Death dreams of a long life, long hair - to success and wealth, mice - to trouble … Where did all this come from? And can you trust dream books?
Oneirology and oneirocritics
The first dream book known to scientists was found by scientists in Ancient Egypt, it contained the interpretation of about two hundred dreams, as well as magic rituals that were required to be performed to protect against evil spirits. The very first author's dream book called "Oneirocritics" (from the Greek "oneiros" - a dream) was written by a certain Artemidor Daldiansky in the 2nd century AD. Artemidorus begins by distinguishing between so-called "ordinary dreams" and "prophetic dreams." In his opinion, the meaning of a dream depended on a specific person, his social status, gender, age and profession. He wrote: "Water meadows are beneficial only to shepherds, for the rest they mean unemployment, and for travelers - obstacles, because these meadows are roadless." Also Artemidor was sure that, for example,Hestia (the ancient Greek goddess of the hearth) and her statues mean advice and revenue to officials; for ordinary people - their own life; for a ruler or king - the fullness of their power.
In the East, in China, there were special Taoist temples, where people specially came to sleep to see a prophetic dream. In the Middle Ages, dream books were used by doctors. The interest in astrology that arose at that time gave rise to "lunar dream books", in which dreams were associated with the phases of the moon. The most popular is the Dream Book of Daniel, written by an anonymous Greek. It was a list of the most common subjects and their interpretations and, apparently, was written on the basis of the dream book of Artemidor. By the way, even modern dream books still more or less follow this particular scheme.
The Orthodox Church was ambivalent about the interpretation of dreams. On the one hand, the canon says that God can appear in a dream, on the other hand, providence and divine revelation are the lot of the righteous.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, the publication of dream books was condemned by the Orthodox Church. For example, the list of "heretical books" included the dream book "The Sniper". Nevertheless, they were quite popular among the people until the 20th century. In Eugene Onegin, Tatyana Larina reads Martin Zadeka's dream book, which became widespread in the early 19th century. Dream Interpretations in the XVIII-XIX centuries were quite varied: from astrological to alphabetical. In the Soviet Union, dream books and interpretations were not published, but after its collapse, they gained popularity again, and people read them to this day.
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"Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud
The idea that dreams are a reflection of the needs of a person and the events of the past day was expressed by Aristotle. In the 20th century, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was one of the first to speak about the non-mystical nature of sleep. He suggested that a dream is a manifestation of the unconscious and repressed desires. According to Freud, dreams are divided into latent and explicit. Latent means repressed unconscious desires, including socially disapproved desires, and explicit ones means hallucinatory fulfillment of desires. Subsequently, Freud added to his theory the symbols that are most often found in dreams, in order to facilitate their interpretation. So, for example, a house is a symbol of a person, a king and queen are symbols of parents, departure is a symbol of death, and so on. Symbols, according to Freud, are the only elements of dreams,which can be interpreted by the analyst without the help of the dreamer himself, since they have a constant, universal meaning, regardless of whose dream these symbols appear.
The modern attitude to dreams
At one time, Freud made a revolution, but now psychologists treat his ideas with a grain of salt, not connecting the unconscious exclusively with libido. For example, psychologist Mark Blencher believes that dreams teach you how to react emotionally to problems and help you cope with negative emotions. The same idea is expressed by psychiatrist Ernest Hartman, one of the founders of the Modern Theory of Dreams. In his opinion, dreams are an evolutionary mechanism. “If any bright emotion prevails in a person, his dreams are simple, if not primitive. For example, survivors of some kind of psychological trauma often dream something like: “I was lying on the beach, but suddenly I was washed away by a huge wave.” This is a fairly common option: in a dream, a person sees not a specific event, but a monosyllabic emotion, such as fear. If the falling asleep is disturbed by several things at once, then his dreams will have a more complex structure. The higher the emotional arousal of a person, the brighter the dreams that he sees will be,”he writes.
One of the co-authors of the discovery of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick and scientist Graham Mitchison, put forward the theory that our brain resembles a computer during disk defragmentation. In other words, in a dream we are freed from useless information. From the point of view of scientists, when we sleep, our parts of the brain are even more active than in the waking state, but in a completely random way. These random and messy connections between neurons open the way for new connections, weaken existing roads and create new ones.