Even as we reach new understanding of the human condition, one thing remains elusive to us: dreams. Not our goals and hopes, but those fleeting nighttime figments that play out behind our eyes whilst we rest. The way we interact with dreams has changed drastically as our understanding of them has grown and developed. Some people say you can glean important information about your greatest desires from your dreams, and others disregard them completely. Some have lucid dreams and superior recall, whereas some claim to have never experienced dreaming. Sweet dreams of days long gone, half-remembered experiences, and chilling nightmares all plague us, but how exactly has our understanding of dreams changed? What even are they, and why are we continually fascinated by them?
Historically, dreams have been closely connected with spirituality and mysticism. In early cultures, Egyptian and Greek to name a couple, dreams were closely associated with the divine. Records of dreams can be found dating back to the reign of Ramesses II, or 1220 BC. Many cultures saw a clear distinction between good dreams and bad dreams. Greeks, Egyptians, and Babylonians believed that good dreams came from gods and bad dreams originated from demons. Ancient Greek and Egyptian culture had special rituals thought to induce dreaming or channel dream messages from specific gods. Another common interpretation of the act of dreaming was that of prophecy, in that events that happened in a dream would later come true.
It’s not until the late 1800s that we start to see a more modern practice of dream interpretation. In 1899, Sigmund Freud published his influential book The Interpretation of Dreams, kicking off the modern ages’ renewed fascination with dream psychology. Another prominent figure at the time was a follower and friend of Freud’s, Carl Jung. Though the pair were contemporaries, their approaches to decoding dreams were very different from one another. Where Freud believed that dreams were secretive and a way for people to express their tabooed desires, Jung thought dreams were a way for the dreamer to learn critical information about themselves. Another prime aspect where their theories differed was that Freud believed dreams had to be
interpreted in a way that their full meaning was understood, whereas Jung thought that through the act of having them, dreams had fulfilled their primary purpose of having the dreamer learn through them. While Freud was popular during his time, most current experts have widely disowned him and his ideas.
The neuroscientific approach to dream analysis began in the 1950s with the discovery of rapid eye movement, or REM sleep. Building off the work of a French scientist, Nathaniel Kleitman and one of his students, Eugene Aserinsky, conducted a study which linked REM sleep with dreaming. Another one of Kleitman’s students, William C. Dement, built upon this research as well. In a paper published in 1958, he proposed the existence of cyclic organization of sleep in cats, or that while sleeping a subject goes through distinct patterns of brain activity. This pattern is shared by humans, which was later expanded by Michel Jouvet into the identification of REM sleep as “paradoxical sleep” or an independent state of alertness.
Since then, dream research has had inconclusive results. Many factors can lead to unintended bias in study participants. Dream recall is not always accurate and people can be influenced into more consistent recall by placebos, or by habit. On top of that, recall varies due to which sleep state a participant is in. Even the way researchers phrase questions can have an influence on how people remember their dreams.
So, even if we can’t know exactly why we dream, there are still some sources leading us to believe what different dreams mean, right? While a few generalizations and observations can be made, most dream interpretations do not and cannot explain everything. Many common elements, symbols, and themes can be found in dreams, but may not mean the same thing to every person. Sometimes a bird ****does signify freedom, hope, and change, but sometimes a rose is just a rose.
After all this, can we really point to any aspect of dreams and say with certainty that we know what’s going on? No, not really. Dreams are one thing that current science has no concrete explanation for. Perhaps that, more than anything else, is why we continue to be fascinated by them.
