Dreams: Part 1
Historical Facts and Freudian Interpretation
I gave a talk on dreams recently. It was so well received I thought those who still read my stuff might be interested.
I began my talk by saying that while I don’t usually remember my dreams, I had two that might interest them.
The night after I agreed to give the talk, I had a dream that I was in a dark tunnel which split into numerous tunnels leading in different directions. Confused as to which way to go, I finally said, “The devil with it,” and took one. Later, a night or two before my scheduled appearance, I dreamed that I had gone somewhere to give a talk and forgotten my notes. As I stood before the gathering, presumably explaining, everyone stood up and left. Easy to interpret! First, which direction to take in a talk on dreams: second, just scared.
Everyone dreams three to four times a night, some of us remember them: some of us don’t. But we still have them.
In every known society in history – in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America - dreams were considered important. Dreams were studied and their messages, major and minor, were acted upon. Most of us are aware of the importance given to dreams in the Old Testament, but dreams were just as important to American Indian tribes, and the native peoples in Africa, Asia and Australia.
This belief in the importance of dreams disappeared among the “educated” of Europe during the Dark and Medieval Ages. Dreams were dismissed as meaningless. St. Augustine is reported to have thanked God that he was not responsible for his dreams. (Considering the life he led before becoming a priest, they must have been dandies!)
Many useless books are available on the meaning of dreams, and I suspect they make their writers good sums of money, but the experts I have read argue that the only person who can interpret a dream is the dreamer.
I consider four authors important: Freud, Carl Jung, Eric Fromm, and Calvin Hall.
The great importance of Freud is that he opened a door which had been closed. Early in the twentieth century, Freud wrote a book on dream interpretation. This aroused general interest in dreams and their interpretation. Freud’s theory was very narrow. If not wrong, it was misleading at times. (But he still opened a closed door.) He thought that:
1. Children were evil. He identified this “evil” nature as the “Id.” He believed it consisted of illicit sexual and aggressive impulses, which had to be repressed for the child to enter society. (All of us who are parents know that infants are only satisfied when they achieve their wants, but I doubt that we consider this “evil.”)
2. The first growth of the child’s personality Freud termed the Ego, an understanding of reality that develops and expands throughout life.
3. The final element of the personality is the Super Ego, the conscience, which develops in the early teens.
4. As child matures, Id is repressed during waking hours by the Ego and Super Ego, which dominate our waking lives, because of its unacceptable, evil, nature.
5. At night, the Id comes forth in dreams. Because the nature of man is either aggressive or sexual, dreams are representations of those thoughts, repressed during waking hours by normal people.
When teaching about dreams, I would permit students to give me dreams only if they wrote them out. After I read them, I would decide if they were proper to be read before the class. I was saved by this rule at least once. A single, middle-aged teacher in the class who represented in person the image most people have of a fundamentalist Christian, wrote of a dream in which a snake was hovering over her as she lay in bed. She was terrified as the snake came closer and closer. Then it reached down and nibbled on her shoulder and she found that very pleasant. I never read a better example of a Freudian sex dream. Despite her request, I didn’t discuss it in class!
The idea that such dreams are always a result of suppressed, unacceptable, desires suffered a second blow in my experience a year or two later. During a smoke break, I told an older man who was in the class about the dream and we both laughed. We laughed even harder a minute later when a tall, slender, attractive young woman who was listening spoke up with, “My husband had a friend stay with us over the weekend and, wow, did I have a dream. But I’m not telling it to you or anyone else!”
More next week.