Internal Vs External Sources for Dreams

Do dreams come from within the person or do they come from some place outside of the person? There are many different ways to answer this question, either inside, outside, or a combination of the two. For ancient Near East peoples, some of the Greeks, and early Muslims the answer is a combination of the two. For Aristotle and Freud the answer is that dreams come from inside the person. Despite different causes for dreams, both camps arrive at similar conclusions about the nature of dreams and some of their meanings.

In the ancient Near East dreams were said to be sealed baskets of legal contracts from the gods, but it is clear that not every dream was something from the gods because the emphasis placed on reoccurring dreams. It was custom of the day to report reoccurring dreams to priest or kings because they were likely to be significant. Here it is evident that people like priest and kings were better able to interpret dreams and it is likely they were more apt to have more significant dreams. Dreams were of a high importance to ancient Near East peoples as one can tell from the pressure one may of felt to relay a potentially significant dream to the priest.

Kings and priest were much more likely to have significant dreams than regular people. This, in and of itself, is evidence that significant dreams came from outside the person, mainly from the Gods. Significant dreams come from outside the body and as such are somewhat mysterious and need special interpretation. In the ancient Near East there was much need and appreciation for dream interpreters. Dreams interpreters worked off of puns, they would rearrange the letters in a word to come up with a new word, or they would relate words to rhyming words or a word with a similar root, etc. It was rare that a dream meant what it appeared to mean and often dreams would have nearly the opposite meaning of what a face value reading would of resulted in. It is also said that figuring out the meaning of a dream may there by nullify the dream, an idea that echoes in Freudian thought.

For ancient Hebrews dreams had a similar function but the two most famous examples of dream interprets in the Hebrew Bible, Joseph and Daniel, were both working in foreign countries. Other keys from the text may lead one to believe that dream interpretation was natural and easy among the Hebrews. For example Joseph’s brothers did not have any trouble interpreting Joseph’s dream of the sheaves. Other themes from the ancient Near East are also present in the Joseph story such as Pharaoh having two dreams that were a message for the same thing (the wheat and the cows). By the time of the prophet Isaiah there seems to have been some controversy over people lying about their dreams and then dream interpretation became less popular.

Ancient Greek writers like Artemidorus and Aristotle because they wrote specifically about dreams, and their writings aren’t in the context of a larger story so they say things more directly about dreams. For Artemidorus dreams can either come from the self or come from the gods. Dreams that came from within were generally considered to be gibberish and were called enhypnia while dreams from the gods were called oneiroi. Oneiroi were subdivided into two types; those that can be directly interpreted and are plainly obvious, theorematikoi, and those that need interpretation, allegorikoi. To interpret the allegorikoi Artemidorus would of used word play, the principle of opposites, and visual free association, and numerology.

Another important issue Artemidorus took up was that different dreams mean different things to different people. Artemidorus looked at the person that was having the dream to try to figure out what that dream meant. An identical dream from a priestess and the dream of a prostitute would of meant something different. Artemidorus’ notion that not only the dream but the dreamer mattered echoes later in Freudian theory.

Another thing that makes Artemidorus’ theories different from the ancient Near Eastern traditions is that to Artemidorus a dream being reoccurring did not make it special. In fact he says that a reoccurring dream will mean different things at different times and gives the example of somebody that dreams they lost their nose. The first dream means the dreamers perfume business will go under, the second dreams means that he will lose face and be degraded.

Unlike Artemidorus or the peoples of the ancient Near East, Aristotle believed that dreams arose internally. The Aristotelian soul was made up of perception, judgment, and imagination. Perception accounted for sensory input, judgment was able to make rational decisions based on that input, and imagination was part of the mind that made wild associations and was a source of creativity and spontaneity. When one falls asleep one’s judgment becomes dormant and the perceptions fade. While faded the perceptions do not disappear and also there are some residue perceptions still in the organs that will take some time to dissipate. While sleeping, the imagination is dominant part of the brain that is still awake. It uses the residue of the perceptions as well as some random memories to make dreams. The value of dreams in the Aristotelian system is that dreams allow you to explore a part of your mind that you usually don’t have much access to.

For medieval Muslims dreams played a huge role in their religious practice. John C. Lamoreaux argues that dreams played a central role in the early Islamic communities by way of the charisma of early dream interpreter. And now dreams exist in many strings of Islamic scholarship and culture such as Sufism, high culture, sharia, and the non-Muslim Islamicate. Puns play a large role in Islamic dream interpretation as it does in Arab poetry. Also popular in the Islamic world are dream manuals like the kind Artemidorus made. These dream manuals.

For Freud dreams are internal wish fulfillment. Somewhat similar to Aristotle’s imagination Freud believes that the mind can be divided into conscious and unconscious parts. The unconscious part of our brains is where a lot of our thoughts actually happen but a lot of these thoughts would be unacceptable to our conscious mind because they are crass, sexual, and violent. It is when we sleep that our unconscious mind takes control; Freud uses the analogy of an invading army. Our mind is taken over by the unconscious and things do not work the same as they do when we are asleep. The unconscious, again like Aristotle’s imagination, makes wild and free associations between things observed in waking life. Because of these wild associations often what we see in our dream does not really mean what it seems to mean, a theme that is echoed in all the traditions mentioned so far.

Many of the things we see in our dreams are symbolic of other things, but it is a hard to know exactly what they are symbolic of because of the nature of the unconscious. A vision seen in a dream may be representative of something it is very different from or it may even be it’s direct opposite. To Freud everything in our dreams matters and has great significance. There is nothing in our dreams that does not come from inside of us and there is nothing in our dreams that does not have some kind of greater meaning. In the Freudian system, like the ancient Near Eastern traditions, once you figure out why a symbol is in your dream you gain control over it and it will not bother you any more, provided of course you found the real cause and not an imaginary one.

This idea of conquering our dreams may be at the root of all of these traditions but nonetheless there are similarities in these theories even if they don’t agree on where dreams come from. The notion that dream images are representative of something other than what they are appears in all these ideas about dreaming and beyond that one may wonder if it is not self evident and intuitive that our dreams are rarely to be taken at face value.