By Marcia Bender
“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.”
—William Shakespeare
Since the dawning of humankind and before time as we know it, the “mystery of dreaming” has been a focus of fascination, confusion, fear, and psychological study. Everyone dreams. A period of sleep always includes one or more periods of dreaming. This fact has been experimentally proven beyond any doubt.
Some people entirely forget every dream that they have and will claim that they don’t dream at all. There are others who have almost complete memory of their dreams. The “norm” for dream recall is to remember a few elements of our dreams, and sometimes remember in great detail a dream which seems to be especially important. Most psychologists insist that some dreams, if not all, have something important to say to the dreamer. The works of Freud, Jung, and others have made dream analysis an important ingredient of psychotherapy and in understanding the “subconscious” mind, and they used dream analysis to help analyze their patients.
Journey with me into the early history of dreams and their messages as studied and viewed by ancient religions and cultures. Much of the following information was gathered from a wonderful book, written in 1985 and titled The Complete Book of Dreaming, by Derek and Julia Parker of England.
Victorians had their dream books and believed that certain symbols in a dream related to all individuals that dreamed about that particular symbol. An example of this would be that a dream of a black cat would mean good luck, or bad, depending on the book and the author. However, psychologists and psychiatrists believe that one person’s dreams do NOT mean the same as another person’s.
Going back further, the early Egyptians certainly believed that dreams were messages from the Gods, and a book of dream interpretations has been found that dates back to 1,300 BC. The Assyrians had dream books dating from 2000 B.C. The Old Testament contains numerous dreams that are familiar to most who have attended Sunday School, the dream of Jacob and his ladder is one of the most well known. The prophet Mohammed believed dreams to be extremely important and began each day by asking his disciples if and what they had dreamed the night before. Mohammed maintained that dreams were “a conversation between man and his God.” The Greeks believed dreams to be divine messages from Zeus and also studied the Egyptian, Assyrian, Jewish, Babylonian, and Persian dream theories. There were many sacred places in Greece that were used for the “incubation” of dreams and dreamers would actually take drugs and herbal potions to induce sleep and to await the important prophecies of their dreams.
Plato stated that man’s true nature revealed itself in his dreams. Aristotle believed that dreams could often predict the onset of diseases, and Hippocrates took a similar view. Christianity revived the view that dreams were sent by God to communicate commands to humanity, such as the dreams of St. Joan of Arc. In India, the Puranas (ancient Hindu scriptures) reported dreams to be messages from the gods, and to the Buddhists they were “signs traversing the paths of thought.” In the Islamic world Mai al Mas’adi, an Arab writer felt that sleep was a “preoccupation of the soul” and that the most secret desires of the dreamer could rise to the surface, uninhibited by moral attitudes. Chinese scholars believed that dreams occurred when the spiritual soul, the hun, was temporarily separated from the body, and could communicate with spirits, the souls of the dead, or the gods.
The American Indians have always regarded dreams in the upmost importance, especially in the education of their young. The Iroquois saw dreams as the language of the soul, more important and valuable than the language of man’s waking state. The study of dreams takes us from the most ancient cultures and through the ages to the present, where experimental work is taking place in dream laboratories throughout the world.
The Great Pioneers
One great pioneer of dreams, psychologist Sigmund Freud, published his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Freud said that it was difficult for one to interpret one’s own dreams as a human becomes his/her own censor. He contended that under analysis every part of a dream could be revealed in some true sense. Freud’s disciple, Carl Jung took a more mystical view of dreams than that of his teacher. Jung said that there were two types of dreams, Great Dreams and Little Dreams. He felt that Great Dreams were more difficult to interpret and were dreamed at crucial periods of one’s life, at the time of puberty, during the crises of middle age, and not long before death. Little dreams contained symbols from everyday experience and were concerned with everyday matters. To me, that is much like the Major and Minor symbols of the Tarot, another area of Metaphysics that Jung studied and analyzed, giving us the term Archetypes for the Major Arcana cards.
There are many “common” dreams, those dream symbols that are more often remembered than others and that are dreamed by more people. Most of us have had one or more of these kinds of dreams. The most common of all dreams are dreams of Pursuit, Travel, Disasters, Sex, Weather, Birth, Death, Fire, Water, Nudity, Flying, Food, Drink, Animals, Environment, Color, and Crowds. There are many excellent books on dreams, both ancient and modern that will enable the reader to understand what some of these symbols mean and, more important what they may mean in one’s own personal life.
There is advantage to striving to remember our dreams. As a teacher of Metaphysics, self-knowledge is very important to me, and I strive to give my students “tools” to use to better understand the self. Dreams are fascinating and we should not be frightened of them, rather we should attempt to understand them and use them as a tool. If you take the time to try to focus on and remember your dreams, you may learn to be the interpreter of your own dreams. You can open the door to understanding more about yourself and unlock the door to the subconscious, that important area of YOU which is beneath the surface of your conscious mind. The more imaginative and sensitive you are, the greater the dream experience can be.
The imagery of your dream comes from your mind and nobody else can dream your dream but you. The world of our dreams can be romantic but also practical and very informative, as we take the information gleaned in sleep and apply it to our living our daily lives.
And remember, Knowledge is the Greatest Power, so Walk in the Light.
Marcia began her career as a school teacher, working with preschool through inner city high school students. She has worked with all aspects of Metaphysics for over 40 years and specializes in Tarot and Numerology. Marcia’s clients and students are in every state and throughout Europe. Marcia has taught over 400 students to “read” the Tarot for the purpose of self-guidance and to use the powerful symbolism of the Tarot to reach higher levels of spirituality. Her column, Spiritually Speaking, originally ran for 8 years in Attitudes Magazine in the Sarasota area. Email marlou2000@aol.com