Dreaming dreams - dream interpretation History, methods and tips

Interpret and classify dreams
Dream interpretation is probably as old as humanity. Our ancestors believed that the spirits of the dead, spirits, or gods appeared in dreams; psychology brought dreams back into our inner self as processes of unconscious processes. Today, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists see dreams as an evolutionary survival strategy. A scientific dam break similar to Darwin's insight on the evolution of living beings, is in the dream analysis but still pending.

contents

• What is dream interpretation?
• Free memories
• The script
• Dreams indicate problems and patterns of behavior
• Soul and body
• History of Dream Interpretation: Ancestor Cult and Spirit Beliefs
• Greek experts
• Empathy and psychology
• Artemidor, the forefather of psychological dream research
• Gods and demons
• Dream interpretation with Freud and Jung
• The "collective unconscious"
• Other approaches
• What do the neurosciences say?
• What do we know today??

What is dream interpretation?

Dream interpretation encompasses all practices and models to interprete the feelings, images and events in dreams with different methods. The different approaches, religious as well as psychological, anthropological and neurobiological, all have in common that they assume in the dream images a meaning that can be decoded. Who thinks dreams meaningless, does not interpret them.

The interpretation of dreams has a long tradition. (Image: Brian Jackson / fotolia.com)

Free memories

From brain research today, we know that the brain has access to memory contents in sleep, which remain locked in the awake state. In the latter, parts of the brain link thoughts and design structured solution models. These brain areas are not active during sleep. That is why we experience memories in the dream, and the brain provides the appropriate pictures. It is no coincidence that our ancestors regarded sleep experiences as messages from the ancestors, because in a certain way we can see in the dream in the past.

The script

In doing so, the dream "works" in a similar way to a film script that uses a script to pick up on a topic and pack it into a story. For example, if I pack too many things and miss my plane, it probably shows that I'm in too many projects and warns me that not all of them can be done at the same time.

The idea of ​​Freud (see below: "Interpretation of Dreams in Freud and Jung") that dreams contain complicated, repressed messages is today considered obsolete. Rather, these issues seem to convey very directly. According to new dream research, there is no objectively correct interpretation of sleep experiences, and an absolute truth is not their task.

Dreams indicate problems and patterns of behavior

Instead, dreams are inspirations to find solutions to a topic or to think about it more closely. Rather, successful interpretation means identifying patterns of behavior and problems a dream points to:

Do I always stand in front of a door and are afraid to open it? Which threshold in life scares me? Where am I blocked? Is my apartment crowded with people I do not like? Then I probably have a problem isolating myself. Sleeping experiences therefore give little detailed information, but point to the general weaknesses and strengths of a person.

Soul and body

These can have both physical and psychological causes. For example, those who often dream of falling are usually afraid of falling out of their current life situation, be it that the marriage is crumbling, be it fear of losing their job, or failing in an exam. Conversely, people have such experiences but also when the blood pressure drops during sleep.

If someone dreams that he is naked, and this is embarrassing for him in a dream, he may find himself in a life situation in which he feels vulnerable, be it that his boss overrides him, whether he rituals, relationships and Intrigue at the new workplace does not yet know.

A successful dream interpretation means recognizing which problems, conflicts etc. the dream points to. (Image: fotovika / fotolia.com)

Clarity exists in the meantime that conceptions of dream symbols, which mean this and that, are objectively as little valid as star signs or tarot cards. Dreams arise in ourselves, and they reflect our own desires, hopes and fears. The dream consciousness is very similar to the waking consciousness: Where the waking consciousness thinks through these wishes, the former provides fantasy pictures

History of Dream Interpretation: Ancestor Cult and Spirit Beliefs

From an anthropological point of view religiosity belongs to the first nature of man, so to our biological basic equipment. It is therefore natural that people believe in supersensible beings to systematically think scientifically, but is a process of our second nature, culture. For example, tedious brainwork requires explaining natural phenomena out of abstract laws, while humans intuitively believe that a living one can thunder, flash, or rain. Toddlers of all cultures also endow inanimate things with animate will: the stone they stumble upon is evil, the sun that warms their skin well.

For many thousands of years, dreams have logically been considered to be the communication of nonhuman beings. In dreams of deceased people their spirits came into contact with the living. The word nightmare, too, comes from the Alb, a demonic creature that sat on sleepers' sleep and caused evil dreams.

Shamanic cultures gave the dream the highest importance: here manifested a non-everyday reality that could be existential for life issues. Specialists who summarize anthropology under the umbrella term shamans, interpreted the dreams of the members of their group and concluded what these consequences entailed.

They even sought and sought altered states of consciousness such as trance and ecstasy to connect with the spirits.

Greek experts

The belief of the ancient humans in supernatural beings must not lead to arrogance, they could not have differentiated dreams. Even Homer separated between those with a meaning and vain dreams - as well as today's psycho-neuroscientific dream research between the sleep experiences of the REM phase and those shortly after falling asleep differentiated. In the REM phase, this sees an active working through of life issues at work, while the dreams after falling asleep "just" daytime experiences.

This is how Penelope Ulysses explains that there are dreams of ivory and horn. Those at the gate of ivory were fulfilled, those at the gate of horn would be vain. But she herself is mistaken: thus she dreamed that an eagle stumbled upon the geese in her palace and killed her, but rejected this dream. But then her husband Odysseus comes back and expels Penelopes worshipers who fatten in the palace "like geese".

Empathy and psychology

In the ancient Greeks, interpreters of dreams were a profession that meant much more than "divine prophecies". On the one hand, many of them served as rulers, and they had to apply tact to interpret the dreams of the powerful so favorably that the dream interpreters did not lose their heads.

In ancient Greece, dream interpreters were important guides. (Image: Erica Guilane-Nachez / fotolia.com)

Thus, Alexander the Great saw in his dream a satyr, a hybrid of man and goat from the entourage of the lustful god Dionysus and the symbol of uncontrolled urges. This sleep experience he had during the siege of the city of Tyros. The creature danced around Alexander in a dream, he tried to seize it, but the goat man escaped him, in the end Alexander caught him.

The interpreter of dreams now dissected the Satyros in Sa Tyros, which meant "Tyros will be yours". Alexander's army conquered the city, and the Macedonian was now convinced that the assistant had interpreted correctly. So it was not just about knowing the traditional supersensible interpretations, but also about empathizing with the individual as the interpreter of dreams, seeking his advice.

Artemidor, the forefather of psychological dream research

The most famous interpreter of dreams in Greece, Artemidor, even explicitly stated the "soul" as the cause of the dreams and considered the idea that these were messages of the gods outdated.

The Greeks distinguished dreams that resulted from bodily needs of the sleeper, such as hunger or thirst, from those that came from emotions like dreams of love or anxiety, and those in turn from meaningful dreams.

Significant sleep experiences could therefore be open or symbolic, according to Artemidor. According to him, the cultural imprints would have to be considered first, before the symbols could be decrypted. There were, according to Artemidor, both symbols that are common to all human beings, such as customs, which allowed a certain interpretation. So Syrians would not eat fish, because they were animals of the goddess Astarte.

Historically, too, the content changed: one must distinguish dreams of bathing in his time from those in a time when people were bathing only after hard work or illness.

Artemidor can easily be described as a pioneer of psychological dream analysis. He considered it essential that the interpreter knew about the dreamer's background, occupation, possessions, physical condition and age, as well as his mental state. He was so today vulgar interpretations according to the motto "online lexicon for 1000 dream symbols" far ahead.

Even more: instead of being an omniscient fortune-teller, he saw himself as a companion of the dreaming, analogous to the listening therapist today. He warned against bringing an interpretation. Instead, the dream interpreter would have to listen carefully to every detail of the sound experience, for now without interpreting it, because even overlooking the smallest detail could falsify the result.

According to Marion Giebel, Artemidor considered dream images that were incomplete because the sleeper had forgotten parts unimaginable. Here he demands a strict professional duty of the interpreter. He should not interpret what he could not grasp exactly, because that would hurt the person concerned.

Artemidor formed himself extensively, sought out every interpreter of dreams he encountered, wrote countless accounts of dreams and their interpretations, and learned about various methods.

Dreams in antiquity were fateful predictions. (Image: pathdoc / fotolia.com)

Gods and demons

The cultures of antiquity assumed gods and demons as the cause of dreams, and these brought the people a message. In Greek and Roman antiquity dream interpreters enjoyed a high status, as in ancient Egypt, Babylon and later in Arabia.

Sleep experiences were above all "if-then" messages. Since the interpreters suspected a supernatural origin, dreams were less evidence of what problems a human being dealt with, but fateful predictions with the key message "if you see this or that in the dream, that happens and that".

The monotheistic religions saw dreams as caused by God or the devil or demons and so either as prophecies of the future or as misleading as temptation. So should Incubi or Succubi sexual dreams trigger to "spoil" the chaste believers.

The Muslims distinguished between the word-image of a dream and its allegorical meaning: thus a Christian, who appeared in this, prophesying to the dreaming Muslim a coming victory.

Dream interpretation with Freud and Jung

The enlightenment of the 18th century declined to attribute dreams to messages. Dream interpretation fell for her in the field of magic, quackery and mistaken beliefs. Now sleep experiences should be clearly distinguished from reality.

At the same time, however, enlighteners drew these to a worldly level, ie from the realm of the supernatural to the natural, from the heaven of the gods to the psyche of man. The modern interpretation of dreams was introduced by Sigmund Freud and his pupil Carl Gustav Jung.

Both saw them as essential information about unconscious events in humans. Freud spoke of dream analysis. According to him, mental contents would be slowed down before they reached consciousness, but in sleep these contents, repressed into the unconscious, would emerge and become dreams of a preconscious.

According to Freud, daytime remnants, long-term memory and contents of consciousness outside of the coordinate system of time and space of waking consciousness mingled with each other. At the same time, however, the censorship would be preserved by the awareness of excluding unpleasant content, and therefore a dream could only be decrypted via an analysis. Dream content was symbolic for Freud.

Freud and his pupil Jung quarreled over their different approaches to dream interpretation. Jung suspected, unlike Freud, a collective unconscious of all human beings, leaving open whether it had a spiritual or biological origin. According to this, in human mythologies the same patterns have repeatedly cropped up around the world because they are naturally anchored in man - Jung called them archetypes. These included animus and anima as the pattern of mind and life.

For Jung, dreams were by no means "only" encrypted references to suppressed contents of the unconscious, but an immediate representation of an inner reality. According to Jung, the symbols that appear in them should not be dissected, but are holistic - they stand by themselves. According to Jung, symbols were fixed while Freud derived them from the individual experience of the dreaming.

Sigmund Freud and his pupil Carl Gustav Jung pursued different approaches to dream interpretation. (Image: matiasdelcarmine / fotolia.com)

In addition, Freud and Jung were divided over their relationship to religion and esotericism. For Freud it was crucial that dream interpretation had to be in harmony with biological findings: on this basis he developed his structural model of the psyche. Jung, on the other hand, saw God as the archetype that preceded it and combined psychotherapy with religion.

The theologian Eugen Drewermann outlines Jung's basic assumption as follows: "The dreams can not possibly have come about (...) from socially time-constrained pressure, but there is something literally eternal in man."

The "collective unconscious"

According to Jung, the "collective unconscious" was the sea from which religions, mythologies, narratives and fairy tales drew their material. For him, religion was the approach of man to something sacred that rested eternally in man. He always saw the forms of religion in society through the eyes of the psychologist.

Freud, on the other hand, was decidedly anti-religious and considered spirits, gods and demons to be psychic constructions, in the literal sense of the word. He rejected Jung's approach because, according to Freud, it denied science.

These contrasting approaches led to different methods: in Jung's case, the analyst merely had to look up the meaning of these symbols and put them into a relationship with mythological storylines. Friend, on the other hand, did not consider a fixed interpretation of the symbols by the therapist to be decisive, but rather the free associations that the patient himself had with his dreams. Today it turns out that Jung and Freud were partly in the right, partly in the wrong.

Other approaches

Psychotherapy not only means Freud and Jung, but also methods based on Freud or Jung in the "primordial ground" developed a life of their own. Other approaches include Gestalt therapy and analysis of existence.

Gestalt therapy breaks with the Freudian analysis, which focuses on the conversation, ie the verbal analysis. She sees in the dream-contents, occurring humans, beings and things, aspects of the dreamer lost to consciousness. This one should not dissect the one, but recognize and integrate. In doing so, he transforms them creatively, enters into a dialogue with dream figures or depicts scenes of the dream as in a play.

The analysis of existence hardly has any significance today. It challenges Freud's depth psychology and expands Heidegger's concept of being to dream interpretation. Accordingly, there is no hidden unconscious in the dream images, but the dreamer appears only that which corresponds to his being. It's not about hidden desires, but about behavior and feelings that the person experiences even in the waking state.

What do the neurosciences say?

Neuroscience brings dreams back to processes in the brain, both cognitive and neuronal. Brain researcher Gerhard Roth confirms Freud's structural model of the psyche. Accordingly, there is also a neurobiological view of the unconscious, so would the activity of the nerves involved in cognitive processes already to, if the affected person the corresponding thought is not yet known.

Younger children often dream of animal monsters that they hunt or hide from. (Image: Rawpixel.com/fotolia.com)

What do we know today??

Today's interpretation of dreams assumes that human sleep experiences are both archetypal and individual. The archetypes are not, as in Jung, a "divine power in man", but evolutionary prototypes for archaic turnouts that decide on life and death.

Certain dream patterns on this archaic level are actually generally human and also present in animals. These are dreams that have to do with flight for (predators) enemies, fear and struggle, hiding and natural threats. Children in different cultures dream at an early age of animal monsters that they hunt and hide from - similar to the creatures that appear in fairy tales.

At the same time, dreams of humans, along with human cultural ability, are much more individual than those of animals. Here, Jung was not right: Even if there are evolutionary archeological dreams of dreams, Freud was right that those of humans always say something about the experiences, conflicts and models of the individual's solution. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)

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http://www.fachdidaktik.klassphil.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/didaktik_waiblinger/marion_giebel/traeume_u_traumdeut.pdf