Chapter 24

Psychology:
The Mind and the
Psychological Causes of Dreaming

The last chapter looked at the physical biomechanics of the dreaming brain and various possible physical causes behind dreaming and our perception of reality. The brain, many scientists believe, may be the source of our dreams, so that all dreams are the result of biomechanical fluctuations, sensory input and self-generated neural impulses which are scrambled together and then sorted into a final composite dream based on the brain’s previous experience of the world. At the other physical extreme, the brain may be seen as a sophisticated mediator device, biochemically equipped to capture, code and translate incoming sensory information from any level of body, mind or soul and present it to the conscious waking memory as dream recall. Science, it was argued, has been able to describe some physiological aspects of how the brain controls sleeping and dreaming, and it has been able to theorise on how the brain compares and perceives its external and internal sensory worlds. However, it has not been able to elucidate the source of all our dreams.

Whether you think that all dreams will eventually be explained in physiological terms, or whether you feel they connect us to a wider spiritual reality, the fact remains that we tend to see our daily problems, concerns or thoughts reflected in our dreams. This book has shown that careful observation and interpretation of our dreams can and does lead us towards self-knowledge and provide us with the tools for meaningful development of our full potential. Surely this is where we leave physiological science and enter the realm of psychology: the study of the human mind and behaviour in given circumstances?

Much of this book has focused on what our dreams can tell us about our behaviour patterns and attitudes towards ourselves and others. This chapter takes a brief overview of the history of dream psychology, and the ‘mental’ or emotional causes of dreaming.

According to the Ancients

The word ‘psychology’ was not used until the late 19^th century, but what was the view of the ancients on dreaming and the human mind? Much of the ancient and classical focus was on the philosophy of dreams, which is presented in the next chapter, but were allusions made to the existence of ‘mental’ causes or aspects of dreaming?

The earliest records of dreams still in existence are probably those of the Ancient Egyptians, recorded in hieroglyphs some 4,000 years ago. However, information on dreams dating back to around 5,000 BC was believed to be stored in the oldest known library, the Assurbanipal Library in Ninevah, belonging to Assurbanipal, the Assyrian King (668-627 BC). Clay tablets dating back to this period, presumably from this library, have survived into modern times. This archival material as believed to have been consulted by Artemidorus, a Greek physician living in Rome in the 2^nd century AD, when he wrote his dream interpretation book Oneirocritica. This is the most complete treatise on dreams which has survived from the ancient world. It combined all that was known from Greek, Assyrian and Egyptian realms and went on to lay the foundation for dream interpretation for the next 1,500 years or so! In fact, the 24^th English edition of this manual was published in 1740. Artemidorus’s work shows seeds of early psychology, but first, let’s return to Ancient Greece.

Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher (c.535-c.475 BC) who stated that each man retreats in sleep into a world of his own. Here, perhaps, was one of the earliest allusions to the inner dream world, the world of the mind, of the psyche. Plato (427?-347 BC) saw a ‘lawless and wild beast of nature which peers out in sleep’. Again this could be interpreted as an insight into psychology, the observation of our less socially acceptable mental inclinations breaking through to express themselves in sleep. Plato himself regarded our dreaming comfort with incest, murder and sacrilege to be due to our release from the rule of reason in sleep. This, he believed, freed the other two elements of the ‘soul’, namely anger and desire, to have full reign.

Bridging the Gap: Artemidorus

As we have seen above, Artemidorus took all that was ancient in dream interpretation, represented it, researched it, added to it, and published it in a form which became a credible point of reference for some 1,500 years. In his words: ‘I have done no other by day and by night but meditate and spend my spirit in the judgement and interpretation of dreams.’ The result of his dedication was to see two classes of dreams. The first class comprised somnium dreams, which contained references to the future and were often highly symbolic. For these, he created a dream interpretation dictionary. The second class were insomnium dreams, which Artemidorus saw as the product of everyday life (much like this book’s concept of ‘housekeeping dreams’) that reflected the dreamer’s current mental and physical state.

He realised the usefulness of dream interpretation, writing ‘Dreams and visions are infused into men for their advantage and instruction’, and saw the key to understanding dreams lying in the conscious associations they evoked. This emphasis on personal association was summarised as ‘The rules of dreaming are not general and therefore cannot satisfy all persons, but often, according to times and persona, they admit of various interpretations.’ His ‘body and mind’ analysis of the insomnium dreams included looking at a range of physical and psychological aspects such as how the dreamer spent his days, the conditions of his sleep, his occupation and name, the dreamer’s associations to the dream, the appearance of word plays and puns in the dream content and so on. In many ways, Artemidorus bridged the gap between the ancient and modern worlds of dream interpretation and his interpretation methods certainly reflect the beginnings of dream psychology.

The Birth of Psychoanalysis: Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who was trained in both medicine and neurology, practised in Vienna as a neurologist with a special interest in the treatment of mental disorders, in particular, hysteria. He noticed that when he let his patients talk, they would often lead themselves from subject to subject by a process of association, and would frequently come round to the origin of their neuroses by themselves. Their neurotic symptoms commonly disappeared after this, particularly when some painful memory and its associated emotions came to light. He concluded that their physical or mental symptoms (headaches, rashes, phobias, delusions, etc.) were the result of these unconscious emotions that the patient had been repressing. The repressed emotions were letting off steam as neuroses instead. Once the repressed emotions were acknowledged, they no longer needed an outlet, and the patient recovered.

Freud also observed that his patients often mentioned their dreams, and that this frequently led, by association, to the ‘cause’ of the neurosis. Freud saw these dreams as expressions of his patients’ innermost repressed wishes. Putting it all together, Freud concluded that his patients’ unconscious repressed emotions manifested as mental and physical neuroses by day and as wish fulfilment dreams by night. In this way, Freud saw analysis of the dream as the Royal Road to the Unconscious, a previously untrodden path.

In studying dreams closer still, Freud developed the theory that the unconscious contains a part of the psyche which he called the ‘id’, a collection of inherited instinctive impulses (such as infantile sexuality), which we tend to restrain while we are awake. He believed the id was released from waking censorship during sleep and would break through into our dreams in an attempt to express itself in ways which the waking ego would not permit. Now, since the dreamer would not approve of such behaviour, Freud postulated that the dreamer tries to suppress the id and disguise the dream to make it more acceptable. This Disguise-Censorship Principle, according to Freud, is why dreams seem bizarre. Instead of dreaming of a penis, for example, we censor it and dream of a symbolic penis disguised, perhaps, as a pen, or a pole, or any other long, thin, pointed shape. Since Freud believed most of his patient’s repressed desires were sexual, a large proportion of his dream symbols were too. Freud saw added benefits for the dreamer to disguise his or her real instincts in symbolic form, because this gentler dream would not awaken the dreamer in self-disgust. This became known as his Dream as the Guardian of Sleep Principle.

Freud called the original, unadulterated dream that the id tried to express the ‘latent dream’, and the censored version which actually resulted, the ‘manifest dream’. Since the dreamer obviously couldn’t face the uncensored latent dream, Freud calculated that the dreamer needed a professional interpreter to explain the true meaning of the manifest dream. In this way, Freudian analysis was in danger of imposing a professional interpretation on a patient. Freud was aware of this and advocated the importance of finding out the patients’ personal associations to their dreams. He also noted visual and verbal puns in dreams but perhaps laid greatest emphasis on interpreting through dream symbols. Freud was later criticised by several of his more prominent students for being too dogmatic and rigid in this approach.

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 after a decade of personal research including much self-analysis. This was a courageous step for a doctor to take and Freud risked ridicule. It took eight years to sell 600 copies, but the book finally became a classic, marking the beginnings of both the scientific acceptance of dreams and the birth of psychoanalysis. From this point psychiatry and neurology went their separate ways until the Aserinsky and Kleitman discoveries (see Chapter 23) on the physiology of dreaming in the 1950s.

In later decades, Freudian psychoanalysts were perhaps perceived as being preoccupied with sexual repression, rigid symbolism, imposed interpretation and an apparent need to relate every dream back to childhood trauma. In many ways this tight attitude finally caused a public move away from Freudian analysis and towards a more subjective, dreamer-focused psychology.

Transparent or Mystical?: Jung

Swiss-born Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) greatly admired Freud, his teacher and mentor, but gradually experienced a different vision of dreams and their relationship to the dreamer’s mind. Trained in medicine and neurology like his teacher, Jung finally broke away from the Freudian method in 1914 and spent a lifetime building an alternative psychology.

His basic contention with Freud was that he did not see the dream as a disguise but as ‘transparently meaningful’ in itself. He saw the dream not as concealing the dreamer’s unconscious, but as revealing and expressing it. Neither did he agree with Freud’s concept of infantile sexuality, nor with his idea that the dream always pointed to the past, to a trauma or to a childhood repression. Instead Jung saw the dream as expressing something about the dreamer’s present life. If today’s anxieties or challenges were hooked up in some way to a past memory or trauma, he argued, then yes, the dream might well show how the past has influenced the dreamer’s present outlook. Just as often, though, Jung realised that dreams reveal our potential, and act to inspire us to achieve a greater future. This forward looking, almost spiritual outlook moved Jung even further away from the Freudian view.

Jung dismissed Freud’s blanket approach to symbolism by reinstating the importance of personal symbols alongside the universal. Like Freud he studied myths and legends, but whereas Freud saw mythological characters as representative of, perhaps, one’s parents, Jung saw them as aspects of the dreamer. He developed this theory of ‘archetypes’ to show how the role-model strangers in our dreams represent the parts of ourselves that need to be integrated into the Self. For example, Jung saw the dark, shadowy, perhaps ‘evil’ figure in our dreams as symbolic of repressed aspects of our personality which we disown, and he saw God in a dream as symbolic of our future, integrated, whole Self. Heroes, monsters, angels and devils all played their part, he believed, in introducing the dreamer to the various facets of her personality which needed to be owned and brought into integration to achieve wholeness. Dreams, he saw, might sometimes be seen as compensatory, as the dreamer’s inner drive towards integration resulted in ‘balancing’ dreams.

Jung saw within each person the need to balance their male (animus) and female (anima) qualities (sides). He underlined the importance of watching the activities of the male and female strangers in our dreams as pointers to achieving a better balance. He perceived people known to us who appear in our dreams to be representing themselves, and only strangers to symbolise parts of our inner selves.

Jung argued that all people throughout the world have a common understanding of the archetypes and other universal symbols which surface in our dreams simply because we are freed, through the dream state, to experience a universal language, unrestricted by the rational confines of waking thought. This shared understanding was expressed by Jung as a shared ‘collective unconscious’, a kind of ‘shared mind’ or collective memory. This collective unconscious could also, he believed, be accessed as a source of wisdom.

Whereas Freud used dreams and psychoanalysis to investigate and, hopefully, cure neurotic patients, Jung’s approach was to see dreams as the expression of an inner drive in all people, mentally healthy or unhealthy, which could be tapped by the conscious mind to bring the dreamer a sense of wholeness and potential. He suggested that a greater picture should be obtained by looking at a series of dreams, rather than individual dreams, to get a balanced view of the dreamer’s mind and progress over a period of time. He believed the only correct interpretation was the one that made sense to the dreamer, so the dreamer should meditate on his dream and its symbols, or perhaps converse with the dream characters. Above all he believed he had no method of dream interpretation, but that dreams should be interpreted in the way that was most helpful to each particular dreamer. I have huge admiration for Jung and his pioneering work, especially in his choice of focus in seeing the hidden treasures rather than the buried past traumas in dreams. I also applaud his endeavour to hand dream interpretation back into the capable hands of the dreamers themselves, but I sympathise with those who argue that Jung’s highly intuitive grasp of collective unconscious symbolism is beyond their reach. I wonder if Jung would agree with my humble advice to ‘have faith and stick in there’ because, in the end, what looks mystical to the uninformed is simply a working knowledge of another language: the language of dreams.

An Apology!

The 20^th century has seen mighty contributions towards understanding dreams through the fields of psychology and psychiatry. I apologise for the huge omissions I have made in confining my modern-day overview to Freud and Jung and for the omissions I have made in attempting to summarise each man’s lifetime work in a few meagre paragraphs. The purpose of this chapter has been to illustrate the range of possibilities in approaching dreams as manifestations of that elusive quality, the human mind.

New Age Psychology?

It would also be inappropriate to leave this chapter without mentioning the enormous popularity of psychology in the general media today. The literate man or woman on the street is versed with at least a spattering of an insight into psychology and a deep appreciation of the power of the mind, even though they may be hard put to answer the question: What is mind?

The New Age has also brought a new dimension to popular psychology through a blurring of the perception of the difference between the mind and the soul. With its licence to drop rationality, the New Age brings as many questions as it attempts to answer. Does mind die with the physical body, or does it survive as a mental energy, a lasting memory, or an eternally accessible file still capable of generating thought somewhere in an expanded collective unconscious? Would an eternal mind negate the purpose of a soul? Can mind escape the clutches of time? Is the mind a separate entity from the soul? Can the soul survive without the mind? Does the soul, or mind, carry an indelible imprint of its past mental and emotional experiences, a time bomb ready to pop up in a dream in a future life, or to roam the astral dimension, accessible to the dreams of you or me?

Yes, you’ve got it. With the New Age came the suspense of reason. Anything is possible, and, although perhaps beyond the proof of science or the application of psychology, with a leap of faith, it probably is.