Dream Debate: Hobson Vs. Solms - Should Freud's Dream
Theory Be Abandoned?
Starring: David Chalmers, Stuart Hameroff, Stanley Krippner, Stephen LaBerge, and Jaak
Panksepp Sue Blackmore, Allan J. Hobson
Editorial Reviews
Product Description
The meaning of dreams has been debated since
ancient times, with 20th century science dominated by
Sigmund Freud’s view of dreams as the ‘royal road to
the unconscious’. According to Freud the bizarre nature
of dreams reflects repressed infantile wishes and
primitive drives (the id), censored and disguised by the
ego. Hobson and Solms have argued this question in
many contexts including Solms’ 2004 Scientific
American article "Freud returns" and Hobson’s
accompanying response "Like a bad dream". These two
giants of dream science met for the first time in formal
debate at the April 2006 conference ‘Toward a Science
of Consciousness’ in Tucson, Arizona. Held Biennially
since 1994, the interdisciplinary Tucson Conference are
sponsored by the Center For Consciousness Studies at
The University of Arizona.
Dream Debate- I'd rather be Sleeping!, July 12, 2007
By Master of Mordor (Indiana) - See all my reviews
From the very beginning, this Dvd of Mark Solms and Allan Hobson, two world-renowned
thinkers on dream science, focuses on the heart of the matter: is Freud's theory on dreams
obsolete? Debate format used is the same seen in many other arenas, including the
presidential debates. Both candidates are clear, concise, and for the most part polite in
terms of respecting the rules of the debate. At times the content matter can be
overwhelming in terms of complexity and depth, but that is to be expected in regards to the
audience this video is aimed for.
Unlearned individuals such as those I viewed this video with understood much more
regarding dream theory afterwards, but complained somewhat on the ability to differentiate
between Freud's initial theory and the one proposed by Hobson. At the end of the debate, a
vote is taken which quite clearly shows what the opinion of the scientific community is.
The quality of the content was excellent, as the video was of great quality and the audio
was crisp and clear. There were also some extra features on the disc, including a chapter
select option which helped greatly in reviewing certain aspects of the debate.
At nearly two hours in length before the extra features, this DVD is a great learning
experience for both the inexperienced student and the learned professional.
Exploring the meaning of dreams
by Jonathan Stucki
Dream Debate: Freud's Dream Theory Hobson vs. Solms (2006) DVD ISBN 0-9786608-2-X
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A powerful debate can be a great tool for persuading people towards your point of view. In the
case of "Dream Debate," the issue is not persuasion or dissuasion, but rather the instigation of the
independent mind.
Allan Hobson is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical, and presents the dissenting
argument that Freud's dream theory is antiquated and incorrect and thus should be discarded. A
rather brash fellow, he is nonetheless extremely intelligent and represents his own replacement
theory with great enthusiasm. Dr. Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town represents the
opposite opinion supporting Freud's dream theory as still highly relevant and worth saving. He
proposes that since Freud's theory cannot be even partially discredited, it cannot be abandoned
and in fact should be embraced for the wide range of positive influences it has had on the field of
dream theory.
Dr. Hobson's research specialty is quantifying mental events and correlating them with
quantified brain events, with special reference to waking, sleeping and dreaming. He believes
that dreams are created when random energy signals reach the brain's cortex during REM sleep.
The cortex attempts to make sense of the random inputs it is receiving, which causes dreams. Dr.
Hobson clearly dismisses the idea that there are deep, non-physiological, or hidden meanings in
dreams. He calls such notions "the mystique of fortune cookie dream interpretation." For years
he has proven his theories through lab testing with mice and human subjects. Hobson does not,
however, explain how the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, where the dreamer has control of the
content, fits into his theories. (A question posed by a member of the audience involved lucid
dreaming, the discussion of which Hobson avoided.)
Mark Solms follows a ideology closely related to Freud's. Psychoanalysis emerged 100 years ago
as a treatment for the neuroses. Neuroses were defined as 'functional' disorders of the nervous
system, in which no perceptible abnormality could be found in the brain. The prevailing view
was that the physical causes of neurotic illness would yield eventually to advances in scientific
technology.
Freud, however, based psychoanalysis on the observation that neurotic symptoms violated the
established laws of functional anatomy; neurotic symptoms simply did not make sense from the
physical viewpoint. By contrast, when one took seriously the personal viewpoint of the patient,
and reconstructed the emotional history of the illness, then the symptoms did make sense. For
example, although the abnormal sensation on one side of an hysterical patient's face did not
conform to somatosensory neuroanatomy, it did make sense subjectively: the symptoms first
appeared when the patient was slapped in the face under humiliating circumstances, for reasons
about which she still felt intense guilt and shame. In short, Freud observed that the essential
nature of neurotic symptoms needed to be described in subjective terms,- using concepts like
remembering and feeling rather than objective ones.
The DVD's content is very articulate, concise, and is quick to please the fascinated listener.
Rebuttals are charged with conviction and determination, and both speakers are very energetic in
explaining their positions with the utmost care. The quality of both the audio and video are
excellent for a DVD of this type, and the inclusion of the extra features makes this DVD an even
better purchase. What cannot be valued is what is to be learned from listening to this excellent
debate, which shows to us the never ending need to pursue the unknown of the subconscious and
the brain.
http://www.helium.com/items/454784-exploring-the-meaning-of-dreams
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The dream debate
16 September 2006
The nature of dreams has long fascinated philosophers and of course it lies close to the heart of
Freudian psychoanalysis. This week, in the year of Freud's 150th anniversary, we hear a debate
on the subject between a psychoanalyst and a professor of psychiatry.
Transcript
Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders and on ABC Radio National, this is The Philosopher's
Zone.
Well, last week we looked, in the year of Sigmund Freud's 150th anniversary, at Freud the
philosopher of civilisation. This week, we're turning to Freud, the scientist of the mind. Or
perhaps that ought to be the would-be scientist, which is why this is a philosophical issue. The
distinguished philosopher of science, Karl Popper, said that Freud's theories could not be science
because they were not falsifiable. In other words, Freud had not stated what sort of evidence
would, if it turned up, force him to abandon his theory. And if you don't do that, then your theory
is proof against any evidence the world can throw at it. By definition, it can't be disproved. And a
theory that's true by definition, can't be empirical science.
But was Popper right? And if he was wrong, might there nevertheless be other reasons for
abandoning Freud's theory?
Well this was in part the subject of a debate staged in April during a conference held at the
Centre for Consciousness Studies of the University of Arizona. The motion was 'Freud's Dream
Theory is Misguided and Misleading; it should be Abandoned'. It was proposed by J. Allan
Hobson of the Harvard Medical School, with Mark Soames, of the Royal London School of
Medicine speaking against the motion and for Freud.
So this week we have an edited version of their spirited exchange, beginning with Allan Hobson
and the Case Against Freud.
J. Allan Hobson: We need to know what we're debating about. What is Freud's dream theory?
There are three cardinal points. One is that wishes are the instigators of dreams and in fact they
are repressed infantile wishes, and that these infantile wishes welled up from the unconscious in
sleep, and needed to be disguised and censored. That's the heart of the theory, that dream
bizarreness was the result of the mind's active effort to conceal these forbidden unconscious
wishes, which would otherwise interrupt sleep. And so we now have an alternative view about
what causes dream bizarreness which I'll explain to you.
The third point is that dreams can be interpreted and they can only be interpreted correctly by the
use of free association to the dream material in the transference relationship with the
psychoanalyst. I think that is both a mistaken statement, an erroneous statement, and that dream
content can be easily understood in terms of the new theory without resort to either propositions
1 or 2. And this theory, I think, can be rejected out of hand; and part of my hard reasoning is that
it's based upon 1895 neurobiology, and I'm going to suggest to you that the dream theory is a
disguised theory derived from outmoded, antique neurobiology, and is not a psychological theory
at all; that there was no data collected or analysed. All of the dreams that are discussed in
Interpretation of Dreams, the 1900 work, are Freud's own dreams. There was no attempt to be
systematic and to collect other dreams and look at them and see what they were like.
So the thing is really unscientific from the outset. And it has not been experimentally tested.
We've had psychoanalytic institutes for 105 years and I'm going to suggest to you that they have
not been scientifically fruitful. They haven't generated hypotheses, they haven't tested
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hypotheses, and that even Mark Soames' own very important work is neither inspired by, nor
relevant to Freud's dream theory.
Now another reason for rejecting this as a scientific theory is Karl Popper's assertion that Freud's
whole corpus of work is unscientific because it's untestable. And that's all I need to persuade you
about today, is that this theory is really untestable, and is therefore not a scientific theory, and
should be rejected.
I'm going to go much further than that, but we can accept the hypothesis as stated on the basis of
Popper's objection. Again, I hope Mark Soames will comment on the way in which the theory
could be proved wrong, because that of course is Popper's cardinal contribution, to say that a
scientific theory must be falsifiable. And I think what you'll see today is that as long as one
clings to Freud's coat-tails, great man though he be, that there is an essential argument from
authority and not an argument with respect to the content issues of the theory.
There is a secret mystique about dreams; the psychoanalysts don't tell you what they learn and
when Mark Soames argues that psychoanalysis is going to save subjectivity and the study of
first-person data, I think that that's a really preposterous assumption. I agree that we need firstperson data, and I've argued that very strongly. I think there is nothing in the psychoanalytic
literature that can compare with this rather modest and meagre attempt to study dream
phenomenonology.
Dreams are so compelling as scenarios or narratives, that we tend to regard the reports as
literature, and we apply essentially a literary approach to their understanding. But in fact when
one studies a language, one studies the grammar; the formal aspects of dreams are universal: all
dreams that are really worthy of the name are hallucinoid, we believe in them as if they were real
despite the presence in them of robust cognitive difficulties; we have trouble remembering them,
and we have trouble understanding them. And I'm going to suggest to you that the formal
approach is very important, especially in mapping aspects of dreams down onto the brain.
Now Freud was wrong about so many things in neurobiology, and he can't be faulted for that; he
lived in 1895, and at that point, spontaneous activity in the brain was unrecognised, the fact that
dreaming occurred throughout the night, and not just in the instant before awakening, as Freud
assumed, was not known. So naturally he didn't have the scientific data on which to construct a
more adequate brain-based theory. But furthermore, he thought that the mind and the brain were
entirely stimulus-dependent. That's not the case, so he was forced to invent this notion of
neuronal side-paths out of which the concept of the unconscious and that the unconscious as a
repository of unexorcised infantile wishes was constantly feeding information that condensed for
discharge during sleep.
This assumption is incorrect. The unconscious as in a repository of infantile wishes is probably
also wrong; there's very little evidence that anything is remembered in terms of declarative
memory before age 2 or 3. Infantile wishes may or may not be present in brain activity in some
way, but we can never know that. Certainly the idea that the unconscious is mainly repressed is
wrong. We now know that most of the unconscious is cognitive, it can be gotten up with fair
ease, sometimes you have to dredge it, sometimes you have to put your brain on automatic
search to get the name of somebody like Karl Popper. But the brain is working all the time and
this is something that Freud was ignorant of.
Now the activation synthesis hypotheses which McCarley and I put forward in 1977 as the
beginning of an alternative dream theory suggested that dreaming was caused by brain activation
and sleep. At its lowest point of deactivation in non-REM sleep, the brain is still 80% active. So
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there's no wonder then, that dreaming can occur in stages other than REM. But REM is the state
which causes the longest and strongest dreams.
I've left out an important aspect, that's the first aspect; that is not that you believe these things to
be real but what do you actually experience? You experience sensor motor hallucinosis; you feel
like you were moving through the dream space and you see the dream space very clearly. So the
dreaming is hallucinoid and Freud thought that this was regression he said, to the visual side.
Activation synthesis says no, it is a primary activation of the visual brain that results in dream
hallucinations. And seeing is believing. We tend to believe them to be real, even though a
moment's reflection upon awaking, regaining of self-reflective awareness, shows us that this
could not be true.
And in the presence of chaotic activation from the brain stem, and this is where the concept of
randomness comes in, I think that the activation process is very unpredictable, very
motivationally neutral. Then the fore-brain does its best to understand what's going on and
creates a dream scenario, and it does that on the basis of creating the best story it can under
adverse working circumstances. Freud thought that dream bizarreness was a function of disguise
and censorship. So for us, what you see is what you get, dream content is the content, there is no
distinction between latent and manifest content. It's not to say that one couldn't evoke interesting
ideas by thinking about dream content; it's not against the idea of free association, but it is
against the idea that that is a necessary way to go to understand dreams.
Now the emotionality of dreams is one point that Freud admitted, even in 1933, he really
couldn't understand. Dream emotionality is primarily negative affect, and if it was fulfillment of
wishes, and those were adequately disguised, then why are so many dreams still extremely laden
with anxiety? That, we think, is because there is a direct pathway from the REM sleep generator,
which as I've said, begins to operate at sleep onset, into the amygdala, triggering these emotions
in an automatic and, I think, completely unpredictable way.
Now one of the key points of the theory has to do with why dreams are so hard to remember.
Freud thought that despite all of the bowdlerising of disguise and censorship, that still the
material had to be re-repressed. For us, this is an unnecessarily complicated idea that dreams are
characterised by a simple amnesia; the amnesia is related to the loss of noradrenergic and
serotonergic and histaminergic modulation of the fore-brain. All three of these neural systems
start to decline at sleep onset and turn off completely during REM sleep. So I'm saying that the
amnesia for dreams is a physiologically determined event and it has nothing to do with
repression or motivation.
Alan Saunders: Allan Hobson, of the Harvard Medical School has just given us the case against.
So we have a central criticism of Freud: that his theory cannot be tested, and an alternative
theory: that the longest and strongest dreams occur during REM sleep. That's deep sleep, Rapid
Eye Movement sleep, and rather than being the expression of repressed appetites, they are the
product of random activity on the part of the sleeping brain.
And now, coming in to bat for Freud, here's Mark Soames, of the Royal London School of
Medicine.
Mark Soames: The most fundamental point in the theory is that the visceral body, the
representation of the visceral body, the demand made upon the mind to perform work from the
visceral body, does not stop when we go to sleep. In other words, drive demands do not stop
when we go to sleep. They activate instinctual automatisms no less in sleep than they do in
waking life.
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Concomitant with this, the executive control systems, the regulatory, modulatory, realityoriented systems of the mind do go to sleep. As a result of these two facts, there's a shift in the
balance between drive and executive control. This is the shift between, in Freud's terminology,
between Id and Ego. The Ego is weakened during sleep, the Id comes to the fore. This in Freud's
theory applies especially to the appetitive drives, what Freud called libido. The famous claim that
Freud made that dreams are a royal road to an insight into the inner workings of the human mind,
arise from this shift in the dynamic balance. These more primitive, basic, biologically rooted
drive states are less visible to our waking consciousness than they are during sleep, for the reason
that the executive control mechanisms that normally hide them are being relatively weakened
during sleep.
The intrinsic meaningfulness of dreams arises also from this in Freud's theory. Because dreams
are driven by these basic motivational states, they mean something, they tell you something
about what the dreamer wants. Slightly less important is the fact that because motor output is
blocked during sleep, we can't act on these motivations that arise during sleep. We therefore,
instead of waking up and acting on them, we hallucinate ourselves acting on them. Dreams are
imagined actions which occur instead of real actions. That is the hallucinatory aspect, the
regression aspect that Allan referred to. Because there's a regression back onto perceptual
systems, the dream-thought is turned into a concrete picture, and this is one of the reasons why
dreams require interpretation. They're a bit like hieroglyphics: you might have the thought 'I
want to teach Allan Hobson a lesson', and what you dream is Allan Hobson sitting in his school
uniform before you, and you're a teacher in front of him.
As you can see, the transformation of the thought into pictures immediately requires a degree of
interpretation, turning the pictures back into the thought.
Now implicit in what I've just said about motor output being blocked and this being the cause for
the hallucinatory regression, is the notion, an important notion in Freud's theory, that dreams
therefore serve the function of protecting sleep. Because these motivational impulses are active
during sleep, we have two choices: either to act on them, or to do something else. And in Freud's
view, this imagined acting, this hallucinatory regression, is what happens instead of acting in
reality, so that we don't have to wake up.
The issue of distortion and disguise arises like this: Freud says that the executive control
mechanisms, the Ego, is weakened during sleep. He does not say that it's switched off
completely. There is some greatly reduced and degraded degree of self-monitoring going on
during sleep, it's a shift in the dynamic balance but not a complete obliteration of Ego, not a
complete obliteration of self-awareness.
As a result of this, while these drive states are being represented in hallucinatory form, there is
the possibility, in fact the probability, of a generating anxiety, for the weakened, enfeebled Ego.
As a result of this, in a rather crude way given its weakened state, it tendentiously tries to shift
this hallucinatory process to try to suppress anxiety and create a more pleasing picture.
Obviously it's an attempt that doesn't always succeed, hence the nightmares that everybody
always says are such an impossibility to explain on the Freudian account.
A last point, because Allan mentioned it, not particularly central, is that we forget our dreams.
On Freud's theory we forget our dreams because we wake up, and when we wake up, our
executive control mechanisms come back to the fore. That's the same thing as to say we forget
our dreams because we repress them.
Now on what grounds did Allan Hobson reject this theory? Whatever he may say now and he
says all sorts of things at different times, if you look at his publications from the 1970s and
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1980s, you'll see that he rejected Freud's theory because he believed that dreams were identical
with REM sleep. Sometimes he says dreams and REM sleep are identical; sometimes he said
dreams are epiphenomenal to REM sleep, and sometimes he says simply that REM sleep causes
dreams.
Why this is important is because REM sleep is of course an automatic pre-programmed state, it
happens every 90 or 100 minutes during sleep no matter what your childhood was like, no matter
what happened during the dream day, it's a completely basic physiological, cyclical, intrinsically
meaningless state, regulated at a level of the neuraxis at which very little of mental consequence
occurs. For Allan Hobson, as he again has said now, therefore dreams are intrinsically
meaningless, the basic causal mechanism underlying dreams, is meaningless. It's a basic, preprogrammed physiological state. Whatever meaning there is in dreams is applied retrospectively,
trying to make sense of this intrinsically chaotic, random process. Something like, as he's often
said, projecting meaning onto an ink blot.
So it was on this ground that Allan Hobson claimed that the Freudian dream theory is misguided
and misleading in its essence. Now is this a valid basis for rejecting the Freudian theory? It's not.
Because dreaming is not identical with REM sleep. Dreaming is not an epiphenomenon of REM
sleep, dreaming is not even caused by REM sleep. You can have dreaming without REM, and
you can have REM without dreaming.
Now for me the most important and most closely related to my own work, a bit of evidence
against this view, is that not one single case has been reported in which loss of REM, due to a
focal brain-stem lesion, resulted in loss of dreaming. That is the absolute basic requirement of
brain behaviour correlation. It's the A, B, C of brain behaviour correlation. If you're going to
attribute a function to a structure, you must show that lesions to that structure, lead to a result of
that function.
I've tried very hard to find a patient with a brain stem lesion who stopped dreaming, and I've yet
to find one, both in my own research and in the entire literature. By contrast, there are literally
thousands of cases in the literature, and hundreds in my own work, where the patient loses
dreaming as a result of a fore-brain lesion, completely separate from the brain stem mechanisms
that regulate REM sleep; with preservation of REM sleep, who nevertheless have a total
cessation of dreaming. So there again, we have this double dissociation that I'm talking about.
Dreams and REM sleep are two different things, regulated by two different sets of brain
mechanisms.
So Hobson's theory of what causes or explains dreams, is simply wrong. And since this theory is
what he used for rejecting Freud's theory, we have to say that his rejection of Freud's theory is
unfounded. He should therefore withdraw his rejection of Freud's theory. Instead of withdrawing
it, what he's doing now is coming up with all kinds of new ad hoc arguments against the
Freudian dream theory. I'm afraid it appears he has pre-judged the issue and is not basing his
arguments any more on the evidence.
One more example: if we're going to accept Freud's dream theory as proven, then we might want
to test the sleep protection hypothesis. My prediction would be that patients who stop dreaming
due to parietal lesions, due to lesions in the posterior projection area, these patients, whose
motivational structures are still intact, and therefore should have the same impetus to dream
during sleep as all the rest of us, patients who due to parietal lesions nevertheless can't dreamthese patients should have more disturbed sleep than appropriate controls. In other words, the
sleep protection theory can be tested directly by seeing whether patients who are unable to
produce a dream when they need one, wake up. I'm busy testing that hypothesis myself. So far I
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have one case and Bischoff and Busetti have published two years ago one case in which patients
with lesions there with cessation of dreaming, present with sleep maintenance insomnia. So far
we've only two cases, but let's see. The point is that I would be happy to accept that the sleep
protection theory is wrong, if we can't show that sleep maintenance insomnia is a common
concomitant of cessation of dreaming with parietal lesions.
The important thing with respect to the topic we're debating today, however, is that the Freudian
dream theory has not yet been falsified. It therefore is not fair to abandon it on the basis of a
wrong conclusion reached 20 years ago. I would say that the guiding of current research efforts,
making use of the Freudian dream theory, is a perfectly reasonable way to proceed. It's the way
in which I'm proceeding; I'm using it as a very complex, sophisticated theory of the mental
processes involved in dreams, and the aim of using it is in order to refine it, extend it, correct it,
and ultimately, to replace it. Of course nobody wants to preserve a 100-year-old theory just for
the love of it. It's the value of the theory is that it has more at this point that's right with it, than
the alternative theory that Allan Hobson has proposed for us.
Alan Saunders: Mark Soames. And whether you come down on his side or Allan Hobson's, he
did give us a nice summary of what many philosophers say you should do with an existing
scientific theory: refine it, extend it, correct it, and ultimately replace it.
He also described a number of what are called crucial experiments to decide between two
competing theories.
The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Polly Rickard, with technical production this week by
Luke Purse. I'm Alan Saunders, and I'll be back next week with more philosophy of science,
when as part of Radio National's celebration of the year 1956, we look at the life of a man who
fled Hungary in that year and became a controversial philosopher in the west: Imre Lakatosh.
Guests
J. Allan Hobson - Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
http://www.researchmatters.harvard.edu/people.php?people_id=1054
Mark Soames - Royal London School of Medicine
Presenter - Alan Saunders
Producer - Polly Rickard
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2006/1738901.htm
Freud the philosopher
9 September 2006
Sigmund Freud was born 150 years ago this year. He was, of course, the father of
psychoanalysis, but was he in any sense a philosopher? This week, we look at what he had to say
about a philosophical question: what is civilisation and what do we need to do to keep it going?
Transcript
Alan Saunders: Hello, I'm Alan Saunders and this is The Philosopher's Zone.
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This year, as you might know, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. Now, does
he belong on a show like this? He started off as a medical practitioner; he came to regard himself
as a scientist of the mind. And I seem to recall that the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
said that psychology is not necessarily more philosophical than any other subject, but I think we
can agree that there is something philosophical in some of Freud's thought, especially in a late
work like his essay Civilisation and its Discontents, which was published in 1930.
Now with a title like that, it could be a work of philosophy, it could be a work of psychoanalysis,
of history, or of sociology, so what exactly is it?
Here is Professor David Tuckett from the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College, London.
David Tuckett: It's one of Freud's later works, 1930, and there he's interested in looking at the
way in which, well he calls it, instincts and basic driving forces of mankind, how they are tamed
or not by civilisation. Broadly speaking, there are two things that the book did. The first was that
he had the idea that the major problem civilisation had was taming the basic destructive drive
and if this destructive drive is turned outwards against people, obviously you don't have
civilisation. And so it had in some way, to be turned inwards.
And out of this he got the idea of something which is very much in the culture called the super
ego, it's of course only a concept of the real thing, but inside our minds we have this sense of
something called the super ego, which keeps us from doing things which we shouldn't; it's like
our conscience. And Freud argued that the kind of force of the super ego comes form the
destructive instinct being turned upon each person. This means that for him, civilisation always
involved a certain amount of unease that the person had but isn't really fully conscious of. So he
was interested in the way in which, in a way, through being civilised, we have to give up
something.
Alan Saunders: These days we have plenty of people, and they were around in Freud's day as
well, who will tell us that the benefits of civilisation are not worth the pains that are inflicted
upon us in gaining these benefits, and they're not quite the pains that Freud had in mind. The
latest example would be somebody like Jared Diamond who says that agriculture, as opposed to
hunting and gathering, agriculture of course leads to structured societies and to cities and
therefore to civilisation, that really we shouldn't have gone down that route in the first place. And
Freud similarly refers in the book to people who yearn back to a mythical picture of the noble
savage, of the life of paradise. Is he addressing that sort of disdain for civilisation?
David Tuckett: Well, one of the ways you can look at the two basic instincts he talks about, he
calls them the loving instinct Eros and the destructive instinct Thanatos, is to see the Eros as
basically an instinct towards linking things up, joining things up including being within human
social groups. Thanatos, the destructive instinct being exactly that, to go against being part of
things, breaking things up, breaking links and not being part of human groups. So, that tension,
he would see very much at the heart of society and of the individual and inherent, that is, you
could never get away from it, it's always there. So if we take up your question, human
civilisation takes place in groups, we're adapted to groups from many hundreds of thousands of
years ago, the beginning of humankind, but there's always going to be that tension between
working together and working individually. Working together, we achieve a great deal more, we
wouldn't be where we are now, for example trade, everything involves working with other
people, but on the other hand major innovation for example, occurs through things that happened
within individuals often. So that tension is there and is, I think, always going to be.
Alan Saunders: Does he distinguish between stages of civilisation? I mean, obviously you could
say that people in the European Middle Ages were civilised, but it's very, very easy to idealise
9
their state by saying, Well look, you lived in the same village all your life, you knew the same
people, there wasn't too much, short of the odd war or a plague, that would disrupt your
enjoyment of life; it's not as disruptive as the modern world.
David Tuckett: Not really. I mean Freud is not really differentiating different stages.
Alan Saunders: This does then bring us to the question of how the work is to be read. I mean, is
it categorisable? It's obviously not a scientific treatise, but it's not a historical or sociological
monograph either.
David Tuckett: At the time the work was written, it would have seemed highly speculative, and
part of Freud's motive in writing it was not just to contribute to the understand of society and the
issues we've just been discussing, but also it led to this understanding of the super ego as a major
part of the human personality. Now, with the passage of time I think Freud's work has actually
stood the test of time much more than you would expect, not through the metaphors but through
trying to understand it in modern terms. For instance, the whole issue of guilt is, I think you don't
have to look very far to see that we all struggle either with guilt or with the consequences of not
recognising we feel guilty. For instance, in Australia, you have an issue I know with the
Aboriginal peoples, and what is the relationship between the settlers and the Aboriginal peoples.
Now there, of course you can ignore the problem, which is I think really what happened for a
long time. In recent years there's been much more interest in that in novels, in history and in
society and politics. And in a way this brings up one of Freud's key points, that unconscious
guilt, that is guilt you don't know about, can affect you, so that you have an uneasy feeling that
this land which I call mine, perhaps wasn't exactly mine. And there's a novel called The Secret
River which deals with this issue of the difficult feelings, and all the complex issues around this
resettlement of Australia, and how working through guilt, that is, coming to realise there was a
history, things did happen, although it may be painful at the time, it makes you feel better to get
these issues sorted out.
Alan Saunders: Well, I think I have two questions arising from that: one is does he have a
concept of guilt as being collective, or is it individual? Can a society have unrecognised guilt?
David Tuckett: Well, I think ultimately all feelings belong to individuals, but different human
groups can deal with the situation which they're in collectively, so that one of the things that
happens, for example if you take the Nazi period in Germany, is that people could identify with
the way Hitler was carrying on against the Jews, and they didn't at the time, or most people
didn't, feel guilty about what was happening, but perhaps they were uncomfortable. If I just you
an example: you take someone who is encouraged to hit or treat badly someone else, they do
that. Then they feel uncomfortable but they're not conscious of it. Instead of being aware they
feel uncomfortable for hitting somebody, what they feel is that that person makes them feel bad,
so they hit them again, and again, and again, and in the end what you want to do is kill them or at
least eradicate them from your existence. So, these things happen in the individual, but groups
can help or not people to recognise what's happening. One of the things that I'll be talking about
in my talk is that, for example, the English psychoanalyst, Bion, talked about what happens in
groups and how groups can share basic assumptions to do with the way they manage anxiety, for
example.
Alan Saunders: And my other question arising from the example you give is, I do know people
who would say with regard to white Australia's relationship with the indigenous people of this
country, that guilt's neither here nor there, what we really want are practical measures that will
improve Aboriginal living standards, will improve education, will improve life expectancy, and
so on, and that really has nothing to do with guilt.
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David Tuckett: First of all, I'm sure that these practical measures are important, but the way
feelings come is you never have any choice about them, they're either there or they're not there,
and then after that you either recognise them or you don't. So on the part of the settlers, I think
there would be somewhere, and most people would think, Well, we've actually taken something,
somewhere along the line something was taken, and that produces a feeling of having stolen
something. If you're aware of it, you can think about it, and you can see it in proportion. Then on
the other side, that is on the Aboriginal side, there will be a feeling of having something stolen
from you, and there will be grievance. Now again, by knowing that you have a grievance you can
think about it rather than spend your whole life dominated by it. If these two sets of feelings,
grievance and guilt, can be thought about it'll be more easy to get down usually I think to the
practical business of saying, OK how do we resolve this by making arrangements between us,
not forever one side having grievance and the other side feeling eternal guilt.
Alan Saunders: Can we return to the super ego. I've heard a number of critics say that one of the
problems with understanding Freud is that we've saddled ourselves with the translations of his
technical terms, which were in many cases originally arrived at by his first translator, James
Strachey, and that they actually sound rather more approachable in the original German. So, can
you enlarge a bit on the concept of the super ego? What is it? Is it the I over me, as it were?
David Tuckett: Yes. Well I think what you're saying is absolutely true. As I understand it in
German Freud's language reads very colloquially, and he indeed won literary prizes for his
writing, whereas Ernest Jones and James Strachey wanted to make it sound terribly official and
proper because they were worried about what he says about sex and things like that and this does
mean it's a bit distant.
I think the super ego is a simple idea in that it is literally a sense of being watched over by
something. For example, when you feel a little bit uncomfortable, and if you think of when you
feel slightly guilty, it is a bit associated with kind of looking over your shoulder, mentally
speaking, as to what's going on behind you. I think it does have, once you've got the meaning of
it, I think it does have quite a nice, intuitive feel, a sort of someone watching, and of course as
you know, Freud's idea is that our idea about fear of punishment and fear of having done wrong,
is based on the way we think of how our parents treated us. Our ideas about that are always
exaggerated for Freud. That is, however badly parents treated us, and of course in some cases
parents treated people appallingly, the child always tends to exaggerate it, because the child sees
the way the parent is through it's own and tending to be highly aggressive basic wishes, the idea
'I want it, and I'm going to have it, I'll take it', and then being frightened of the parent wanting it,
bigger, stronger, taking it back. So this I think is quite a lively model once you've appreciated it a
bit.
Alan Saunders: I'm talking to Professor David Tuckett from the Psychoanalysis Unit at
University College, London, about Sigmund Freud's book Civilisation and its Discontents and
that watcher over your shoulder, the super ego. Now of course the biggest watcher over your
shoulder is God, so what about God?
David Tuckett: Well, Freud in another related work, The Future of the Illusion, tackles that, in
which God effectively is an idea which for Freud is the super ego, so that this God represents a
projection of the individual super ego into the eternal, basically.
Alan Saunders: Freud was medically trained, of course, and he aspired to making a contribution
to science, but how do we regard a concept like the super ego? Do we see it as a scientific
concept like those arrived at by his contemporaries, like relativity, like Schrödinger's wave
equation, or is it a metaphor or what?
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David Tuckett: I think all concepts are really not exactly true or false but are useful a lot, and so
I think the idea of the super ego is just a way of trying to describe what in fact are a very
complex set of processes. The processes rest on the interest psychoanalysts have in feelings or
emotions. And in that respect Freud's early ideas, as you know, he started life really as a
neuroscientist, he was quite a top neuroscientist of his day, working at a top laboratory and it was
because he couldn't understand certain things going on with hysterics, that he turned from
neuroscience to psychoanalysis. Now in recent years, neuroscientists have found themselves
coming back in fact, to the kinds of ideas that Freud was having, so that for example the
centrality of emotion in human life is beginning to be recognised. For instance, whereas it's
common to think that emotions stand in the way of making good sensible rational decisions, in
fact we now are beginning to believe that good decision making requires emotions, because you
can't actually, as economists for example argue, do huge numbers of calculations even if you've
got a lot of computers, you do things quickly and efficiently, and you partly do things because it
feels right to do something. And this is the way in which we're actually biologically programmed
through feelings, to help us actually live, and undoubtedly feelings, the basis of which something
like the super ego is based on feeling bad about things, these I think are probably ultimately
biologically conditioned. And so Freud's metaphor there probably stands for a lot of complex
processes which I think in the next 50 to 100 years will be better understood, but at the end result
I think, the concept of the super ego probably will stand as a useful one.
Alan Saunders: But if neurophysiology got really, really clever, would it be worth looking for
the seat of the super ego in the brain?
David Tuckett: Well, as you will know, current neurophysiology is much more about the
relationships between parts of the brain, so that the idea of a bit of the brain doing this I think is
already probably disproved, but it is about complex relationships because the brain also evolved,
so that our brain is made up so to speak, of the simpler brains of earlier animals, earlier primates,
and as the brain got more complicated, so it added these functions. So I think that it won't be that
you'll see the super ego, but you can see already, if you put people in these scans that they use,
you can see areas lighting up and things happening when people are so to speak, thinking, and
one of the interesting things about that work is, you see similar things occurring if you give
people an idea of something, as opposed to if you give them the actual experience.
Alan Saunders: Karl Popper, one of Freud's critics, said that the trouble with Freud was that you
did not have in his works any falsifiable hypotheses, and to put that in terms of the super ego, he
would have said that there are no discoveries that you could make that would lead you to suspect
that the super ego doesn't exist, therefore it is not a scientific notion because scientific concepts
should always be vulnerable to being proved false or being proved invalid. In that sense, is the
super ego a falsifiable hypothesis?
David Tuckett: I think that the issue of falsifying things actually depends on the skill or
imagination one has in setting up the test. You could start like this: I think few of us would
disagree with the idea that there's a feeling called guilt we can share between us, although it is
ultimately a subjective feeling. I don't know exactly what you feel when you feel guilt, but we
can probably compare. So once you've got ideas of guilt and once you've got the links between
them, I think then it's a question of does the super ego add anything. If we have the theory of the
super ego, just as if we have the theory of the destructive drives or things of this kind, does it
make sense of the situation, that's if you have an alternative theory. In this way I don't think
psychoanalysis is any different from any other scientific discipline, although the nature of the
way you set up the test, is somewhat different.
12
The underlying point here is really that psychoanalysis I think is the only serious discipline that
looks at the experience of subjectivity, and the whole difficulty is how do you look at
subjectivity in a rigorous way. You clearly can't say you look at subjectivity only objectively, or
there's nothing to investigate. So that's the inherent difficulty, but it's not unique to
psychoanalysis.
Alan Saunders: Well yes, it's perhaps for reasons similar to this, that a lot of Freud's admirers
today want to say, 'Well we really see him not as a scientist of the mind, but as an imaginative
artist, as a writer', but you sound as though you're holding out for the rather older idea of him as
a scientist of the mind.
David Tuckett: I have a somewhat broader view of science, that I think that it's very important
that psychoanalysis is seen as a discipline which can make statements which can claim to have
greater truth than just if any other person says it without the discipline. I think it makes no sense
otherwise really. So that the underlying issue would be with psychoanalysis, like actually with
economics or sociology or social anthropology or other disciplines, you have to construct an
argument, and then you have to think, Well what arguments are there against this. And it's that
way of thinking, rather than thinking there's definitely a simple way of validating it with a
particular form of investigation like an experiment.
Alan Saunders: A few years ago I was talking to a psychoanalyst, not as a patient but at a party,
and I was talking about the Orestia, the great trilogy by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, and I
was saying, well this is a story of a father who sacrifices his daughter, the mother who then kills
the father, the son who goes seeking revenge, threatening destruction to all around, until finally
the matter is only resolved by the gods descending in the third part of the trilogy, and essentially
bringing order to the city. And he said, 'Yes, it sounds like you've been reading Melanie Klein,
the psychoanalyst, which I hadn't, by the way, though I have now, after he said this. But is that
the sort of pattern of the super ego as it were, coming to be born, and powerfully and poetically
embodied in those plays?
David Tuckett: Yes. The way I'd put it rather is this: that the Greek tragedies, and what is great
about them and why they've lasted, is that they describe fundamental human problems of
experience and existence, which they dramatized, as with Shakespeare and things like that. And
they are, so to speak, true, because they're part of human experience. In a way that relates to a
point about science: it wouldn't make sense to say is it true or not, I think we all recognise these
fundamental issues that are addressed in such dramas. Then Klein or Freud or the other
psychoanalysts, or indeed any other person, if their theories are valid they should naturally relate
to the same type of phenomena. You know, the thesis in the tragedies, if your psychological
theory's any good, would highlight them a bit, and that's roughly what I'd say. In regard to super
ego and civilisation's discontent, the centrality of the Oedipus complex, or broadly speaking the
relationship between child and parents, the relationship between the parents in the child's mind,
and the individual relationships between each child and each parent, and their various
vicissitudes, that makes up, according to Freud, the stuff of life and the stuff of emotions, and it's
out of that that human personalities form, starting with feelings about guilt, identification and so
on, and these are brilliantly set out in Aeschylus and the other classic tragedies.
Alan Saunders: While we're on a literary bent: there are very few writers who I can think of - a
couple - who take the view that civilisation is constant work, that it means self-restraint, it means
discipline, it's always on the verge of collapse, we really need to keep a hold on things in order to
prevent that collapse. Conrad, the novelist, is one of them, Kipling is another. Is that Freud's
view of civilisation?
13
David Tuckett: Yes, I think it's very much. I mean the last - I can't quote it to you exactly, but
the last words of Civilisation and its Discontents,- I think it's a footnote actually, written as the
events in Germany are being anticipated, he ends up by saying, 'Only time will show how these
things develop'. So he very much sees the struggle between the life instincts, that's to combine to
be with each other, and destructivity, especially with the development of human capacity for
destructivity, as a constant ongoing battle. I'd add to your list I think, Tolstoy in fact, who I think
in his work is very much interested in these phenomena.
Alan Saunders: Professor Tuckett, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
David Tuckett: Thank you.
Guests
Prof David Tuckett - The Psychoanalysis Unit, University College, London.
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/psychoanalysis/david.htm
Presenter - Alan Saunders
Producer - Polly Rickard
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2006/1733000.htm#transcript
Dreamwork - Tips to Help You Recall and Interpret Your Dreams
By Sharif Khan
"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas;
they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my
mind." - Emily Bronte, English novelist and poet
Dreams have the tremendous power to transform our lives in so many ways. Taking the time to
explore and understand our dreams can help us improve relationships, solve difficult problems,
diagnose illnesses, inspire creativity, fresh ideas and new inventions, and teach leadership and
right conduct. Sometimes, even a single dream can help shape our life purpose.
On February 3, 2005, I had what world renowned psychologist Dr. Carl Jung called a 'BIG
DREAM'. It was a powerfully vivid, life-defining dream which crystallized my purpose and
calling in life. It's a sacred dream which I still refer to often and which has led me on a Dream
Quest to explore and understand the magic of dreams.
To help me on this quest, I recently took an intensive sixteen-hour Dreamwork Workshop at the
home of Dr. Marina Quattrocchi who completed her doctoral thesis on dreams based on her over
seven year's of dreamwork practice with high-school students.
I'd like to share with you some key learning points on dreamwork that I took away from this
course as well as some fresh insights I've picked-up along the way based on my own independent
dream research:
We spend up to 7 years of our lives dreaming
We all average about five to seven dreams a night (even if we don't remember them) and will
spend approximately five to seven full years of our lifetime dreaming.
Dreams are the language of the soul
Dreams are the language of the soul. They are spirit informing mind with the purpose of bringing
wholeness and healing in our lives. Dreams serve two main functions: 1). To help us work
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through our issues or karma, and 2). To help us fulfill our destiny, purpose, or dharma. Most
dreams will fall under these two broad pillars.
Everyone can understand their dreams
We all have the potential to self-interpret or at least understand our dreams to help enrich our
lives.
Dreams come in many shapes and sizes
Precognitive or predictive dreams help us prepare for a future event that comes to pass.
Clairvoyant or clear seeing dreams can often help us better perceive what's happening in the
present. And retro-cognitive dreams can help uncover something hidden in the past. Past,
present, and future are one fluid continuum that dreams draw from.
There are visitation dreams where angels, mentors, and loved ones visit us to provide guidance.
Lucid dreams occur when we become aware that we are dreaming - allowing us some conscious
influence on the outcome of the dream. Telepathic dreams involve mind-to-mind communication
with other people.
We often will dream experiential testing dreams (especially during a transition) where our soul is
trying out different scenarios to help us make better choices or help prepare us for an arduous
undertaking.
For example, a high school student transitioning over to college might have recurring dreams
about participating in various on campus activities to better prepare him for the actual event. Or a
recently laid off person who's thinking of jumping into a business full-time might have a dream
where she's running her business but is wearing disheveled clothing, feeling exhausted, and
swimming in a sea of paperwork. This dream could be warning the dreamer to transition over
part-time or choose another business deal.
Dreams can have many layers of meaning
More complex dreams with several scenes will often involve multiple layers of meaning. Some
dreams will require a long period of incubation involving several months or years because they
are working on complex problems.
Some of these complex dreams might not make any sense at the moment of interpretation but
will make sense after an appropriate gestation period has elapsed. It is well worth the effort to
journal your dreams in as much detail as you can and make a conscious effort to explore all
aspects and meanings of your dreams. Some dreams, like a good book, will bring new flashes of
insight and meaning with each reading.
Dream Recall Tips
* Start with the belief that you can and will remember your dreams.
* Place a pad, pencil and pen by your bedside. (Pencil tips can break while pens can run out of
ink).
* Try a light pen so you can write your dreams in the dark without having to switch on a lamp.
* You may wish to have a tape-recorder to speak your dream upon waking.
* Reading a good book on dreams 20 minutes before going to bed can help stimulate dream
recall.
* Repeat a dream recall affirmation often such as: "I am easily remembering and recording my
dreams."
* Write down your dream as soon as you awake. 80% of a dream can be lost in as little as 10
minutes.
* Visualize yourself immediately writing down your dream on waking.
* Be as still as possible. Shifting positions in bed is known to reduce dream recall.
15
* Tell a partner or trusted friend in advance that you will share your dream with them tomorrow.
* Meditating and praying for guidance will put you in the alpha dream state and help increase
recall.
* Get a good night's sleep. Dreams get progressively longer peaking in the 6th, 7th, and 8th
hours of sleep.
* You will establish the habit of remembering your dreams by journaling them for the next 30
days.
Dream Interpretation Tips
* Start with a sincere intent to learn from your dreams to better yourself and live purposefully.
* What emotional feeling are you left with? Feelings are more accurate and truthful than words
in dreams.
* You are made up of 80% water. The state of water in your dreams often reflects your
emotional state.
* Write a simple story line. Summarize your dream in one sentence and express the main theme.
* Ask: "Why did my soul have this experience? What do I need to understand? What issues need
working?"
* Be aware of the events occurring in your life at the time of your dream; especially the day
before.
* Remember that dream symbols often have dual opposite meanings. Good dream dictionaries
will have both.
* There are three main types of symbols: archetypal symbols, cultural symbols, and personal
symbols.
* Review all your dreams at least once a year. You will notice common themes and motifs to
help guide you.
* Act on your dreams: call or visit someone, pick up a book, watch a movie, wear clothing from
your dreams.
* Dream application leads to dream interpretation. By applying your dreams the full meaning
reveals itself.
Dreamwork is a wonderful way to enrich your life with new meaning and vitality. If this topic
fascinates you, then I highly recommend Dr. Marina Quattrocchi's Dreamwork course. For
information about her workshops and dream therapy sessions, call 416-246-0123.
I sincerely believe Dr. Quattrochi is doing an excellent job of helping people harness their
dreams. In this sleep-deprived, dream-deprived world, helping people to honor their dreams will
bring healing and wholeness to the planet.
In her book, "Dreamwork Uncovered," Dr. Quattrochi mentions the fascinating culture of the
ancient Senoi tribe who lived in the mystic mountains of Malaysia. This mysterious tribe was so
advanced that at one period of their existence "there had been no accounts of violent crime for
over two hundred years."
Interestingly, dreams played a central role in their culture and every morning family members
would share their dreams with each other and consult the village council.
We now live in a world where the village Shaman that brought healing and hope to people is all
but killed off. Under the veil of science and technological progress, the world weeps silently. It is
time to bring back the lost art of dreaming...
Sharif Khan (http://www.herosoul.com | sharif@herosoul.com) is a freelance writer,
inspirational keynote speaker, consultant, and author of "Psychology of the Hero Soul," an
inspirational leadership book on awakening the hero within. The Hero Soul is based on his ten
16
year's research in human development and has been mentioned in a number of media including
USA Today, Reader's Digest Canada, and the Toronto Sun. He publishes his free monthly Hero
Soul ezine on personal development and is currently working on his first novel. To contact
Sharif, call: (416) 417-1259.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sharif_Khan
http://ezinearticles.com/?Dreamwork---Tips-to-Help-You-Recall-and-Interpret-YourDreams&id=1213275
Book: Dreaming By J. Allan Hobson (Dream Science)
What is dreaming? Why are dreams so strange and why are they so hard to remember? In this
fascinating book, Harvard researcher Allan Hobson offers an intriguing look at our nightly
odyssey through the illusory world of... (plus > see reviews)
http://books.google.com/books?id=mdeXsYkSzNIC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=%22Dream+D
ebate%22&source=web&ots=qbVOrZokvZ&sig=s-Mm4Bgt-MMei2WaG_AhHShPOo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result
Exploring the meaning of dreams
by Nora Carver
Have you ever had a dream that you just couldn't shake? When you woke up you could swear it
was so vivid and real it must have been true? We all have dreams that may affect our waking life,
whether it be a nightmare that leaves us wide awake and shivering, or one that inspires us to take
on new heights in our waking lives, dreams are an essential part of being human.
People have always had a curiosity about dreams. What do they mean? Even in ancient times
people understood the power of dreams, and those who could interpret their meaning were
accorded mystical and spiritual powers. The Christian Bible records many instances of dreams
and dream interpreters. Peoples of the ancient world sought meaning in the symbolism in their
dreams from priests and oracles. Many cultures have rituals of invoking waking dreams or
visions that are believed to help them in their lives. Dreams have been thought of as messages
from the gods in many religions.
Dr. Sigmund Freud, prominent psychologist at the emergence of psychology as a science is
renown for using dream symbolism and interpretation in his therapy and research. Many
psychologists today use a dream journals as a therapeutic device in treating their patients. It is
widely believed that dreams are the communication of the subconscious mind to the waking,
though most psychoanalysts will tell you that these "messages" can be interpreted in many ways,
putting more emphasis on the associations of the symbols than the actual objects in a dream.
Many dreams can be grouped into several categories. Many people have similarly themed
dreamed such as falling, drowning, or being naked in public. Dream interpreters derive a
common meaning to correlate with the most common human emotions evoked by these dreams
to interpret them into a language the waking person can understand. Most dream theorists believe
that these messages are ways for the mind to release negative feelings by telling the conscious
mind what to do to resolve these internal issues. Although many dream dictionaries have been
written over the centuries, these texts have little to no actual scientific value. Some dreams
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however do seem to remain constant in their general interpretation as they are some of the more
commonly experienced dreams throughout humanity. Some of these dream themes include:
Drowning, associated with being in a situation that is out of control or out of your control
Death, associated with the removal or ending of some situation or event in one's life, not
foretelling of a death but rather a resolution of something. Death also has more in-depth meaning
depending on how close the dead person in the dream is to the dreamer.
Falling associated with a fear of loss or failure
Flying associated with a positive uplifting experience, things are looking up, hopefulness
Nakedness depending on the circumstances, naked in public means you are unprepared for
something, in private means you are comfortable with your position or a recent decision you
have made.
Dreams and their meanings have continued to elude the scientific community. Theories about
why we dream range from the purely scientific view that they are simply random neurons firing
off in our brain, to the deeply religious view that dreams are a message from a higher source.
Whatever the reason for or behind dreaming it is a fact that dreaming links us all in the human
experience.
http://www.helium.com/items/521113-exploring-the-meaning-of-dreams
Exploring the meaning of dreams - by Judy Furniss
Interpreting the meaning of dreams starts way back in the book of Genesis, where Joseph
interpreted the butler and the baker's dreams. Then he went on to interpret King Pharaoh's dream.
Obviously dreams must have meaning and a message, or people wouldn't go out of their way to
find interpretations for them. Hence, came forth books explaining what your dreams mean. My
question is this, how can you find the meaning of your own personal dream in a generic book of
dreams? Just because someone dreams about a particular thing, doesn't mean that another person
who had the same type of dream can be interpreted the same way.
I believe some people have a natural gift for interpreting dreams, but I deem if you're intuitive
enough, you can search inside yourself and find the meaning of your own dreams.
When you've had a particular dream, access the circumstances going on in your life at the time,
and apply it to the dream, and then look for the message that it has to offer. Let me share a dream
I had many years ago while going through a horrendous divorce, starting a new career, raising
two children alone and scared to death of what my future held.
I was riding in the back seat of a sedan. My supervisor, who in real life is my mentor, who I have
the utmost respect for, was driving the car. Another lady was in the passenger's seat. We were
traveling down a straight dirt road hedged in by many tall pine trees, in search of a rainbow. I
kept looking around stating how absolutely beautiful the drive was. Then I saw another road off
to my right and I said, "Oh that's such a beautiful road, let's take that one." Then I would see
another road, and I would ask my mentor to go down that road. She would quietly say "No, we
must keep moving forward."
Then, the passenger said, "There's the rainbow!" I turned and looked out the back window.
"Where is it?" I asked.
"Don't look behind you, it ahead of us." My mentor said.
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What this dream meant to me was; to move forward, don't look at the past, stay focused and don't
veer off the path. Then you will find a brighter future.
A simple dream can be profound enough to change your life if you just listen to it. Dreams are
given to us for a reason and if you tap into that sixth sense, you can use your dreams to benefit
yourself and others.
Sweet dreams!
http://www.helium.com/items/793795-exploring-the-meaning-of-dreams
by Steve Marshall
The other night I was dreaming that my wife and I had bought a horse and a cart and we were
sitting on the top of the cart on a wide enough wooden seat for us both to sit next to each other
and we were riding it through a country town. I am wearing a singlet, a shirt and have a vest like
jacket with no sleeves on also. I have my shirt sleeves rolled up to just below my elbows, and a
scarf around my neck and a cowboy type hat on. But I have forgotten to put my pants on, and my
bare legs are visible and I'm feeling embarrassed about it. My old fashioned shirt tails hang down
to my thighs however, but I still feel very shameful as I notice my state. We then ride past an old
antique shop just on our left side and on the left side of the road also just back from the road a
fraction. We had passed it by a bit earlier and had moved just passed it now and I said to my wife
"we'll stop and have a look at in there". I pull over and walk the horse to the side of the brown,
stony gravel road. There is a large gravel side area to park, maybe for horses like mine. Then as I
am hoping off from the cart, it hits me what a stupid thing we have done. What do I know about
horses, feeding them, grooming them and controlling them and handling them and knowing how
to get them to stop on the road where I want them to stop. I'm thinking I can't just leave the horse
here as it might walk off; it's not the same as my car, and I look for somewhere to tie it. I'm also
thinking I should find my pants and put them on. But then I find us in the shop, me still pantless
and looking around near the old glass counter, with one middle shelf and it's about waist high
and all made of glass. It's like I am me as I am today, but I am also back in the past viewing me
from partly inside my character and partly from some sort of dream overviewing position. I was
also feeling it was real and in my real life I would have to put up with this new acquisition of the
horse and cart. And this was why I was feeling annoyed with myself for buying something I had
no skills with or use for now. A strange combination of feelings of being there while not being
there.
What does a dream like this mean? Maybe the meaning I see is different from somebody else's
meaning, but my meaning I think is probably what I need to see now. This is so I think, unless
my own meaning only hides the real meaning. But is there really a real meaning in a dream, or as
in life maybe it's more up to us to find meaning, apply it, learn from it and not to waste anything
that comes along and to know that in it, there is the possibility to teach us something. Now that's
utilising our life and our dreams.
Well this is my interpretation:
This dream, surprise, surprise is from a past life with me and my wife in the outback cowboy
days in Missouri, in America. It was around 1845 I feel, and I was riding into the town after
buying the horse and cart for the princely sum of $3.75 US in the previous town. I had cashed in
some gold I had found. The reason I had forgot my pants, was that I had had a wash in the
bathroom of the hotel in the previous town, my first in many months since being out looking for
the gold. I had left quickly gathering my things and riding out because someone had accused me
of doing a line with my "wife" (my actual wife in my life now who is this Indian girl in my
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dream) who is only my girl friend there, but working for someone here in this town as a
housemaid. They were accusing me of coming into town and taking their maid to have my way
with her while I was bathing in their hotel room upstairs. My "wife's" name here was Mandy and
I was Samuel Cassidy. My "wife's" real name was Mandelinjo as she was an Indian Squaw but
had taken an easier name when she had started living and working in the town. I eventually went
on to marry her and had 5 kids, 3 boys, 2 girls but only 3 lived past childhood, as diseases and
plagues were common then in that time. So the life is showing me that I can actually control
things in my life and am often actually in control even when I don't think that I am in control or
that I can handle things or when I feel out of my depth and up a stream without a paddle or so to
speak . The learning has been obtained from previous lives and I already knew about horses in
that life. I had a flash of recognition, seeing the real me and my real wife as these characters for a
minute, and it surprised me that I could now handle the horse with a natural ability without even
thinking about it. The horse is a symbol of course, as well, a symbol for freedom and self control.
I need to both control the horse but also do it by allowing a certain freedom to it. And so with life
you appear to be free, but you are fairly well controlled by others, by your past and also my the
physical laws and restrictions operating for you. Life is a matter of choices, and I need to
remember this as I do what I do, and so that I don't always think that I am being overwhelmed by
events that I don't think that I can handle. For most of the time I really can handle it and have
handled it before or in a similar situation. Life repeats often, and allows the learning to be
integrated and fully achieved through presenting themes from slightly different angles and
different perspectives, This is to show you that love is multi directional, many sided, and to give
you this flexible knowledge from all sides so that you always approach it from the side of love.
Then as you have more experiences with love and gain more experience of love you will know
how it, the way of love, is always the best course and the very best direction to take in all
situations, and each situation is showing you this in some fashion or other. The whole of live is
set up for you to learn about love and then to utilise the learning and live more and more from
love. That life, that's love.
So this dream after I woke up seemed to connect to something from the past that then broke into
this locked memory and gave me all these other details and somewhat easily they flowed through
from somewhere. I didn't just make these up as they came from the dream memory seeming to be
stimulated and brought forward or connected to that dream.
There are probably many explanations for these particular memories ( that's if they are actually
memories ), to surface. My explanation above suggests the memories come from a possible past
life or maybe I have somehow slipped back to the past or maybe even I have just constructed it
all like a movie scene in order to show me some point my soul, or mind obviously wants me to
see at this time. If I learn and grow from this and get something from each life experience be it in
real life or dream life, well who could dispute me my own interpretation. But all the same I am
not dogmatic and I don't just put it all down to just one possible explanation in a universe where
just about anything seems indeed to be possible and another interpretation or explanation might
also fit and explain my dream.
One other point here might be worth pointing out. So why was I pantless in this dream?
Often this type of occurrence occurs in a dream only to provide an extra stimulation or unusual
happening so that it stands out to your mind and so that you remember it more easily. Often if
you are dreaming that, for example you are in your pyjamas and you find that you are in an
office or in a shop or similar situation, this is your mind's way of telling you that this is only a
dream. If you remember these type of queues or symbols and then become aware of it in your
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dream it's a good way to become lucid in a dream. Here the pantless state is showing me that I
have allowed myself to be caught with my pants down because I allowed others to misinterpret
my motives and I probably should have allowed for this type of misinterpretation. This was
because they did not know of my previous relationship already with this girl when I had met her
previously when she was still part of her tribe and I was prospecting near the river she was
obtaining water from.
http://www.helium.com/items/455038-exploring-the-meaning-of-dreams
by Summer18
How important are our dreams?
In our day to day lives, we wear a mask to hide whatever may be going on inside. After all, we
have to work and earn a living. We have to take care of our families. We certainly can't be
wearing our hearts on our sleeve, can we? This is where our dreams come in. Holding back our
emotions often find their way into our subconscious.
Sometimes, our repressed emotions is a sign of how drastically our lives need to change. If we
are feeling anxious, it might be an easier task during the day to distract ourselves, but at night our
dreams tell another story. Feeling taken for granted or abused in some form, leads to repression
needing to be released. If you find yourself angry all the time, it doesn't leave you much space to
be any good to anyone, especially yourself. This is why our dreams are so important. They open
up a gateway of healing, and a unique opportunity to learn about ourselves.
Here are some common symbols in dreams and what they might mean
1. Revolving Locations. One moment you're in the middle of a dessert, next moment you're on
top of a mountain. This could indicate that your life is undergoing a transformation. The message
might be to investigate all of your options and opportunities. Your subconscious is relaying to
you, your need for change.
2. Disorientation. If your dream finds you somewhere you've never been, and you feel
uncomfortable and out of place, this might indicate that you are not ready to give something up.
If, on the other hand, you feel exhilarated and happy in these new, never seen environment, this
would relay to you that you are definitely ready to explore a new territory and should accept the
challenge.
3. Mazes or fun houses. These are common in dreams where you are looking for direction.
Finding your way out easily is a sign that you are feeling confident of who you are and the road
you're taking to achieve your goals.
4. Identity Crisis. Looking into a mirror and seeing someone else looking back can be terrifying.
This symbol in dreams usually represents your feelings of confusion as to who you really are.
Maybe you're struggling with your sexuality or a role that you are expected to play in your life is
feeling like an act.
5. Coming in First. If you have a dream where you are running for office or racing to the top of a
hill and you win, most times this means you are feeling very confident and sure of your success.
This type of sign can be common in dreams to help assure you when you are feeling hesitant.
6. Look out below. Falling is one of the most common symbols in dreams. Anxiety and feeling
overwhelmed usually ignites these types of dreams. Your life is feeling out of control and you're
not sure where to turn or who to trust.
7. Everyone's bigger than me. When others are represented in your dreams as being larger than
life and towering over you, this could bring up memories of childhood and your subconscious
craving to be taken care of.
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8. Who's that behind me. Seeing your shadow in dreams can be a symbol of all things you don't
like about yourself. A side of you, you wish others to never see.
9. What a tangled web we weave. Spiders in dreams represent an overbearing or extremely
possessive mother figure. An authority figure who you feel is overpowering your ability to
makes decisions or hindering your independence in some way.
10. It sure is hot up in here. Fires or burning buildings represent the need to start over. It can be
connected to a passionate romance that is filled with fire, or the urgency you feel the importance
of regrouping and leaving behind the old ways that are not working.
http://www.helium.com/items/1117408-the-meaning-behind-dreams
by Linda Atalig
I had a dream this morning that frankly disturb me. I honestly believe it is a psychic prediction.
This is how it played out in my dream...
I was with a detective, the reason I knew this is because when we were leaving the scene, we ran
into a couple of people and he asked if they have a way to call 911, they said no yet, I saw them
holding cell phones. The detective next to me said, "We do" and I can hear police radio or
scanner. What I do not understand at this point is why he did not call the police right away. Why
is he asking if they have a way of calling 911? Why did the couple say they did not when they
were holding one in their hands?
In my dream I remembered him getting out of an American car, a real nice one, like the one the
police often use. I got out of the car was coming around from the back of saying "why did you
turn off the air conditioning it's like a hundred degrees here?". I got in the car and remembered
when I turn it on how cool it was. I was in the driver's seat backing the car up and the detective
got in and I moved to the passenger seat, as we were leaving the scene, we saw this Caucasian
American couple getting out of their car and coming over to our car. I remembered them
crouching down so they can see into the car, holding their cell phones.
The murder scene that I glimpse was a couple of people, a man and a woman. The woman was
sort of blond reddish hair and appeared well off. I am not sure why I thought of this, but it just
appeared to me like she was. I did not remember any details about the man hanging next to her.
The couple appeared to be hanging from a tree; it looked like they were in the woods, but so
close to the house. They were almost concealed by the house yet, you can see them hanging from
certain angle, from the front of the house. I saw blood on their clothes, I am not sure if they were
murdered in an execution style. Some other pertinent things that I saw were a silver sports car in
the garage. It sort of looked out of place because the garage was kind of dusty and they were
some wood working stuff around the car. The car looked like a corvette or a newer model jaguar
or sporty Japanese. Not sure about the model, but I could identify the car if I saw it again. I am
absolutely sure about the color though. Another detail that stood out was half of a papaya that
appeared fresh. I remembered it being vivid orange and yellow in color. The parking area where
we parked the car appeared dry and dusty. I do not know the significant of this dream, but it was
very vivid and thought I would write it down. I dream of other things, but sometimes forget them
as soon as I get out of bed. This one sort of stayed in my mind for some odd reason. This could
be a frightening dream or a psychic prediction.
http://www.helium.com/items/456424-exploring-the-meaning-of-dreams
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