Reflections on Dreams

Dreams, their origins and their interpretation, have been a subject of intense speculation for people at all levels of society since ancient times. However, unlike the prevailing views that were held in antiquity, in modern times relatively few of those people having an active interest in brain activity have thought that preoccupation with the meaning of dreams is justified, but the purposes and process of dreaming have intrigued even the sceptics.

Here, however, as someone who has always taken a keen interest in the subject I do want to say something about the content of dreams, my understanding of their possible meaning(s), how these might be accessed and what we may infer from them about our personal lives, our nature - and also about reality, particularly in respect of time and communication.

The first point to clear up is that in my opinion at least, although some interesting things may be learnt, unless you are neurotic your dreams will not tell you very much that is absolutely fundamental about yourself that you do not already know.

Your dreams may however reflect what you do know about yourself in a variety of ways and employ a wide variety of images and settings in so doing. And there will be especially rich dreams that can be seen as having more than one level of meaning. The connections between these layers can be interesting.

Much of the classical imagery of dreams was set out by Sigmund Freud, particularly in his monumental and path-breaking work The Interpretation of Dreams. Quite a few people today are no doubt still unhappy about some aspects of Freud’s analysis and the erotic imagery (trains, tunnels, piers, clock towers, trees etc.) of which he wrote but I think that at one level it tends to be correct (but why a clock tower rather than a train you might fruitfully ask).

Some dream images may have more than one personal association and they may evoke more than one emotion – for example involving anxiety (as may be instanced by the possibility of missing a train) as well as more pleasurable sensations. There is usually some food for thought there I think.

Carl Jung, once a colleague of Freud, gave less prominence to sexual imagery than Freud himself and some of what he said added richness to Freud’s perceptions on dreams. Jung introduced other images too, such as the well known mandalas.

Furthermore, most people will have their own set of visceral images, but I will not go into any detail here. I forget whether it was Freud or Jung who pointed out that in dreams some groups composed of three elements may refer to the male genitalia - these could be trios of people or animals for instance.

But in my opinion there is a lot more to the understanding of dreams than this. One of Freud’s perceptions was that the elements used in the composition of one’s dreams make use of what he termed ‘the day’s residues’. These are bits and pieces of our mostly mundane experiences during the preceding day that, as the modern understanding goes, the brain is likely to be sorting out for longer term storage or eventual removal. But these residues may be combined and built on to produce a particular story-like dream.

How may dreams be interpreted? The first thing to make clear is that an off-the-shelf guide book approach to images and their supposed significance simply will not do. There is in fact only one person who can interpret a dream properly and thoroughly, and that is the dreamer themselves since the dream uses their residues and personal images, and its meaning relates to their experiences either recent or from years ago – quite often childhood, puberty or experiences with a high emotional charge.

Other parties may gently aid in the dream interpretation, usually by way of a well placed suggestion or two, and by being generally supportive and encouraging in the process but, importantly, directly intervening no further than to ask the occasional question such as: “What were you feeling at this point in the dream?” or “Have you had this dream before?” If you do this, my advice is not to have eye contact with the other person – sit at an angle.

One factor that is very important in interpretation is the feeling tone in dreams. What emotions accompanied the dream or certain parts of it – excitement, anxiety, awe or typically a fusion of many feelings? This is the area where the unravelling is likely to be especially productive. Productive, that is, primarily in terms of interest rather than dramatic revelations.

Centuries ago dreams were given great weight when they related to major events that were supposedly coming down the track from the future. I’m profoundly suspicious about the verity of such reported historic or religious dreams and suspect that many of them in fact never occurred but were stories aimed to further self-interest, promote an agenda, manipulate either the ‘masses’ or Kings (in which case it’s best to be positive and right!)

I must say that have no time for seeing dreams (or anything else for that matter) as ‘omens’ with their predominant focus on the negative, on helplessness and thus the diminishment of the role of free will and the effectiveness of action to counter possible very real threats such as impending war.

But I expect many of us have had what appear to be glimpses of future events in our personal lives. I’ve had a few of these myself but before going overboard one should realise that there are seven billion potential dreamers every night, making some two hundred trillion dreams that occur worldwide in a lifetime! Some of these dreams will surely look like predictions but, as rational analysis reveals, could also be a product of chance. But maybe not all of them – and there is another sort of future related dream too.

These are those dreams where, on waking, you do not sense a reference to the future or even remember the dream unprompted. But an apparently run of the mill (if slightly odd in feeling) and maybe forgotten dream may leap back into mind when an event occurs in the future that was ‘seen’ in the dream. In my case these always have several characteristics in common – the time period is always the following day, the matter is always utterly trivial, it always has a ‘visceral’ nature, it is highly visual, and there is no way of seeing that a particular dream may be of this nature or of nurturing one.

As an aside, this question of timing seems, from my experience at least, to be important in such direct interactions as there may be between people’s minds. Years ago there were many instances where the first few words that a close relative was going to say came into my head. These always made up just a short phrase and the time gap was always one or at most two seconds. This phenomenon no longer occurs however. The tenuous connection with dreams was the relaxed state of my mind at the time of occurrence. But I digress.

It is as if, to extend Freud’s concept, such future-perceptive dreams include some of tomorrow’s residues. If there is anything to this, and of course there may not be, there are profound implications for the nature of time. But then, there have to be profound differences from our day to day impressions of time. A straight line, clockwork time simply cannot be. It is woven in with space and space time is warped by matter and there cannot have been a straight line infinity of time preceding the present.

I have sometimes though that of the temporal triumvirate of the past, the present and the future, the only one with a questionable reality is the present. This may sound surprising but by way of explanation, if you imagine yourself sitting in a room opposite someone, the sound of their voice comes out of the past as does their visual image (at a different, much faster speed) since both take a time to reach you. The processing of this information and your thoughts also takes time so that ‘the present’ is a smeared combination of incoming information and the brain’s work to render it comprehensible. This will apply to other sensory inputs too. In terms of the reality of the future, we have previous experience of reaching futures 100% of the time so, hopefully, we can expect this to continue.

My subjective experience suggests the possibility of tonight’s dreams including some of tomorrow’s residues as well as today’s so that ‘dream time present’ would also include elements of the very near future to be reached following the exercise of albeit constrained free will. One can envisage a sort of asymmetric bell-type curve of the probabilities of residue inclusion in dreams with the much greater probabilities being from the preceding day.

One other thing to look out for when interpreting a dream which appears to be significant is that the true focus of the dream may not be on the central character but one who is either less well defined or apparently in a lesser role.

To give one example, I had a dream when on holiday which caused me great concern about the welfare of a colleague who was the central character in the dream. In parts of the dream I was accompanied by a figure to my left and slightly behind me as we rushed to find my friend. The concerns I had did not evaporate and on my return to work I felt I must ask my colleague if she was alright. She said that she was fine but asked if I had heard about Godfrey. It turned out that poor Godfrey had committed suicide whilst I was away. It was then that I recognised the figure beside me in the dream.

Returning to Freud’s views on dreams, he placed great emphasis on the role of wish fulfilment even when the ‘wish’ coming to light may appear to be a highly negative or embarrassing one - and one which may be steadfastly denied by the dreamer. This idea can be revealing and we should pay close attention to it in the interpretation of dreams even though its presence is not always obvious and the supposed ‘wish’ is not always palatable.

So there is, after all, the potential to learn something from our dreams although I would emphasize that in my opinion it is more a question of there being a number of aspects of interest rather than dreams being of central importance for fundamental and heretofore unrealised self-understanding.