Dreams

"All this is a dream. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these experiment is the best test of such consistency."

"The seventeenth-century Iroquois, as described by the Jesuit missionaries, practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols. ...And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association... The Iroquois faith in dreams... is only somewhat diminished after more than three hundred years. ...The conclusions are inevitable: Had Freud not discovered psychotherapy, then someone else would have."

"You have to believe we are magic, nothin' can stand in our way You have to believe we are magic, don't let your aim ever stray And if all your hopes survive, destiny will arrive I'll bring all your dreams alive, for you."

"People say that your dreams are the only things that save ya... Come on baby in our dreams, we can live our misbehaviors"

"Pour accomplir de grandes choses il ne suffit pas d'agir il faut rêver; il ne suffit pas de calculer, il faut croire."

"If dreaming was selected for because of its adaptive function, the general content of dreams should certainly reflect this, and consist of situations that allow the rehearsal of scenarios that ultimately lead toward increased fitness. This is exactly what is seen, with studies indicating that dream content is biased toward negative elements reflecting threat, as opposed to positive elements. Data collected from over 500 dream reports by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) indicate that about 80% contained negative emotions, while only about 20% contained positive emotions. These negative dreams are also disproportionably likely to contain threatening elements such as animals and male strangers in threatening encounters. The evidence points towards the overrepresentation of threatening events in dreams, which should not occur if dream content is random. Through appropriating and learning to deal with these threats in dreams, it is proposed here that an animal could increase its overall evolutionary fitness."

"Another example of a skill that has arguably played a pivotal role in other functional aspects of the human intellect and could serve to be shaped by dreaming is that of interpretation. As discussed by Bogdan (1997, p.108), “…key advances in interpretation, such as the recognition of belief, were accelerated by increased opportunities to interact with or manipulate subjects and slowed down by a lack of such opportunities.” As such, via teasing, play, mental rehearsal/imagery, or dreaming, the individual is given the opportunity to utilize successful strategies in dealing with these situations and further develop interpretive skills. In fact, studies of children’s dream-reports indicate that their dreams more often contain family members and close friends than adults’ dreams (Hobson, 1988), possibly due to the fact that it is more important for younger children to be practicing close interpersonal skills than it is for adults."

"The latent content of dreams consists of: 1. Dynamically unconscious wishes (id impulses) prevented by the censorship (the defences of the ego) from reaching consciousness or even the system preconscious during waking life. Several wishes may be present in the same dream: 'Dreams frequently seem to have more than one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include several wishfulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on one another, the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest childhood. And here again the question arises whether it might not be more correct to assert that this occurs "invariably" rather than "frequently"."

"The majority of these impulses are sexual in nature, and most of them stem from the infantile period of life: 'a dream might be described as a substitute for an infantile scene modified by being trnsferred on to a recent experience. The infantile scene is unable to bring about its own revival and has to be content with returning as a dream.'"

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

"Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world."

"The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows."