Dreaming: Remembering, Interpreting, Benefiting [Paperback]

Derek Parker (Author), Julia Parker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 1989

Already a classic in its field, Dreaming by Derek and Julia Parker is the most authoritative and comprehensive book available on this fascinating subject. The best-selling authors of The New Compleat Astrologer and The Future Now explain how you can interpret your dreams in a way that is totally individual to you. This lavishly illustrated book is divided into two sections. "The Dream Workshop" provides the historical background and latest conclusions about dreams and explains how you can improve your dream recall. "The Dream Directory" offers a practical approach to the interpretation of more than 1,500 dream themes and subjects. With Dreaming on your nightstand, you will never again have to spend another day perplexed or confused about the meaning and significance of your nighttime visions.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Derek and Julia Parker are internationally renowned experts in dream interpretation, predictive techniques and the occult. Derek Parker is past president of the Faculty of Astrological Studies, and Julia Parker is a professional astrologer and writer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Mystery of Dreaming

From the earliest times humans have been fascinated by their dreams, by the relationship between the shadowy people and events which crowd into our sleeping hours, and the people and events of our waking life. At one time, dreams were thought to be of divine origin. Even today, they contain an element of mystery that separates them from our ordinary existence. So it's not surprising that a belief in the significance of dreams has survived to this day, and even though we may no longer believe in their divine origin, dreams continue to be important to us.

It takes little effort to realize that dreams affect our waking lives. Watch your dog as he wakes from a dream: having barked and twitched for several minutes, he will, on waking, often behave as though he has just come in from an energetic walk, wagging his tail cheerfully -- or, on the other hand, put his tail between his legs and look thoroughly cowed, as though expecting to be reprimanded for bad behaviour. Similarly, we ourselves can wake up in the morning cheered by a happy dream or depressed by a bad dream; there is some evidence to suggest that when we feel irrationally depressed, the depression may be the result of a forgotten dream.

What is a dream? That is the mystery. The question is hard to answer, since it involves the basis of mental activity,just as it is hard to define gravity, or what people mean by the soul. At one level, we dream when, in a certain phase of sleep, our brain creates a series of images, usually in the form of events which appear to us on the private screen of our mind; we are conscious of these images just as though they were real to us -- it is only very rarely that we know that they are only dreams.

It is important, here, to dispose of the "lucid dream" -- the dream in which we are conscious that we are dreaming: we jump happily off a mountain top in the knowledge that it is "only a dream"; we can even shape our dreams as though we are writing a screenplay for a film in which we are starring. In this book we disregard the lucid dream, for by its nature, because we can control it, because we know we are dreaming it, it seems extremely unlikely to be of real use to the dreamer. The whole point of the psychological interpretation of a dream is that, in it, we are not ourselves (or in another sense most completely ourselves!) -- our guard is down, we are uninhibited and free of the constraints of waking life. Intervening in a lucid dream, we may destroy its usefulness, we may be devaluing our dream as a means of revealing ourselves to ourselves.

The images in a normal dream sometimes relate to each other in a fantastic, surrealist, unreal way. On the other hand, they sometimes tell a straightforward story of an easily understood kind, or they can simply exist as disconnected snatches, scenes which seem entirely unrelated to each other or to our waking life.

The general view held by those, from Freud onwards, who have studied dreams, is that while some of them have no meaning other than as distorted memories of incidents we have experienced while awake, many are probably messages from the unconscious, from the depths of our personality, depths with which we are not consciously in touch. They may indeed be the chief source of readily available information about what we are really like, under the surface veneer of education, environment, social consciousness, for dreams are notoriously unaffected by social considerations.

Dreams in antiquity

The earliest records of the life of man show that dreams have always been regarded as important. The ancient Egyptians believed that they were messages from the gods, and produced, 1,300 years before Christ, the earliest dream book giving over 200 interpretations of those messages. Interestingly, the Egyptian interpreters put forward the theory of opposites: that to dream of death was an omen of long life, for instance. Freud, the great originator of modern dream theory, also advanced the theory that dream symbols often relied on a system of contrary symbols.

The Assyrians, too, had their dream books: the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal (c.669-626BC) is believed to have contained books of dream interpretations dating from 2000BC; and his own personal dream book is said to have been one of the chief sources used by the Greek Artemidorus, who wrote the most famous dream book of the ancient world.

The Old Testament is full of dreams, probably the oldest dreams familiar to most people -- those of Daniel and Jacob, Nebuchadnezzar and Solomon. Despite religious differences, there were few disparities between the Jewish interpretations of the dreams sent to man by their God, and those dispatched by the multifarious gods of other religions. The prophet Mohammed believed dreams to be extremely important, starting each day by asking his disciples what they had dreamed, and telling them his own.

The Greeks, with their passion for the rationalization of knowledge, made use of Egyptian, Assyrian, Jewish, Babylonian and Persian dream theories. Their interpretation of dream symbols was widely different: for instance, while the Greeks thought that a dream of a snake signified sickness and enmity, the Assyrians believed that dreaming of seizing a snake meant that you would receive the special protection of an angel. The Jews thought that a dream of being bitten by a snake meant that the dreamer's income would be doubled, while to an Egyptian a snake, appearing in a dream, signified the settling of a dispute. These beliefs are echoed, even today, in the so-called "dream books" which suggest that if you dream of, say, a black bird, it is an omen of evil.

The Greeks also believed dreams to be divine messages. Homer records dream messages from Zeus, sent to man through a gate of horn (forged messages were also received, issuing from a gate of ivory). Herodotus reports some famous dreams, including that which persuaded Xerxes to set off on what proved a disastrous expedition into Greece. And Delphi, spiritual centre of ancient Greece, was famous for ambiguous interpretations.

Many sacred places in Greece were used for the "incubation" of dreams: visitors would take drugs and herbal potions to induce sleep, and regard their dreams as important prophecies, with special reference to their ailments and afflictions. Aesculapius, the god of medicine, was the tutelary deity of over 300 incubation temples from the first millennium BC onwards, and the temple at Epidaurus in Greece was in use for many hundreds of years. Here is yet another anticipation of the future: twentieth century psychiatrists encourage patients to remember their dreams not for reasons of prophetic revelation or physical cure, certainly, but rather for reasons of self-revelation and self-help. The whole purpose of this book is to enable you to remember your dreams, record them, and interpret them, in the belief that they can be helpful in the waking life.

The idea of dreams as a revelation of man's true nature -- the modern view -- also originated with the Greeks. Plato, in The Republic, claimed that man's true nature showed itself in dreams.

Plato wrote:

When the gentler part of the soul slumbers and the control of reason is withdrawn; then the wild beast in us, full-fed with meat or drink, becomes rampant and shakes off sleep to go in quest of what will gratify its own instincts. As you know, it will cast away all shame and prudence at such moments and stick at nothing. In fantasy it will not shrink from intercourse with a mother or anyone else, man, god, brute, or from forbidden food or any deed of blood. In a word, it will go to any length of shamelessness and folly.

Aristotle, on the other hand, tried to explain dreams as the products of purely physiological functions: when one slept, the food in the body evaporated, and liquids passed to the head where dreams were mirrored on the surface of the fluids, like images on water. Nevertheless, he believed that dreams could usefully predict the onset of diseases unobserved by the waking body. In the Parva Naturalia he states that "since the beginning of all things are small, obviously the beginnings of disease and other distempers, which are about to visit the body, must be small. Clearly, these must be more evident in sleep than in the waking state." Hippocrates took the same view. Both Plato and Aristotle, then, advanced theories which our twentieth century psychiatrists have confirmed. With such notions, especially those of Plato, we are almost at one bound in the world of Freud, and surprisingly little original work on dreams was done in the centuries between.

The first substantial published work on dreams, the Oneirocritica, a five-volume work of the Greek Artemidorus (2nd century AD), argued that a dream was individual to the dreamer. The book, which had an enormous influence (it was published in English for the first time in 1644, and went into 24 editions during the next century) is in many ways extremely modern. Perhaps most importantly, it underlined the principle of association -- the fact that a dream image generally evokes some associated image in the conscious mind (though Artemidorus relied on the association in the mind of the dream interpreter, rather than that of the dreamer, which seems irrational).

Artemidorus wrote, potently, that dreams "are infused into men for their advantage and instruction". He happened to believe that they were messages from the gods; but the attitude was again a modern one. He condemned arbitrary and over-literal interpretation, studied recurring dreams, and like Jung two millennia later, believed in the idea of the "great dream", the seminally important dream, which he believed most difficult to interpret.

In interpreting a dream, Artemidorus suggested that there were six important things to be considered: one was simply the dreamer's name, but the others were his occupation, the conditions under which the dream had occurred, and whether it was natural, lawful and customary. He was conscious of many of the tricks dreams can play -- including the use of puns -- and some of his interpretations seem to anticipate the kind of approach used by modern psychiatrists: a dream of the mouth, for instance, he interprets as probably representing a house, and the teeth the inhabitants; so the loss of a tooth therefore symbolized the death of a member of the household.

Christianity revived the view, never really discarded, that dreams were sent by the gods to communicate their commands to their subjects (in this case, of course, the communicator was the Christian God). The Bible is full of such dreams, and so are the writings of St Clement, St John Chrysostom, St Augustine and many other early Church fathers. St Jerome, almost single-handedly, reversed this trend: troubled with "difficult" dreams which appeared to run counter to current Christian morality, he asserted that they came from the devil, and condemned them; from then on, the Church took the view that dreams were not from God, and must be ignored. Martin Luther suggested that dreams could help us by showing us our sins.

Dream interpretation and cultural diversity

In India, the ancient Hindu scriptures called the Puranas reported that dreams were messages from the gods; to the Buddhists, emerging in India somewhat later, in the 5th century BC, they were "signs traversing the paths of thought" which rose mistily before the dreamer like mirrored reflections. In the Hindu Brihadarmyaka-Upanishad (c.1000BC) it was made clear that dreams occurred in a never-never land between the real and the promised world, but that the "real" world was in fact less real than the dream one, in which the lack of physical sensations freed man from inhibitions, so that his true character emerged.

In the Islamic world, al Mas'adi, an Arab writer, asserted that sleep was a "preoccupation of the soul", though dreams could be suggested by the physical condition of the dreamer. AL Mas'adi also took the Freudian view that in dreams the most secret desires could rise to the surface, uninhibited by moral attitudes:

If the sleeper sees things which meet his desires, that is because the soul...can, when it is purified in sleep from the defilements of the body, float at its ease over everything that it desires to possess.

Nevertheless, to the Prophet Mohammed, dreams remained "a conversation between man and his God", and as with the Christian priests, Islamic mullahs and religious men insisted that they were the only reliable interpreters -- and they also underlined a view which was positively discriminatory: unimportant people did not need to dream, so the slave's dream was obviously a message for his master, that of the wife must be for her husband, that of the child for its parents.

Chinese scholars believed that dreams occurred when the spiritual soul, the hun, was temporarily separated from the body, and could converse with spirits, the souls of the dead, or the gods. In the 14th century AD all visitors to an important city had to spend their first night there in the temple of the city god, so that they could receive any messages, a practice which shares some features with the "incubation" temples of the classical period.

In the West, the earliest dream books appeared soon after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible in the 15th century, teaching among other things how to encourage predictive dreams (eat a salted herring before going to sleep and you would dream of a future partner). A dream book based on the writings of Artemidorus, also circulated widely, as we have seen, giving firm meanings for almost every conceivable dream symbol.

The Romans, much given to divination of all kinds, had allowed soothsayers to run riot in the interpretation of "significant" premonitory dreams. Galen (c.130-201AD) made some attempt to show that a dream might indicate an unsuspected illness, but Cicero accepted the idea of predictive dreams; Synesius of Cyrene, a Platonist (4th century AD) also believed that in dreams we "conjecture the action of the future". It was this attitude which engendered an atmosphere in which dream books flourished, interpreting a particular symbol in a particular way, whoever the dreamer might be. For over 1,500 years these presented the simplest notion of dreams as arbitrary symbols.

The approach to dreams made by relatively primitive 20th-century peoples bears some resemblance to the traditional attitude of Western cultures until comparatively recently. They all regard their dreams as important, and many of them believe that the dreams relate the adventures of the soul when it leaves the body during sleep (as did the ancient Egyptians and Chinese). Natives of Greenland and New Guinea alike hold this view. Some African tribes -- and in parts of Africa dream life is held as being almost as important as waking life -- believe that dream battles can take place; waking with sore arm muscles, a man will assume that he has been wielding his club during the night! The Zulu people regard dreams as messages not from gods but from ancestors (they perform much the same function, however). Some Indians will try to paint the face of a sleeping enemy, in order that the soul, adventuring in dream, will fail to recognize its body, and so be forever lost.

The American Indians have always regarded dreams as of the utmost importance, especially in the education of the young; after initiation, a boy with a rich dream life, who could relate it in vivid detail, was regarded as particularly wise and valuable to the tribe. Potent dreamers such as Black Elk of the Sioux people, have recorded their lives and the part that dreams played in them. The Iroquois saw dreams as the language of the soul, more important and valuable than the language of man's waking state, and, in a theory somewhat analogous to that of Freud, they believed that dreams could be indications, often in a highly developed code, of the dreamer's deepest and most secret wishes.

The value of dreams to the most primitive society is fascinatingly seen in the Senoi, a people living in the jungles of the Central Highlands of Malaysia, and studied by the anthropologist Kilton Stewart in the 1930s. The Senoi believed that people should call on the characters and forces of their dreams to help them cope with everyday living: dreams were analysed each morning, and adults advised children on their conduct in dream life. Dreamers were encouraged to cultivate their dreams, and live them to the full, trying to bring each dream to a satisfactory and rewarding conclusion. It is interesting that the Senoi, who seem as a culture to be the most advanced dreamers in the world, are particularly concerned with developing their abilities in lucid, or "conscious" dreaming.

Interestingly, anthropologists studying the dreams of various societies have found several common strains which seem to reflect Jung's concept of a collective unconscious serving all mankind. In Ireland, Switzerland, China, Greece, the Ukraine, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Borneo and Sumatra, dreams of raw meat are all interpreted as presaging misfortune; Artemidorus interprets fire in the sky as foretelling war -- and so do the Africans. And the Africans, like Artemidorus, also believe that losing a tooth in a dream means one will lose a member of the family.

To return to Europe in modern historical times, the 18th century Enlightenment began to put a stop to the consideration of dreams simply as predictive symbols. As Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), one of the most notable dream interpreters of our time, put it conclusively: "No dream symbol can be separated from the individual who dreams it, and there is no definite or straightforward interpretation of any dream." In other words, your dream belongs to you, and even if someone else dreamed the identical dream, its meaning would be different for them.

After many centuries of often irrational treatment of dreams, the 19th century saw a move to examine their real meaning and importance. One of the pioneers was the French psychologist, Alfred Maury, who designed various experiments on the connection between external stimuli and dreams: for instance, he discovered that a person whose lips and nose were tickled with a feather while he was asleep dreamed that tar was being applied to his face, and the skin pulled off. When someone sharpened a pair of scissors near the sleeping Maury, the psychologist dreamed that he heard the pealing of bells, then the ringing of an alarm. An example of the effect of external stimuli which most people will recognize was a dream of the psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859-1939):

I dreamed that I was in an hotel, mounting many flights of stairs, until I entered a room where the chambermaid was making the bed; the white bedclothes were scattered over everything, and looked to me like snow; then I became conscious that I was very cold, and it appeared to me that I really was surrounded by snow, for the chambermaid remarked that I was very courageous to come up so high in the hotel, very few people venturing to do so on account of the great cold at this height. I awoke to find that it was a cold night, and that I was entangled in the sheets, and partly uncovered.

In a paper on sleep and dreams published in 1861, Maury suggested various questions which should be asked about them. Were dreams associated with external stimuli? If you tickled the toes of a sleeping man, would his subconscious immediately respond by inventing some event in his dreams to explain the feeling? Did a man dream more vividly the sounder he slept? Was it possible to measure just how long it took a dream to dream? Did dreams relate to unconscious longings or emotions affecting the dreamer? Did dreams become different as one grew older? Was it possible to discover the "real meaning" of dreams? Indeed, how important were they?

Maury was responsible for the view, still widely believed, that the events in dreams are somehow telescoped together so that even an eventful dream covers a very short period of time. Dream laboratory research has shown that in fact a dream goes on for as long a period as the dreamer would take to imagine it in a daydream, so that an eventful dream really does have a comparatively long duration. Maury's theory was based on his famous guillotine dream, in which a series of events led up to his execution by guillotine. He awoke to find that the bedstead had fallen on his neck, and assumed that all the events must have been compressed in the period between this happening and his waking up. Today it is thought that the experience may not have been a dream but a fantasy.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) took a more severely rational line even than Maury: dreams were, he argued, simply forgotten memories dredged up from remote corners of the mind as the result of physical stimuli.

Freud, the great pioneer

It was in 1900 that the psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he insisted that they were far from haphazard meanderings, perhaps prompted by outside stimuli, but were on the contrary extremely important manifestations of our inner lives -- in fact, disguised fulfilments of the dreamer's sometimes most secret wishes, often rejected by his waking mind. Certainly there was a sort of scaffolding of confused and perhaps meaningless images (which he called the manifest content of the dream), but this supported "dream-thoughts", the latent content, which were entirely logical, and could be interpreted under psychoanalysis. Dreams, according to Freud, combined two functions: they enabled forbidden wishes to be expressed in concealed form and, by conceding the true nature of these wishes, allowed the sleeper or the dreamer to continue undisturbed. The dream, he argued, was the guardian of sleep.

The question you have to ask yourself about a dream, Freud insisted, is "Why did I dream it?" If it were as simple as that, of course, there would be no mystery to unravel. But the truth seemed to be, Freud claimed, that we all have a censor who presides over the inmost chambers of our mind, and often refuses to allow us to think about, or even to know, some of our deepest emotions or inclinations. This censor, he said, refused to allow such intimate thoughts to reach our conscious minds until they were so disguised as to conceal their real meaning. Often, "untrue" thoughts were allowed through, while "true" thoughts remained unconscious.

But it was certainly worth trying to discover the truth beneath the cloak, for while we were asleep, Freud argued, our conscious mind was so relaxed that it would allow us to dream dreams which could reveal more about our real nature than any conscious thought. The difficulty, of course, in interpreting our own dreams is that we are our own censor, and the more we try to find the true meaning of our dreams, the more the censor's office tries to prevent it -- by making us forget important parts of our dreams, by making them apparently more and more meaningless, more and more ridiculous.

Freud insisted that under analysis every part of a dream could be revealed as in some sense true. Talking to a patient on his couch, he would fix first on some very striking episode of a dream, and then begin to question the dreamer about it, asking him or her to comment on that episode almost irrationally, in other words without trying desperately to make it mean something. He believed that the true significance of the dream would be revealed as the patient gradually attached more and more possible meanings to every part of it.

There are innumerable examples of how this theory works in Freud's own notebooks and those of more recent analysts: in a simple example, a young man dreams of being hungry, and eating with enormous enjoyment a mushroom omelette; but almost as soon as he has finished it, he begins to feel nauseous, his mother appears, reprimands him for eating something which he knows will disagree with him, and forces him to take a dose of salts to "get rid of the sickness". Analysis reveals that the man knows a girl whom he fancies, who is fond of mushroom omelettes. His choosing to eat this same dish, for which he is very hungry, reveals his sexual longing for the girl; but the fact that he begins to feel ill after eating it equally suggests that he is repressing those longings, and that that repression is connected with his relationship with his mother, who wants to keep him "pure" (the salts) or to purge him of that sexual experience which is "bad for him".

Reading such analyses of other people's dreams, and attempting to apply the system to their own, some people still assert that these are simple variations on themes from their everyday life. They dream of a gunfight, they say, because they happened to watch an old cowboy movie on TV before going to bed. But they must then ask themselves why their unconscious chose to focus on the theme of a gunfight rather than on, say, a love scene or a comedy scene in the same film; or indeed why their dream should hinge on the film at all, rather than on a hundred and one other incidents of their daily life. To dismiss dreams on that basis is, to say the least, unscientific!

As with Freud's other writings, his work on dreams attracted criticism; but its value was undeniable, and is underlined by the fact that almost every work on dreams since its publication has made use of it, and to some extent been inspired by it. It is safe to say that one aspect of it with which almost every worker in the field now disagrees is Freud's insistence that certain "symbols" always mean the same thing. For instance, he claims that a snake, in a dream, is always a phallic symbol, standing for the penis. His concentration on sexual symbolism in dreams can easily be criticized: such statements as "all complicated machinery and apparatus in dreams stand for the genitals", or "there is no doubt that all weapons and tools are used as symbols for the male organ" seem now far too cut and dried. Which is not, of course, to say that a gun or almost anything else cannot represent the penis in a dream. Freud gives an amusing example of a woman who dreamed that she went into a bathroom to discover a nude man who clasped his shirt to his neck, exclaiming "Excuse me, but I've not got my necktie on!" No doubt, in that dream, the tie represented the penis. But it is a long stride from that to the statement that all neckties in dreams are phallic symbols. There is also criticism of Freud's methods of attempting to discover the true meaning of his patients' dreams: all very well, said his critics, to start the patient off on a trail of unrelated associations with the events and symbols of his dreams -- but how did he know when to stop?

Jung and the archetypes

The second major psychologist whose work on dreams remains of the greatest importance is Carl Gustav Jung, who when he was 79 claimed that for many years he had "carefully analysed about two thousand dreams a year", and had acquired a certain amount of experience in the matter.

Jung, though an admirer and sometime follower of Freud, differed from him in some respects:

I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a "façade" behind which its meaning lies hidden -- a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbours no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.

Taking a more mystical view of dreams than Freud, Jung seems to have been led towards the root of his theory by a dream he himself had in 1909, in which he found himself in an unfamiliar house which he nevertheless knew he owned. He explored two floors of it before finding a door which revealed a staircase leading down to a beautiful and obviously very ancient cellar; yet another staircase led down again, this time to a cave where bones and scattered pottery lay, two human skulls among them. To Jung this meant that below, or within, the ordinary level of human consciousness (the house in which we all live) lies another layer, that of our "unconscious"; and below that again, a deeper level representing "the world of primitive man within myself". That deepest level of consciousness is common to all men and women, of whatever race or creed or cultural background -- the concept of "the collective unconscious" which played such a part in his psychological theory.

Jung was much more tentative in his approach to dream interpretation than Freud, conscious of the difficulties, and even emphasizing them: "I have no theory about dreams," he wrote, perhaps a little disingenuously;

I do not know how dreams arise. I am altogether in doubt as to whether my way of handling dreams even deserves the name "method." I share all my readers' prejudices against dream interpretation as being the quintessence of uncertainty and arbitrariness. But, on the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly -- if we take it about with us and turn it over and over -- something almost always comes of it. This something is not of a kind that means we can boast of its scientific nature or rationalize it, but it is a practical and important hint which shows the patient in what direction the unconscious is leading him.

"Great dreams", the "biggest", most "meaningful" of our dreams, Jung proposed, come from the deepest level of the collective unconscious. In an attempt to define what he meant by this now much-used phrase, Jung wrote (Modern Man in Search of a Soul):

If it were permissible to personify the unconscious, we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to him than any year in the one hundredth century before Christ; he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams, and, owing to his immeasurable experience, he would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering and decay.

Unfortunately -- or let us say fortunately -- this being dreams. At least it seems to us as if the collective unconscious, which appears to us in dreams, had no consciousness of its own contents...The collective unconscious, moreover, seems not to be a person, but something like an unceasing stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind.

"Great dreams" are usually dreamed when one is in one's early youth, at the time of puberty, when one faces the crises of middle age, or not long before death. They are the most difficult of all dreams to interpret, for they are full of symbols which come not from the dreamer's outward, or even perhaps psychic life, but from a great fund of general, universal ideas -- common experience of which all mankind partakes. These dreams can be dreams of great heroes, of mythical enemies -- snakes, dragons, monsters -- of hidden treasure, caves and wells, walled gardens. It is not out of the way to claim that the dreamer is moving in the recognizable world of fairy tale, for fairy tales themselves, and such ancient tales as the legends of the Ring and the Holy Grail seem to have originated in the same vast area of universal human experience. "Little dreams", on the other hand, use symbols from everyday experience, and are concerned with everyday matters.

Dreams and reality

In a sense, Jung's attitude to dreams is a romantic one: he and the other members of the "Zurich school" of analysts, including Silberer, Maeder, Adler and Stekel, sometimes seem to be asking us to regard our dreams as actual messages -- but from whom? Perhaps we ourselves are dreams: "One does not dream, one is dreamed", he writes; "we undergo the dream, we are the objects." He seems to be as confused, or perhaps as imaginative and creative, as the 3rd-century Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu, who one night

dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, content with my lot. Suddenly I awoke and I was Chuang-Tzu again. Who am I in reality? A butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-Tzu, or Chuang-Tzu imagining he was a butterfly?

It is a familiar predicament: the French philosopher René Descartes wondered whether anything was more real than a dream -- doubting that he was actually sitting by his fire in a dressing-gown, for after all he had sometimes dreamed that he was there when in fact he was naked in bed. Pedro Calderon de la Barca shared the same confusion: "For I see now that I am asleep," he remarked, "that I dream when I am awake!" Bertrand Russell, in the 20th century, took that same problem seriously: "I do not believe that I am now dreaming," he once remarked," but I cannot prove that I am not."

One of Jung's most fascinating theories is of the persona and the shadow. The persona is the character we assume in our daily life, "us" as we are known to our friends. The shadow is the "us" we repress, and emerges when we try to kid ourselves that our persona represents all that is to be known about us. A self-regarding businessman for instance might dream of himself as a king, attacked by a revolutionary anarchist. The king represents the persona -- the businessman is a monarch to his underlings, and would like his friends and family to regard him royally; the anarchist is the shadow, who knows that he is far from royal, but human like the rest of us, and badly in need of seeing himself more clearly.

That very example, incidentally, reminds us that Jung believed that one thing dreams strive to do is to give the dreamer a more acute sense of balance. A dream will often take the opposite attitude to the one we take when we are awake, just as some people, for the sake of argument, will adopt attitudes oppshadow. The persona is the character we assume in our daily life, "us" as we are known to our friends. The shadow is the "us" we repress, and emerges when we try to kid ourselves that our persona represents all that is to be known about us. A self-regarding businessman for instance might dream of himself as a king, attacked by a revolutionary anarchist. The king represents the persona -- the businessman is a monarch to his underlings, and would like his friends and family to regard him royally; the anarchist is the shadow, who knows that he is far from royal, but human like the rest of us, and badly in need of seeing himself more clearly.

That very example, incidentally, reminds us that Jung believed that one thing dreams strive to do is to give the dreamer a more acute sense of balance. A dream will often take the opposite attitude to the one we take when we are awake, just as some people, for the sake of argument, will adopt attitudes opposite to those they really hold. It seemed to Jung that if a man's conscious attitude to life in general was a well-balanced one, dreams might comment on his attitudes and opinions, but the comments would be unlikely to be so outrageous as to be worrying. However, if the dreamer was in his conscious life very much prone to taking extreme attitudes, his dreams would be more likely to "tease" him by placing him in situations where he would be forced to reject or correct his views. (The self-consciously heterosexual man is perhaps more likely to have a homosexually oriented dream than the man who recognizes homosexuality as a part of the pattern of life; the man who believes with great force in a property-owning democracy might find himself plagued by dreams in which the world's beggars successfully claim his worldy portion from him.)

Incidentally, Jung found that dreams which might be very unwelcome to the dreamer often had a very practical aspect. On one occasion, for instance, a young patient of his, recently engaged to a beautiful young girl of good family and impeccable reputation, was extremely distressed by dreams which continually suggested that she was less virtuous than he supposed. Jung suggested that he should do a little quiet investigation -- and this revealed that the dreams were right. The engagement ended, and so did the patient's neurosis.

Rather than encouraging patients to talk about their dreams in great detail, one of Jung's interpretative techniques was to invite them to enlarge on the events of the dreams -- to "take them further", to invent conclusions for them; this, he believed, could lead to a revelation of their meanings. Jung believed that dreams not only indicated, but also to some extent corrected, the state of balance between an individual's conscious and unconscious attitudes. Even obscure dreams, he claimed, would yield an answer to the question, "What conscious attitude does the dream compensate?" Jung's final view was that an inbuilt, almost biological, tendency towards psychological health existed in the individual human organism, and that dreams seemed to reflect the way this tendency worked for the improvement of mental health and the attainment of maturity.

He looked, too, at "prophetic" dreams, seeing them not as genuinely prophetic but as evidence that even when we are asleep we are capable of projecting our thoughts forward into the future, sometimes with great freedom and occasionally hitting on the truth.

Warnings and predictions in dreams may reflect an unconscious awareness of a situation, based on observations actually made but no longer recalled to the conscious mind. When, for instance, the Duke of Portland dreamt that a processional coach for which he had responsibility might not fit through one of the triumphal arches on the route, he may have been unconsciously aware that the coach looked too high, and this anxiety emerged in the form of a warning dream -- which proved correct.

However, some dreams which seem to prophesy the future are perhaps not quite so easily dismissed. What would Jung have made of the dream of the English astronomer Edmund Halley, for instance? Halley, according to the biographer John Aubrey:

Had a strong impulse to take a voyage to St Helena, to make observations of the southern constellations, being then about 24 years old. Before he undertook this voyage, he dreamt that he was at sea, sailing towards the place, and saw the prospect of it from the ship in his dream, which he declared to the Royal Society to be the perfect representation of that island, even as he had it really when he approached to it.

There are many other prophetic dreams on record, and well authenticated. Abraham Lincoln dreamed, a few days before his assassination, a dream in which he clearly saw his own coffin lying in the White House, surrounded by weeping people. Bishop Joseph Lanyi, tutor to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, not only dreamed of his pupil's assassination at Sarajevo in 1914, but held a Mass for him on the morning of the day of his death.

But such clear dreams are perhaps the exception. No one needs to be told that dreams are confusing: Havelock Ellis believed indeed that it was only in the moment after waking that one's mind arranged into semi-logical sequence the mass of random images in a single dream. Some people will still argue that their dreams are so random, so haphazard, so obviously "meaningless" that it would be absurd in the extreme to suggest that they reveal anything serious about their personality or motivations. Jung started one of his earliest essays on the subject (The Analysis of Dreams, 1909) by warning readers not to be deceived into thinking that a dream was "the confusion of haphazard and meaningless associations".

We find our dreams confusing because they do not obey the same laws as real life: personality seems to lose its meaning -- we can be both ourselves and some other person at the same time, or our employer can also be our father; we may find ourselves enjoying situations we would loathe in real life, or being enormously disturbed by some event which we would treat lightly, were we awake. Among the most disturbing of dreams are those in which our normal preferences are jumbled and contradicted.

This is all part of what Freud called "dream displacement", in which some person, thing, emotion or activity "becomes" some other person, thing, emotion or activity: your boss may then represent your father, or your father, your boss; a necktie can indeed represent a penis; winning a race may represent successful promotion in your career. Such "displacement" may be partial -- your boss representing your father in the context of a perfectly ordinary setting; or it may be more total, so that the whole context of the dream actually "means" something else -- as the house and its cellars, in Jung's dream, represented his own psyche. Anyone who wants to understand their own dreams, to discover what the dreams are saying, must learn his or her way about this strange world in which almost nothing is what it seems. The Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested, over two thousand years ago, that the best interpreter of his dreams was the man who could understand "similarities" -- who could comprehend metaphor.

The help dreams offer us is sometimes easier to grasp than Freud or Jung might suggest. Graham Greene, the novelist, for instance, has made great use of dreams not only in the plots of some of his novels, but in the actual writing of them. In Ways of Escape (1981), he recalls:

Dreams, perhaps because I was psychoanalysed as a boy, have always had great importance when I write. The genesis of my novel It's a Battlefield was a dream, and The Honorary Consul began too with a dream. Sometimes identification with a character goes so far that one may dream his dream and not one's own. That happened to me when I was writing A Burnt-out Case. The symbols, the memories, the associations of the dream belonged so clearly to my character, Querry, that the next morning I could put the dream without change into the novel, where it bridged a gap in the narrative which for days I had been unable to cross....

"I prefer my dreams to realities because there you always meet a much nicer type of girl," said some anonymous dreamer. It is a happy thought, but there is a danger involved. Jung pointed out that it is too easy, especially if one knows relatively little about dream interpretation, to become over-confident that "the unconscious knows best". (In which case, as he points out, there seems little virtue in being conscious!). "The unconscious functions satisfactorily only when the conscious mind fulfils its task to the full", he writes: "a dream may perhaps supply what is then lacking, or it may help us forward where our best efforts have failed."

Copyright © 1985 by Mitchell Beazley Publishers
Text Copyright © 1985 by Julia and Derek Parker
Illustrations Copyright © 1985 by Mitchell Beazley Publishers

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Fireside (September 16, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671766309
• ISBN-13: 978-0671766306
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,763,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not very good...., October 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreaming: Remembering, Interpreting, Benefiting (Paperback)

This book was a disappointment. It was difficult to flip through and find any really solid definitions. Most of the dreams I looked for were nowhere to be found. I don't recommend this book. It was a waste of money for me. I'll be selling it at my next garage sale for .50 cents. Hopefully someone takes it off my hands.

3.0 out of 5 stars It has it's good points and it's bad, November 27, 2000

By 

Sara (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreaming: Remembering, Interpreting, Benefiting (Paperback)

While this book can readily interpret a person's dreams to satisfaction, the approach is somewhat missing. Parker uses more of a physchological approach to interpreting drems, rather than the more sought after spiritual approach. Furthermore, Parker's recommendations on rememberence are a bit weak. The one thing missing from most dream books, and found in this one, however, is the directions given to benefiting from the knowledge of your dreams. I found this aspect most interesting and helpful.