlet for this turmoil. The dreamer's aggressive and sexual drives can be expressed harmlessly, since he or she is sound asleep and will not pose any danger to society.

The key mechanism at work in dreams, Freud thought, is wish fulfillment, and the dream is properly analyzed when one can identify the wish in question. He theorized that dreams bear a kinship with jokes and slips of the tongue, in that the same forbidden impulse that is hostile to society is allowed some measure of release. The joke, slip, or dream is a "compromise structure" in that only some degree of the full impulse is allowed expression. The dream is a "substitute" for the real desire, since the person only dreams about fulfilling it in place of actually doing so. The bizarre symbolism of dreams functions as a "disguise" to fool the conscious mind into thinking it has not really allowed a shameful impulse to come to expression. The apparent or "manifest content" of the dream disguises the real or "latent content," which carries the underlying wish.

Later studies have demonstrated the importance of dreaming to the psychic system. "Dream deprivation" experiments, carried out in the 1950s and 1960s by University of Chicago researcher William Dement, showed that in virtually 100 percent of test subjects, being deprived of dreaming (though still being allowed to sleep as long as they wanted) led to serious, even psychotic symptoms. These studies clearly show that dreams are tremendously important to maintaining psychological and physical health.

Possibly the greatest interest in dreams in contemporary research is shown by Jungian scholars. Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961) developed a complex theory in which dreams play a prominent role. His interest in dreams originated when he worked with psychotic patients early in his career. The grandiose visions and strange language these patients exhibited struck Jung as similar to the atmosphere of dreams. Surprised to find that the actual dreams of these psychotics were remarkably rational and uneventful, Jung developed his key theory of complementarity—that whatever is expressed on the outside, the opposite will be found on the inside. Rational people produce wildly illogical dreams, while the dreams of psychotic people appear to be rational. Psychotics are effectively in the dream state while awake.

Jung thought that psychoses and dreams appear to speak in the same "language": symbolism, the "native language" of the unconscious. Jung felt that symbols are multivalent—that is, carry many meanings—and that they are produced spontaneously by the unconscious to express profound realities that are ultimately ineffable—beyond description. Specific symbolic elements will appear commonly in dreams, such as the anima or animus, the complementary opposites to an individual's ego consciousness. A woman whose face is often obscured, appearing in a man's dream will represent his "anima," or female side. She will act as a psychopomp, or "soul guide," leading the dreamer into the vast treasure-house of the unconscious; and the reverse is true for the female dreamer. A dark or "savage" figure might represent the "shadow," the primal animal self within, as in a woman's dream of a boy she met at the edge of an Indian reservation. The boy invited her to come visit him whenever she wanted. As he ran off he turned into a wolf and slipped into the woods. This wolf-boy symbolizes the dreamer's animus, or masculine side, fused with her shadow, or healthy animal self—healthy because it appears as a natural animal at home in the wild place and who invites her interaction.

This shadow figure is in great contrast to that of a dream in which a dark man with a machine gun, who is as tall as the tallest buildings of the city, walks through town shooting at people randomly. The shadow figure of this dream exhibits Jung's concept of "inflation." Any repressed contents in the psychic system will gain great energy, inflate and distort, and act in a very menacing manner, as the savage "Mr. Hyde" does emerging from the meek "Dr. Jekyll." This indicates a terribly unhealthy "inflated" shadow, active in the whole collective consciousness in this dream, since the dark figure was threatening the whole city.

These are the sorts of markers Jungians look for in dreams. Jung posits two levels at work, the personal and collective, or "transpersonal." His signature theory of the "collective unconscious" was actually developed as an outgrowth of a dream in which he started on the top floor of a two-story house and continued down successive stairways deeper and deeper into the substructure. Any action of descending in dreams, Jung felt, symbolizes journeying into the unconscious, as does entering into bodies of water, or any dark place. Ascending would indicate moving toward higher consciousness. In Jung's dream, each successive layer of the house got older as he descended. He thought the dream represented a kind of structural diagram of the psyche, an ego consciousness at the top, undergirded by successively older layers containing the entire history and evolution of collective consciousness.

Certain "big" dreams, Jung thought, reveal mythic elements of profound transpersonal significance, as did one of his own earliest dreams. At age three he dreamed of an "underground god," an erect phallus on a golden throne, which, even at that age, he labeled the "underground Christ." This dream functioned in a "compensatory" way, representing the repressed sexual element denied Jesus and labeled "sinful" by church tradition. The dream "compensated" for these repressed contents, expressing the inflated "underground counterpart" to the church's Jesus, enthroned in a position of exaltation, representing sexuality itself in a sacred mode.

Dreams like this with powerful contents contain religious and mythic material. Alice's dream of falling down a hole into "Wonderland" (entering the unconscious) and Dorothy's dream of traveling to "Oz" represent the "hero's journey," the path of "individuation." Each element of Dorothy's dream bears important symbolic significance, from the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, her animus figures, whom she encounters and incorporates; to Toto, her shadow/trickster spirit; to the Wicked Witch, the distorted collective shadow; and to the Wizard, the wise old man archetype, an image of the great or "realized" Self. A dream like this represents the concept of soul transformation, the journey toward psychic integration or wholeness, as at the end the Wizard chants "E pluribus unum," "the many brought into one." Like the journey to the Emerald City in the land of Oz, dreams, for Jung, altogether represent spontaneous products of the psychic system that function to make available to the dreamer the vast wealth held within the unconscious.

Jung drew a primary distinction between "big" dreams like Dorothy's and more ordinary or "little" dreams. Other researchers have added to this list. Some fourteen different types of dreams might be distinguished: (1) assimilation of daily experience dreams; (2) learning new tasks; (3) sensory stimulus; (4) wish fulfillment; (5) personal coping dreams; (6) anxiety dreams; (7) night terrors; (8) compensatory dreams; (9) repeating dreams; (10) prescient dreams, in which some specific dream content later happens in waking life; (11) lucid dreams, in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming; (12) archetypal or "big" dreams, often carrying collective contents; (13) karmic memory dreams; and (14) shamanic journeying.