The History of Dreams
Dreams are the doorway to a person’s collective and personal unconscious mind. The following quote is about the work that Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, completed on the collective unconscious and dreams.
“Jung believed that the deeper layer of unconscious, which he calls the collective unconscious, is an inborn and universal part of the unconscious identical in all people. Jung thought that dreams could help us grow and heal through use of archetypal symbols. These symbols, Jung proposed, are mental images from the collective unconscious that help us to recognize and integrate the parts of ourselves that we have disowned or are apprehensive about. Various archetypes are represented within myths, fairy tales, and religions, as well as dreams. Among the numerous archetypes he documented are those of birth, rebirth, death, power, magic, the hero, the child, the trickster, God, the demon, the wise old man, the earth mother, and many natural objects such as sun, moon, stars, rivers, fires, and animals (Jung, 1969).”
These archetypes discussed are images that all humans share and have in common. Jung believed that all creation stories were created from these archetypes. He spent years studying different tribes in Africa. In his study he was careful to choose tribes that had never been in contact with each other. What Jung found is that all the tribes had creation stories and religions that they believed in. After examining the creation stories from each of the tribes, he discovered that all of these stories followed the same plot line. Characters such as the hero, God, the demon, the sun and the moon were present in all of these stories. The only differences he found were that the names of these characters were different. This could possibly explain why religions of the current time period are all very similar. Most worship a single God who went on his quest to create the Earth. Jung also believed that this explained the early religious beliefs of the world. Why is it that the Mayan culture and the Egyptians had also identical creation stories, when there was no worldly way of ever coming in contact with each other? Jung believed that his theory answered these questions. So how do dreams fit in? Jung came to believe that dream contents present us with revelations that uncover and help to resolve emotional issues, problems, religious issues and fears. He believed that we use our personal unconscious (memories that only the individual has) and the collective unconscious (archetypes that we all share) to overcome these problems.
Another great mind, Sigmund Freud, had his own theory on dreams. Freud theorized that there were two types of dream content - manifest and latent. Manifest (superficial) content, he believed, had no significance because it was a mask for underlying (unconscious) issues of the dream. He believed the latent content contained unconscious wishes or fantasies. He also postulated that dreams originated either from the id or the ego. If it originated from the ego–it satisfied an instinct, according to Freud. If it originated from the id, it solved a conflict (Freud,1949, p. 44). Although Freud’s work was certainly interesting, there was little evidence to support his theories.
To this day the human brain is still a mystery. For thousands of years we have been trying to explain why we dream, why we dream what we do and what it all means. The only consistent discovery among all those who studied dreams is that they were and are important. Dreams are the doorway into a person’s mind and understanding your dreams is an important step in understanding yourself.
Dream Working
T he first step to understanding ones dreams is the remember them. Like a lot of people I could never remember my dreams. So here’s a little trick I read in one of Silver RavenWolf’s book that helped me remember mine.
Before you go to bed at night place a pen, paper and a flashlight close to you. Make sure that you can reach it when you wake up As you begin to drift off to sleep repeat an affirmation to yourself over and over again until you fall asleep. You can either say it in your head or outloud. I used to say “I will remember my dreams” over and over again. Once you wake up for the first time, grab you pen and paper. If it’s dark, reach for the flashlight. Then just start writing everything you can remember. Once you start writing, the dream will flow out of your mind like water. If you don’t feel comfortable with writing, you can always have a tape recorder by so you can record your dreams that way.
Recording your dreams will benefit you in two ways. One, you will remember a lot more details of your dream this way and you won’t have to rely on your memory. Secondly, it helps you to analyze yours dreams and discover the possible meanings of them. When it comes to the analyzation part I prefer to rely on myself. No one understands my mind better than I do. I read the dreams over and over again. I look at colours, plot, setting etc. and I ask myself what it could all mean. If I have a dream where I’m fighting with someone, for example, I could interpret that as an unresolved conflict that I’m debating with in my mind. Now some people don’t feel comfortable with their abilities to analyze their own dreams. For these people I recommend dream books, websites and magazines. One word of caution with these tools is that they are meant for general use and the definitions and explanations are not tailored to your own mind and your personal dreams. What I mean is that a snake in your dream may mean one thing to you, but a completely different thing to me. In a book, it means the same thing for everyone.
Well that concludes my little section on dreams and dreamworking. If anyone has any other suggestions for helping one remember or anyalze dreams, e-mail me and I’d be happy to add your information to my site. Brightest Blessing and Sweet Dreams!
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