By Dan Archer
Dreams are an assortment of clips, images, sensations and memories happening during the REM stage of sleep. Most of us have several dreams throughout the night, but just as our sleep nears the end, our dreams become longer and gain stronger, memorable narratives. Although everyone dreams, some of us fail to remember our nocturnal reveries. For those of us who recall our dreams in detail – especially the visions we’ve just had prior to waking – we might be wondering if there’s any deeper meanings attached to these sleepy-time hallucinations. Vivid dreams are especially puzzling, making them a matter of conversation for centuries. The prophet Daniel in the Bible was valued for his dream interpretations – a man said to have had the gift of understanding dreams and visions (Daniel 1:17). King Nebuchadnezzar and King Belshazzar of Babylonia relied on Daniel’s dreamy elucidations. In the digital age, there are multiple variations of dream dictionaries on the internet, but Daniel relied on spiritual guidance in order to understand and translate the dreams of the bewildered rulers who had taken him into captivity when the prophet was a young man.
In 1899, Sigmund Freud published his ground-breaking effort, The Interpretation of Dreams, believing dreams were the result of two mental processes. The unconscious mind constructs desires expressed in dreams, countered by forces misrepresenting inner-cravings. Freud believed dreams articulated wish fulfilments. In Freudian thought, dream analysts examined the manifest content of dreams by studying the details of the visions as remembered by the dreamers, but the latent content of the dreams were thought to have more importance. The latent content of dreams references the primary meanings obscured within each vision. Freud believed our unconsciousness summarised or transferred the content of our dreams – mixing and muddying our visions so much, we were unable to understand what the dreams actually meant upon waking. In Freudian thought, the interpretation of dreams helps us understand the unconscious mind. Although many of Freud’s conclusions have been brought into question, his ideas about dreams and the unconsciousness still carry a lot of weight in modern academia. Robert Stickgold, a psychiatry professor and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School, credits dreams for guiding our waking lives, allowing us to visualise occurrences and the following consequences. In other words, dreams allow us a possible glimpse at what the future might bring.
Dreams usually involve revisiting specific aspects of our lives, such as familiar people or known locations, but dreams might take on fantastical elements which are difficult to interpret. Antonio Zadra, a psychology professor at the Université de Montréal, believes dreams should be disregarded and should never be confused with reality. With respect to Professor Zadra, I think there might be more to dreams than he realizes, since luciddreams havelonginspired creators and thinkers. In 1965, Paul McCartney first composed the melody for Yesterday – a well-known hit by the Beatles – in a dream. Scientists have also learned new approaches from interpreting their visions. Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, often mentioned a dream leading to his discovery of the atom’s structure. Bohr was known to be a brilliant researcher in the world of physics, but the scientist couldn’t understand how to decode the atom’s components. One night, Bohr dreamt about the nucleus of the atom with electrons rotating around the nucleus in the same way planets spin around the sun. Later, Bohr returned to the lab to support this dream-based theory which proved to be correct. Einstein once dreamt about sledding down a mountainside, moving so fast he approached the speed of light. While Einstein sped down the hill, the stars above in the dream changed their appearance in relation to his positioning on earth. When he awoke, Einstein meditated on this idea – the sledding dream assisted the brilliant man to devise his theory of relativity. Of course, most dreams are subject to analysis and should never be taken as gospel, but perhaps our nightly visions shouldn’t be so readily dismissed either. Always keep a notebook at your bedside, just in case one of your dreams has somehow unlocked a door leading to another great discovery.
