In ancient civilizations, it was widely believed that during sleep, the soul leaves the body and actually experiences a dream in some supernatural parallel world.
Anthropological research shows that in almost every ancient civilization dreams had a special role in society because it was believed that through them a person receives messages from gods or some other spiritual beings.
The interpretation of dreams, in turn, was entrusted to wise elders, tribal shamans, or priests. Special interpretation was required for dreams that contained symbolic meanings instead of concrete images.
In one of the oldest literary works - the epic about the ancient king Gilgamesh, he goes to the goddess Ninsun on several occasions in search of discovering the meaning of his dreams. The Bible is also full of places where God speaks to people precisely through dreams, and these persons appear in both the Old and New Testaments.
The fascination with dreams as a link with the invisible, the spiritual or the unconscious did not remain somewhere far away in ancient times. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a Viennese physician began working on a book that later made him famous, and it is related precisely to the meaning and importance of dreams.
According to him, the 20th century in psychology and psychotherapy is often called the Freudian century. Although much has been written about dreams before Freud, he gave a completely new, hitherto unknown explanation to this phenomenon. Freud concluded that dreams are a kind of playroom of our unconscious mind.
Dreams are full of images and symbols because they depict our repressed desires that can only come to the conscious mind in a covering form. According to Freud, the dream could often, as a kind of defense mechanism, show the exact opposite of what a person really wants. For example, a young woman who often dreams of children may have completely opposite desires and suppress the fear of starting a family.
According to this interpretation, through dreams our unconscious mind sends us messages that are often "censored" and their meaning should be penetrated through psychotherapy. Before writing Dream Interpretation, Freud as a clinician interpreted more than a thousand dreams of his clients. An interesting observation he advocated is that dreams just always apply to ourselves.
So even when we dream of other people they are actually symbols of ourselves or symbols of what that person means to us. Although he introduced many interesting interpretations into psychology, modern science rejected Freud's theory as scientifically unfounded, so today few scientists will dare to refer to his work.
Emotionally colored memories
However, almost 90 years after Freud’s death, dreams continue to intrigue both scientists and non-scientists. Today it is known that dreaming is mostly associated with the so-called. REM sleep phase.
Therefore, if someone wakes you up in the middle of this phase, chances are high that you will be able to easily describe what you dreamed. On the other hand, successful dream recall after waking from non-REM phases occurs in only about 7% of cases. REM sleep phases can last from a few minutes to over an hour, so dreams themselves can last that long.
It is also interesting that in very young children the REM phases take up about 50% of sleep time, while between the ages of three and five this share is reduced to 20% and remains so until adulthood. Imaging of the brain during sleep has shown that in the REM phases, the parts of the brain responsible for emotions are especially activated, so it is not surprising that in dreams we often experience emotionally colored memories. Although with the development of technology today we know a lot about the neurophysiological activity that is delayed in the brain during dreaming, the basic purpose of dreaming still remains unresolved.
Some scientists today believe that the function of dreaming is to integrate new information into memory. For others, dreams are somewhat similar to Freud's explanation, a form of personal psychotherapy given that through them he faced difficult and often insufficiently experienced feelings.
For others, dreams are simply out of function - they are nothing but the result of accidental nerve outbursts in the brain. The final and widely accepted explanation does not become, and leaving dreams in the domain of a scientific enigma, they still for many represent a link with the mystical, spiritual world.
However, even some seemingly coincidences, such as the deep social roots of sayings such as "Believe in your dreams", confirm that dreams, which in no way exclude their other, easier to prove functions, are often really a reflection of our rich inner life. and especially our desires and fears. It therefore seems that the final verdict to Freud, at least in the domain of explaining human dreams, will have to
wait some more time.