The Meaning Of Dreams
The prophetic dream is a staple of human history. Ancient civilizations as diverse as those of Egypt, Assyria, and Greece held the view that dreams offer divine guidance and recognized that the gods had cloaked their messages in perplexing images and events that required a professional translator. The oneiromancer, or dream reader, was therefore a highly esteemed variety of fortuneteller in most early cultures. The Greeks, always forward thinkers, combined the functions of a medical doctor and an oneiromancer in their temples to Aesclepius, the god of medicine. There the sickly would come to bathe and to pray, but chiefly to sleep and so receive a house call from Aesclepius in the form of a dream. The god might prescribe a remedy or he might actually treat the ailment himself, sometimes going so far as to remove the afflicted body part and replace it with a new one in the night. This dream medicine was widely practiced and profoundly believed; it was rare that a patient failed to receive a dream from Aesclepius.
The Bible also was filled with prophetic dreams, which usually provide some worthy dream interpreter with the opportunity for spiritual (and professional) recognition. Pharaoh, for example, is stymied by his dream of seven nice plump cows eaten by seven skinny cows and seven juicy ears of corn consumed by seven withered ears. Joseph, modestly giving credit to his God, says the dream predicts seven years of plentiful harvest followed by seven years of famine. Joseph suggests that Pharaoh quickly hire an overseer to store grain in preparation for the seven lean years; Pharaoh appoints Joseph to the task.Dream interpreters enjoyed a privileged position in the Western world for about 3500 years. Despite some vagaries of fashion, dreams were regarded fairly steadily as coded messages that only a dream interpreter could decipher. Imagine the tantalizing position of the people -- they knew that each dream was a piece of personal advice from their god, but the advice was given in another language. Because actual oneiromancers were expensive, dream manuals became more and more popular as more and more people learned to read. The first of these manuals was the famous sixteenth century work titled La Physiognomie des songes et visions fantastiques des personnes, which offered highly efficient interpretations of a variety of dreams: "To dream you are a tree means illness." "To dream you eat cheese means profit." Etcetera.Thought the educated few had for centuries had questioned such mechanistic one-to-one correlations between dream and event, the premise -- that dreams foretold the future -- had a serious hold on the Western imagination; up until the nineteenth century, there was no other particularly convincing explanation for the strange visitations we experience at night. Throughout the 1800's, there were grumblings and mumblings about the physical and mental source of dreams, but it was Sigmund Freud's publication of Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 that let the cat out of the bag with finality. His discoveries were both thrilling and deflating: the bad news was that dreams, with their odd blend of the familiar and the strange, the rational and irrational, were the products of our own unconscious mind, rather than divine messages. The good news was that dreams, once explained and interpreted properly, could unlock the mysteries of our psyches.To Freud, dreams were the "royal road to the unconscious." With the goal of lingering in the road, excavating dream symbols for clues to better understanding ourselves, we can use Freud's map of the mind to find our way.
Theological scholars and philosophers have, since Freud's revelations of dream interpretation, have suggested that the unconscious is how the divine connects with the material. Through our unconscious minds we receive those messages that our conscious minds might ignore or get confused. Thus, even in these modern times, dream interpretation is still one of the most popular methods of divination.