Dreams and Interpetations

Dreaming has always been the subject of controversy. Egyptian papyrus documents dating back to 2000 B.C. discussing dreams and their interpretations. In ancient Greece the dreamer was to be in contact with the Gods. Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen believed that dreams often contained physiological information that heralded future medical illnesses. In succeeding centuries, Sigmund Freud led the modern age of dream research in his monumentally original book of the Interpretations of Dreams. According to Freud, dreams are disguised thoughts from the unconscious mind. Freud spoke about Manifest Content, which being the obvious but the superficial, meaning of dreams and also about the Latent Content , which was the true meaning of dreams that is found in the symbols in their Manifest Content. Freud’s theo

Contrary to popular belief, dreaming is not caused by eating certain foods before bedtime or by environmental condition during sleeping. Dreaming is caused by internal biological process. Researchers have indicated that large brain cells in the primitive brain stems spontaneously fire at about every ninety-minutes, sending random stimuli to cortical areas of the brain. As a consequence, memory, sensory, muscle-control, and cognitive areas of the brain are randomly stimulated which results in higher cortical brain which attempts to make some sense of it. This gives a rise to the experience of a dream. The content or meaningful representation in dreams are caused by non-conscious needs, wishes, desires, and everyday concern of the dreamer.

“In The Alchemy of Discourse” where Paul Kugler sets out a development, use, and interpretation of language that he derives from the work of Jung. He starts out by showing what Freud and Jung have in common and then traces their difference of opinion. Kugler put Freud and Jung in competition over their understanding and interpretations of dreams. Kugler argues that "Perhaps the reason dreamers, poets, and madmen display such an uncanny sense of the imagination is that their perceptual systems-like those of the oral tellers of myths-are tuned to the invariant archetypal structures of sound and image" (Kugler 1982, 28). "Each human language maps the world differently." (Steiner, 1992, xiv) Geo

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