Dreams are haunting products of mysterious interactions

A hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud
published his extraordinary book The Interpretation of Dreams.
It was the first major attempt at a theory of dreams.
Most of it was devoted to analysis (making narrative sense) of bizarre dreams.
He assumed that a dream is the fulfillment of a hidden wish.
Dream analysis then is a tool to uncover repressed wishes
which in clinical cases could reveal a neurosis.
But the most significant part of Freud's work was undoubtedly his model of the dream-work
found in Part VI of his book--especially the concepts of condensation and displacement.

Working in a classical scientific tradition,
Freud assumed that a dream is the manifestation
of something far simpler in form which exists prior to it.
He singled out wishes as the causes of dreams. His conjecture was brilliant.
Now, a hundred years later, Freud's conjecture appears too restrictive.
Dreams overflow such confining theoretical strait jackets.
Still, Freud's conception of the dream-work itself remains quite productive.

We still don't know what dreams are,
but we do know a great deal about how they function.
Dreams do seem to play a crucial role in our lives,
not so much as oracles of our subconscious or destiny,
but as one of our basic systems of interaction.
Dreams help our minds reflect and play unrestricted by conscious norms & distractions.

I like to view dreams as our mind's digestive system.
In this sense, dreams help shape who we are.
Rodolfo Llinas, chief of physiology and neuroscience at New York University's School of Medicine,
noted that in sleep the brain dreams in the absence of sensory input.
When we are awake, the brain dreams in a more limited way
because the senses limit its capacity to imagine.
This limitation has a survival function.
It helps us construct living maps to interact in the physical world.
For Llinas, our waking life is a dream guided by the senses.

Dreams could also function in ways we have never dreamed before.
For example, former Cambridge and Harvard scholar Rupert Sheldrake
has proposed the hypothesis of formative causation (or morphic resonance).
He thinks that there are morphogenetic fields which influence our development
and help pass the form and function of all living things to succeeding generations.
Although the evidence he presents is indirect, highly speculative, and has defied scientific testing,
the model is nevertheless plausible.
As for dreams, they could tap like an umbilical cord into this unknown field
which for now belongs to the realm of hard science fiction.

Freud's student, Carl Gustav Jung, already proposed that dreams tap into a field.
The field he had in mind, however, was not physical but mythical and human.
He called it the the collective unconscious.
Joseph Campbell 's studies of myths, following Jung, exemplify what I would call
the collective consciousness which is also closely linked to dreams at a more practical level.

Dreams remain a haunting mystery.
Whatever they might be,
we can easily say that dreams are the play of the imagination.
They are one more powerful interactive tool.

Openings (most recent entries appear first)

Look perhaps into Pedro Calderón de la Barca's haunting play Life is a Dream,
and Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream

Here is a page on the biology of dreaming, including links to other sites.

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