Dreams are messages of the soul, messages from the unconscious that are knocking at the door of our fate. It could prove very helpful to listen to this "inner voice"-even if it is not always easy to decipher its truth and message or to heed it.
Interpreting a dream means that we take seriously the whole person and what he/she says and expresses-not only the "active person" who behaves and acts consciously and deliberately during the day, but also the "passive person" whose unconscious, emotional life finds expression in his or her dreams. One third of our life is spent sleeping and what happens during those hours is not unimportant!
In dreams nothing is too small or too big. Dreams deal with the most insignificant things of life as much as they do with the biggest problems and important questions. Often a dream reveals matters that we are totally unaware of.
The world of dreams is as real and true as the world of our everyday existence. We experience emotions about all relationships and actions toward things and people as much dur-ing the night as during the day.
The History of Dreams
Knowledge and faith as well as the meaning of dreams have been with us for ages, and for centuries dreams have been the great mystery of human existence. The oldest document-a major papyrus roll from Egypt estimated to be about 4,000 years old is kept in a museum in London. Many wise men and women in Egypt, Syria, Chaldea, and Phoenicia were masters in the interpretation of dreams and knew about their prophetic quality. It was this ancient knowledge and belief that served as a basis for the dream research that took place in Greece and Rome.
The art of dream interpretation reached new heights in the 8th century A.D. in the Arab world. After the aberrations of the Middle Ages, when people were obsessed by their belief in witches and came up with lopsided, demonic dream interpretations, a more sober attitude began to take hold. Sleep was seen as a simple physiological state, and dreams were thought to be the consequence of an overload of acidic sub-stances in the stomach or dehydration in certain regions of the brain.
In the 19th century, however, influential people began to consider the phenomena of dreams, people such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet; Friedrich Hebbel, German author; Gottfried Keller, Swiss author, Fyodor Dostoevski, Russian author, as well as philosophers Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Pscychology and Dream Interpretation meaning and were guided by a hidden order. He proceeded to use their content in the treatment of neurosis. Relentlessly, he insisted that almost every human dream hid sexual desire, a notion completely rejected at the time. While this was certainly an exaggeration, he was able to prove that the "manifest" dream (what we remember) is only a small portion of a far more extensive "latent" dream, whose content we can't remember when awake. Freud believed that our dreams are the via regia, the primary road to our unconscious.
Because our dreams are so much more than we remember, it behooves us to pay attention and carefully analyze even the small messages our soul is sending.
After Freud, who certainly overemphasized the sexual symbolism of dreams, came Wilhelm Steckel, who in the beginning dealt with the connections between a series of dreams (recurring dreams). Next came Alfred Adler (1875-1937), who saw the desire for power and recognition as a more forceful impetus behind all our behavior and dreams.
An even more far-reaching change in the research into our unconscious emotional life, as well in the interpretation of dreams, took place with the Swiss psychiatrist, C. G. Jung, (1875-1961). By going beyond the individual into the universal, which he called the "collective unconscious," he was able to show that our dream symbols are ancient, so-called arche-typal human images. This enlarges the meaning of dreams. They could even be seen as a warning that evil or harm is lurking. They could alert us to future events, possibilities, or opportunities coming our way.
Dreams and Health
Scientific experiments conducted over many years have shown that every person dreams every night and possibly every hour during the night. Most of us know nothing about it when we wake up. Is there a deep-seated reason for this?
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist