Social Functions of Dreaming

Different theories of dream meaning in the West

       The ancient Greeks had a belief of oneirocritica, or, the dream as a divine visitor. It was a supernatural messenger sent by a god. Dreams were not internal experiences or a state of mind. A person did not "have" a dream; he or she "saw" an objectified agent delivering a communication from a deity. However, not all dreams were significant, there were "true" and "false" dreams. Only "true" dreams were interpreted as divine visitors.

       In the Middle Ages in Europe, the dream vision was frequently used as a moralizing allegory, the veiling of truth in images, in popular writing. Within the dream was a battleground where God competed with the Devil for possession of a man's soul, and stories written about this were endorsed by the Church to enforce its beliefs. Dante's Divine Comedy is a good example. Dreams were received as revelation, prophecy, or as the conflict between good and evil in the self. illustration from dante here

       During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment Period, there was emphasis on the rational mind in which dreams had no role because they were illogical and illusory. Dreams could not be controlled by the intellect and therefore were not a reliable source of knowledge. The scholars of this era really downplayed the meaning of dreams.

       During the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung revitalized dreams as a potential source of self-knowledge. For Freud, the dream revealed secret wishes of the soul, or the inner self. Like the religious allegories of the Middle Ages, Freud thought that dreams were an arena where "forces for selfish, destructive evil struggle with the forces of ethics and the reality principle," (Parman 1991) and the message the dream is delivered in is partially censored and needs to be deciphered by skilled psychoanalysts who are able to "travel to the forbidden region of mind and culture." (Parman, 1991) Jung, on the other hand, had a theory of archetypes, or models. A dream is a lifeline back to a primeval, collective past that all humans share. When we dream, our anima reaches back into the realm of our animal ancestors, into a place that is primitive, non-rational, and possibly morally reprehensible, but it is a source of creativity and where we must go to be whole.

       Jung saw "a world of symbolism which evoked emotions that were universally experienced by all people of whatever cultural conditioning, and he called it the collective unconscious." (Natterson, 1980) He also hypothesized that dreams provide experiences different from, and therefore compensatory to, experiences in waking life. Dreams restore equilibrium to the ego, but not necessarily right away. They may have to be reintegrated with the waking consciousness sometimes long after the dream has occurred.

Carl Jung

       Freud and Jung are popular because they created new myths. They restored dream meaning and symbolism within a cultural context. So, say what you will about Freud, but he recognized how important self-knowledge was, and he and Jung created, in different ways, a body of information that we could apply our personal experiences to and pull from it a common meaning. Many practicing psychoanalysts today generally accept the idea that dream content is the product of an unconscious desire, which stems from an instinctual drive. When dreams are examined for how emotionally significant information gets processed, there is evidence that dream content frequently is involved in solving a problem. Resolution of a problem in a dream seems to correlate with a restoration of emotional balance in the person's waking consciousness. In psychotherapy, dreams are interpreted as an emotionally charged struggle that the patient is probably not wholly aware of, and needs the assistance of the psychotherapist to translate, hence the distinction between manifest and latent content. Manifest content is what was actually in the dream; latent content bears meaning that are not obvious to an unskilled professional. The translation of the latent content has to feel appropriate to the patient, of course. A good guideline to follow is Matoon's paradigm for correct dream interpretation:

1) Does the interpretation "click" with the dreamer?

2) Does the interpretation "act" for the dreamer?

3) Is the interpretation confirmed (or disconfirmed) by subsequent dreams?

4) Do the events anticipated by the interpretation occur in the dreamer's waking life?

(Natterson 1980)

I think these are valid rules for any dream interpretation.

       Probably the most recent theories of dream function are biomedical models, which, I think, are still trying to explain dreams in order to attain more self-knowledge. These theories vary from dreams being an important part of learning and memory, to dreams being a side effect of something else, to dreams not meant to be remembered at all.

       The selective mood regulatory theory of dreaming identifies dreams as functioning to contain emotional surges during REM sleep. Effective dreams absorb the emotional surge so the person stays asleep, and such dreams are not remembered.

       Dallett's mastery hypothesis also believes that dreams are an adaptive function to deal with emotions, namely stress. Dreaming is an opportunity to integrate emotionally charged experiences with similar past experiences that have already been successfully resolved.

       Crick and Mitchison's theory is like the selective mood theory only in their view dreams function to drown out irrational excitations in the neural circuitry of the brain. Dreams eliminate neural noise so the person can sleep, and dream recall is therefore dysfunctional.

       Other theories floating around are that dreams promote learning and memory. Memories, especially emotionally related ones from the previous day, are integrated with existing memories during dreaming. Or, conversely, dreaming flushes useless information or prevents storage of unnecessary memories. Evidence that suggests a link between dreams, learning, and memory, is that the sleep of infants consists of about 70% REM sleep, and the length of REM sleep increases in college students during exam times. However, it has also been found that REM sleep deprivation in adults has minimal effects on a person's ability to learn new material or to recall what was previously learned.

For a broader analysis of dream theories, go to Psychoanalytic perspectives on foreign cultures