Dream interpretation

What it is

The reading of dreams for meaning — about the dreamer's inner state, about hidden facts, or about the future.

Three quite different claims travel together under the name, and separating them is most of the work:

• Dreams reflect the dreamer's waking life and concerns. Well supported.
• Dreams carry meaning the dreamer cannot access directly, recoverable by interpretation. Partly supported, heavily disputed in the details.
• Dreams convey information not otherwise available — the future, distant events, divine instruction. Not supported.

Where it came from

The practice is universal and the documentary record is very deep.

Mesopotamian dream omens survive on tablets; the Egyptian Chester Beatty Papyrus III, from around 1275 BCE, lists dreams with verdicts of good or bad and their meanings. The Hebrew Bible treats dreams as a channel of revelation — Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon — while also warning against false dream-prophets. Islamic tradition developed an extensive interpretive science, taʿbīr, with Ibn Sīrīn as its most cited authority.

The Greeks and Romans had incubation: sleeping in a temple precinct to receive a healing dream. The Asclepian sanctuaries at Epidaurus and Pergamon ran this at scale, and surviving votive inscriptions record what supplicants dreamt and what they believed it cured.

The only complete ancient dream manual to survive is Artemidorus's Oneirocritica, from the second century CE.

The modern era begins with Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). His claims — that dreams are disguised wish-fulfilments, that a manifest content conceals a latent one, and that "dream-work" distorts through condensation and displacement — set the terms for a century. Jung broke with him on the disguise: dreams for Jung are not hiding anything but compensating, saying what the conscious attitude has left out, sometimes in archetypal images.

How it is practised

Traditionally, by consulting a dream-book: a catalogue of images with meanings attached, often working through wordplay in the original language.

Psychoanalytically, by free association from dream elements. Jungian practice instead amplifies — setting the image beside mythological and cultural parallels — and asks the dreamer what the image means to them.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the continuity hypothesis is well supported. Systematic content analysis of large dream collections — the Hall and Van de Castle coding system, and decades of work by William Domhoff — shows dream content is largely continuous with waking preoccupations. People dream about the people they know, the places they go and the things that worry them. Dreams are strikingly mundane in aggregate; the bizarre ones are memorable and unrepresentative.

We can say the neuroscience has moved and is not settled. REM sleep was identified in 1953. Hobson and McCarley's activation-synthesis model (1977) proposed that dreams are the forebrain imposing narrative on essentially random brainstem signals, which was widely read as showing dreams are meaningless — though Hobson himself later revised the position substantially. Competing accounts include threat-simulation (dreams as rehearsal for danger) and memory consolidation, for which there is real evidence.

We can say universal symbol dictionaries have no support, and this is the practical point. The claim that water means emotion, or teeth falling out means anxiety about appearance, for everyone, does not survive contact with the evidence. Dream content varies substantially by culture, and the same image demonstrably means different things to different dreamers. Artemidorus knew this in the second century — his insistence that a dream must be read against the dreamer's occupation, status and circumstances is the most durable thing in his book, and modern dream dictionaries have gone backwards from it.

We can say precognitive dreams are explained without anything unusual. A person dreams thousands of times a year across a lifetime; the coincidences that land are remembered and retold, the enormous number that do not are forgotten. There is no denominator, which is the recurring problem in this section.

We cannot say dreams are meaningless, and the activation-synthesis reading that they are was always stronger than its evidence. A brain constructing narrative from its own material is constructing it from your material, which is why the results reflect your life.

Further reading

• G. William Domhoff, The Scientific Study of Dreams (2003) — the content-analysis evidence.
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) — read as a historical document.
• Artemidorus, Oneirocritica — for how much better the ancient method was than the modern dream dictionary.