Dream interpretation

Dream interpretation, the effort to draw meaning from the images and events of dreams, is among the most ancient and widespread of human practices, undertaken across cultures as a means of receiving divine messages, foreseeing the future, diagnosing illness, and understanding the self. In many traditional societies dreams were regarded as a genuine channel of communication with the divine or the dead, and their interpretation was a serious religious art. The ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians kept dream manuals cataloguing the meanings of dream images; the Hebrew Bible records God speaking through dreams and the gift of their interpretation given to figures such as Joseph and Daniel, who read the dreams of kings; and the Greco-Roman world produced elaborate systems of dream classification, most famously the second-century dream book of Artemidorus.

The great religions took varied positions on the practice. Islam developed a rich science of dream interpretation, tabir, distinguishing true dreams that may carry divine guidance from meaningless ones and those from evil sources, and produced a large interpretive literature. In the modern era the interpretation of dreams was transformed by the rise of depth psychology: Sigmund Freud treated dreams as the disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes, a "royal road" to the unconscious to be decoded through the dreamer's associations, while Carl Jung read them as expressions of a deeper psyche communicating through universal symbols and archetypes. These psychological approaches shifted the aim of interpretation from divination about the world to insight into the self, and while the scientific study of dreaming has moved in other directions, the interpretation of dreams, whether as divine message, psychological revelation, or personal reflection, remains a living practice across religious, therapeutic and popular settings.

Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, is usually read as launching an entirely new theory of the unconscious, but its more precise historical achievement was breaking the two-thousand-year-old method the practice had used until then, the lookup key exemplified by Artemidorus in the second century, where a fixed dictionary of symbols was applied to a dreamer's image once the interpreter knew the dreamer's station in life.

Freud proposed instead that a dream's meaning could not be read off a shared symbol table at all, since the same image was disguised differently by each dreamer's own individual censorship of forbidden wishes, and that the only route to its meaning ran through the dreamer's own free associations to the images, a method he called the royal road to the unconscious and that made the dreamer, rather than the interpreter's reference book, the necessary source of the interpretation. This was a genuine rupture rather than a refinement: Artemidorus and the ancient dream books this practice descends from, along with the rabbinic and Islamic traditions that separately classified dreams as true, false or confused, all assumed an interpreter possessed of external, transmissible knowledge that could be applied to any qualifying dreamer, whereas Freud's method could not be looked up in advance for any dream at all, since it depended entirely on material only that dreamer could supply. Later depth psychologists, Carl Jung foremost, kept Freud's turn toward the dreamer's own material while rejecting his more sexually reductive readings, but the essential break, from a shared key to a personal excavation, has held across every major psychological school that has practised dream interpretation since.