Unit 1: Dreams and Divination

"Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths."   --Joseph Campbell

The meaning of dreams has puzzled humankind since antiquity. In ancient times dreams were seen as supernatural events, bearing prophecies and messages from the gods. Early Egyptian priests slept in temples in hopes of receiving divinatory information from the gods in dreams. In fact, one of the earliest extant works on dream contents and interpretations is the Chester Beatty papyrus of Egypt, which dates to 2,000 b.c.e. It discusses good and bad dreams, dream associations and plays on words, and the concept of "contraries," that is, to dream of one thing is to realize the opposite in real life. Dream interpretation was also important to the ancient Babylonians and Greeks. The Greeks attempted to incubate healing dreams by spending a ritual night in the temple of Aesculapius, the god of healing. The "right" dream meant a cure.

The Old and New Testament both make numerous references to the interpretation of dreams. The early Hebrews used dream interpretation to influence behavior and thought, and early Christians gave them a surprising prominence. As Michael McNierney shows in "The Dark Speech of God," the importance of dreams and their meanings was prominent in the writings of the church fathers, including St. Augustine. Early Christianity reinforced the belief in the divinatory power of dreams, especially the significance of vivid and repetitive dreams, and the ancient Greek custom of dream incubation was for a time kept alive in the practice of nocturnal vigils at the shrines of Christian saints.

However, it wasn't until Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 that dreams were given psychological explanations. Freud saw dreams as the "royal road" to the unconscious, and believed that they were wish fulfillments of repressed infantile desires. Because of the sexual nature of Freud's psychology, dream elements invariable are seen as phallic or vaginal symbols. Even the thoughts left over from day-to-day life, says Freud in his essay "Erotic Wishes and Dreams," can be traced back to suppressed "erotic wishes" that trigger nocturnal release of these repressed elements in the form of dreams.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung considered dream interpretation of the utmost importance in the process of becoming whole. In his essay "The Importance of Dreams," Jung tells us that dreams communicate with us in a language that is both visual and highly symbolic, its origins buried deep within the psyches of individuals and cultures. According to Jung, our psyche seeks to have a dialog with us, and brings information in three successive ways: first, physically, as in dreams; second, through "fate" such as accidents; and third, through physical disorder and illness. To ignore our dreams, says Jung, is to court more drastic event.

Like Freud before him, Jung hypothesized that dreams express the contents of the unconscious mind. However, he broke with Freud's view that the unconscious was exclusively personal and formed of repressed childhood traumas and desires. In "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious," Jung affirmed the personal unconscious, but said that underneath it lies a much deeper layer, the collective unconscious. While the contents of the personal unconscious consist of repressed and forgotten material, the contents of the collective unconscious consist of archetypes, primordial images passed down from an ancestral past that includes not only early humankind but humankind's pre-human and animal ancestors. For Jung, these archetypes inhabit the minds of every people and every ethnic group, inspiring dreams, religious visions, and mythologies.

Though Freud and Jung were instrumental in taking much of the superstition out of dreaming, it was still decasde before sleep and dreams were studied in the laboratory. At the University of Chicago in 1953 it was discovered that dreams occur in ultradian cycles of about ninety-minutes, lasting anywhere from a few minutes to as long as an hour, and are accompanied by rapid eye movement (REM) and activation of the autonomic nervous system. It is during these REM states that dreaming occurs. Nevertheless, though much has been learned about sleep and dreams over the past century, psychologists and psychiatrists still do not agree on the nature of either.

Whatever approach one prefers to dream theory, one thing is certain-everyone dreams, regardless of whether or not dreams are recalled upon awakening. And even though we spend fully one-third of our life sleeping and dreaming, today most people pay their dreams little attention. Some cultural traditions, however, suggest a dream world that underpins earthly reality. They see in dreams a glimpse of a world "as dense, vivid, and perhaps as substantial as the one we see in waking life." This leads Richard Smoley to ask: "Are Dreams For Real?"

Laying a theoretical foundation for future units, we will begin our first unit with an examination of dreams. We will consider their importance to individuals and cultures, their links to magic and ritual, and investigate various approaches to understanding their content. We will look at the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud, and then examine in detail Jung's concept of the collective unconscious in an attempt to decode the universal language of archetypes.

We will conclude the unit with a brief foray into divination systems such as Astrology, Tarot, runes, and with the help of Gary Latham's article "The Way of Change," the ancient Chinese oracle of the I Ching. In the extraordinary richness and complexity of such symbol systems we see human creativity at its full stretch. However, as Richard Smoley points out in "Patterns in a Subtle Light," we can also detect something much deeper than this. The fascination of divination systems is that they resonate with fundamental aspects of our own nature, speaking to us of shared wisdom whose truths we recognize but can never quite put into words.