The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams (10 page)

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Authors: Phyllis R. Koch-Sheras

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BOOK: The Dream Sourcebook: A Guide to the Theory and Interpretation of Dreams
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After several days, a dream, or sometimes a waking vision, would appear and the child would return home to face a team of dream experts who would interpret the vision and tell him of his future: hunter, warrior, medicine man, conjurer, priest, artist, or even dream interpreterwhatever role seemed to be indicated. Upon the child's return, members of the tribe would create a personal ceremonial shield based on the results.
Once an essential part of life, the practice of the vision quest is no longer popular among Native Americans, as traditions have receded into memory. But many of the traditional songs and dances preserved as part of the Native American heritage contain vestiges of the vision quest, and the artifacts created todaypottery, jewelry, blankets, paintings, drums, pipes, headdresses, shieldsare decorated with what began as dream images. Many modern dreamers use Native American customssweat baths, fasting, chanting, meditation, and other purification ritualsto conduct their own vision quests or dream incubations. (Later chapters incorporate some of these techniques into modern dreamwork exercises.)
A belief in the dream as prophecy shows up all over the world, in all different eras, not only in Native American culture, where a single dream experience was seen to determine a boy's future, but in many eras, in many countries. Buddhist legend has it that before the birth of the Buddha, his mother, Queen Maya, dreamed of a sacred white elephant entering her body, a sign that she was carrying a great leader. Ancient Egyptian dream books foretold fortunes based on the contents of dreams. And throughout the Bible, dreams are used as prophecy.
Pagan culture, past and present, also looks to the dream world for guidance. "Each of us has a Dream Spirit within and working with it is central to the practice of Dreamcraft," writes Wiccan priestess Selena Fox in
Circle Network News
, a Pagan
 
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quarterly that devoted its Spring 1987 issue to "dream magic." "Your Dream Spirit is the divine part of you that creates and guides your dream experiences. Your Dream Spirit is an aspect of your Inner Self."
Dream incubation figures heavily in Wiccan dream rituals. "Many dreams of a prophetic nature can be deliberately induced by means of meditation, magickal spells, rituals, and even herbal brews," writes Gerina Dunwich in
Wicca Craft: The Modern Witch's Book of Herbs, Magick, and Dreams
. Dunwich mentions rituals such as placing a slice of wedding cake under your pillow to dream about your future mate, before getting down to the business of magic: "To make bachelors see their future brides in a dream, according to a medieval treatise on dream divination, mix together magnate dust and powdered coral with the blood of a white pigeon to form a dough. Enclose it in a large fig, wrap it in a piece of blue cloth, and then wear it around your neck when you go to sleep." Got that? Other spells include incantations to be recited before bedtime, a practice not unlike the dream incubation techniques we mortals recommend. After fasting, Dunwich says, toss a pinch of white sand, powdered cat's-eye (gemstone), and soot into a cauldron. Mix certain herbs together, and then recite: "St. John's wort gathered by night, Frankincense and Sand of White, Adder's Tongue and Mandrake Root, Cat's-Eye Powdered and Chimney Soot, I mix together in this cauldron of steam, to conjure forth a prophetic dream." The spell continues, ending with sprinkling ''a bit of the brew upon your pillow'' before retiring.
Dream incubation is the dream practice most often referred to in books about Wicca and Paganism, though few volumes available for sale in large chain bookstores mention dreams at all. Interestingly, one Wicca manual makes brief mention of vis-
 
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itations from otherworldly beings, saying this may happen during a dream; this character seems akin to the dream helper of more mainstream Western dreamwork.
Early Western Beliefs
Whereas some cultures embraced dream life as an important dimension, worthy of interpretation and exploration, Western Christian culture emphasized only the most literal or transparently symbolic interpretations, so threatened was that culture by the possibility that dream content might undermine the morality being handed down by the Church. Despite numerous biblical references to dream interpretation, the practice was discouraged as frivolous, if not dangerous, perhaps partly influenced by the early Christian belief that dreams were sent by the devil. Philosopher Jeremy Taylor, writing in 1650, warned readers to pay dreams no mind: "If you suffer impressions to be made upon you by dreams, the devil hath the reins in his own hands, and can tempt you by that, which will abuse you, when you can make no resistance."
By the middle of the next century, there is some discussion of whether all dreams are the work of the devil. Essayist Daniel Dafoe, writing in 1750, observed that "trifling dreams are the product of the mind being engaged in trifling matters; a child dreams of its play, a housewife dreams of her kitchen . . .; these have nothing of apparition in them; nothing of angels or spirits, God or devil, but when dream comes up to vision, and the soul is embarked in a superior degree, then you may conclude you have had some extraordinary visitors." If those "visitors" encouraged the dreamer to do good, then they were godly; if they encouraged the dreamer to do evil, then they were demonic. One significant
 
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godly dream revelation is that of Joseph Smith, who in 1820 dreamed that God told him to establish a church. In 1823, he dreamed that the angel Moroni appeared to him and revealed the Book of Mormon, leading to the establishment of the Church of the Latter Day Saints.
Even as people were writing about the spiritual influences of dreams and their interpretive possibilities, there were theorists determined to persuade the world that dreams were the results of purely physical functioning, the natural by-product of a sleeping organ. After all, argued philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1650, our hearts continue to beat, our lungs to breathe, why not our brain to think, even though it is sleeping? As to whether these mental wanderings had any meaning, there were as many questions as possible answers. Hobbes and others held that physical sensations during sleep gave rise to certain types of dreamsfeeling cold caused a scary dream, feeling warm caused an angry dream, and so forth.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the belief in a divine source of dreams definitely had begun to ebb, and theories such as Hobbes's became more widely accepted. French psychologist Alfred Maury, for example, made an exhaustive study of dreams, concluding that they resulted from the misinterpretation of sense impressions during sleep: A loud noise during the night, for instance, could cause a dream about a thunderstorm. Indeed, some dreams are influenced by surrounding experiences. (Have you ever awakened to a clock radio only to discover the songs and commentary had been incorporated into your dreamlets just before you woke up? Or heard a loud rushing sound in a dream that turned out to be an air-conditioning or heating vent?) But modern research shows that people also dream regularly in rooms in which there is absolutely no environmental stimula-
 
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tion. Still, Maury's commitment to scientific dream experimentation is significant, serving as a precursor of the intensiveand productiveresearch that would follow in the century to come.
As progress continued into the early twentieth century, other, more sophisticated physiological theories began to arise. The dreams people experienced while falling asleep, went the theory of nineteenth-century scientist George Trumbull Ladd, were caused by "excitement of the retina by intra-organic stimulation." (In this, he may have loosely predicted REM sleep, which, as chapter 5 discusses, is part of the basis for a contemporary neurologically based explanation for dreaming.) In the morning, Ladd reasoned, it was the external stimulation of sunlight that caused dreams. Ladd characterized a night of sleep as "a series of naps interrupted by more or less partial awakening"again predicting the eventual discovery of cycles of sleep not confirmed until 1953, half a century after the 1892 publication of his theories.
An examination of the literary history of the world reveals that a dream interpretation dictionary was among the first "best-sellers" in the Western world. With the invention of the printing press in 1622, books were within the grasp of a far greater public than ever before. Naturally, the Bible was the most popular book printed. Second only to the Bible was a book called
Oneirocritics
, which psychologist Calvin Hill calls "the Adam of all dream books." There were others before that, among them the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Muhammaden texts. And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others have followed, as people have continued to seek understanding of their dreams.
One such book, published around the time of Sigmund Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams
, is
Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted
, or
What's in a Dream
, by Gustavus Hindman Miller (reissued in 1992 by Smithmark Publishers under the title
A
 
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Dictionary of Dreams: An Alphabetical Journey Through the Images of Sleep
). This volume, first released in 1909, holds that dreams tell our fortunes, and we have only to understand what their various symbols mean to know our futures. The book today seems whimsical and charming, reflecting as it does a very different culture from the one we know today. Entries are at times obscure, and to contemporary culture seem arbitrary, though one can imagine the book was received with great seriousness in its day as the definitive answer to the cryptic puzzle dreams presented. The entries are very specific, and include such items as "Hemp seed: To see hemp seed in dreams denotes the near approach of a deep and continued friendship. To the business man, is shown favorable opportunity for money-making." Another favorite lists "Embroidery: If a woman dreams of embroidering, she will be admired for her tact and ability to make the best of everything that comes her way. For a married man to see embroidery, signifies a new member in his household; for a lover, this denotes a wise and economical wife."
Notable here are the predictive qualities of each entrythe dream elements predict what will happen in the dreamer's lifeand also the obscurity of the images, which, though not unheard of, are not a common part of American culture today. Miller, in the preface to this dictionary, has this to say about the psychic power of dreams: "To dream at night and the following day have the thing dreamed of actually take place, or come before your notice, is . . . the higher or spiritual sense living or grasping the immediate future ahead of the physical mind." Miller's book was published at the end of an era in which Western culture believed dreams to be mystical and prophetic. With the dawn of Freudian theory, and the many schools of thought that have followed, a new era began, an era in which psychology and science have united in search of the truth about dreams.
 
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Toward A Twentieth-Century Picture
It is interesting to note that many ancient cultural beliefs have found their way into contemporary theories. Certainly, the commitment to interpretation as a means of gaining insight and understanding remains strong among dreamworkers. But consider that the Old Arab practices of bedtime rituals and crediting the dreamer with the creation of the dream differ very little from the contemporary dreamwork techniques that have been developed in the last fifty years. Consider also that the Talmudic premise that dreams express wish fulfillment is echoed in Sigmund Freud's pioneering theory of the dream as an expression of repressed sexual and aggressive urges. (Freud had a long-standing interest in African tribal beliefs, some of which hold to the idea of dreams as wish fulfillment.) That the people of India divided sleep into different periods throughout the night is at least a coincidental precursor of the scientifically proven cycles of REM and non-REM sleep. That a nineteenth-century scientist might make the connection between visual stimulation and dreams seems part of a path toward fuller knowledge of the process of dreaming.
Despite much evidence, then as now, about the healing, spiritual, and even prophetic power of dreams, there is still a current school of thought that considers dream content to be the random result of neurons in the brain continuing to fire in the absence of waking experience. This stance is very familiar, with considerable evidence to support it, yet it seems to echo past arguments that dreams are merely the result of physical discomfort or indigestion. Indeed, the dream theories of today have their basis in thousands of years of belief and experience. The next chapter traces contemporary dream theory from its roots to its many branches.
 
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Chapter Three
Modern Dream Theorists Who Says What About Dreams
Contemporary dream theorists generally see things quite differently than people of previous centuries, though there are some striking echoes of the past. What mainstream dream theorists have abandoned is the ancients' belief that dreams are divinely inspired messages sent by gods to foretell the future or by demons to deceive the dreamer. No longer do they think that dreams bear no relation to the dreamer's own thoughts and experiences. And gone from the writings of modern dream theorists is the idea that dream content might undermine Christian standards of moral conduct.
Primitive societies of many origins tended to consider the content of dreams to be more significant than their waking livesnot surprising since they believed dreams to be messages from a deity. Are dream experiences
more
important than waking ones? Perhaps not. But there is some holdover from this ancient outlook: Although dreams may not be more important

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