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Where did my dream come from

Where did my dream come from It's your first day of high school and as you walk down the halls you notice that everyone is laughing and pointing at you. Suddenly you realize that you have no clothes on and panic sets in and BOOM…. you wake up and realize it was all just a dream. As you sit and discuss your dream with your friends at the lunch table, you can't help but wonder, what does it all mean? Such a situation could not possibly happen, so where could such a horrible idea come from? Many dream analysts, philosophers, psychologists, and interpreters have pondered this question for centuries. Can anyone truly find the source of dreams or even control them? There have been arguments, debates and volumes of written on various theories on the true source of dreams. One author of many dream articles, Robert Gnuse, supports the theory that deities or the gods send dreams themselves. which vary in each culture. In one piece entitled Dreams and Dream Reports in the Writings of Josephus he does so by listing numerous examples of dreams from different times and places, which could only be explained as being sent by some divine source. Another theory of the source of dreams is that they come as a psychological result of a persons past and present experiences. Sigmund Freud upholds this idea in his article On Dreams. In this piece, he shows how experiences in ones life can reappear in dreams in the form of various symbols and events. One final theory, which is argued by Jung, in The Undiscovered Self with Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, is that dreams don't come from experiences but come as a result of patterns of the brain. As you will see, each theory has certain validity and at the same time downfalls. Dating back to Ancient times, dreams were thought to be a result of some higher divinity trying to reach them. They believed that dreams were sent by the Gods or some deity in an effort to deliver some kind of message. It was argued that if dreams weren't sent by the Gods then they weren't important so they wouldn't be remembered, but dreams were remembered so they were of great importance and inturn were sent by the Gods. In Dreams and Dream Reports in the Writings of Josephus, the author, Gnuse clearly supports this theory by citing numerous examples as evidence. For example, the People of the Ancient Near East believed that dreams brought dreamers in contact with the realm of the gods attempting to communicate with them. "Others believed that the god of dreams or special deity might bring a special message, often an auditory message". (Gnuse 35) At that time dreams were believed to bring such oral messages from a deity or from contact with the divine realm. Throughout his piece he states specific occurrences where dream reports mention physical presence's of the deities themselves and of times when they have spoken or has caused the dreamer to "see" things. The reasoning these individuals had in making such a conclusion comes when Gnuse states, " Dream reports usually have a formal termination which implies the continued sleep of the recipient until the morning….. Such termination verifies the recipient was asleep, and therefore the dream truly came from the divine realm." This sort of definition could have had a positive light to it back then, but now it seems somewhat unrealistic. During this time period, this may have been a way to explain dreams because they didn't have any medical or psychological information to prove otherwise, but today this is a very questionable case. Some individuals may want to believe that our dream processes have specific meanings and are sent by gods. Whether this is because they seem more believable if sent by a higher being or because they need some explanation and this is it. However, there are other theories, which do pose a more stable and defendable notion. Contrary to the theory Gnuse supports, Freud and Aristotle believe that dreams come from some outside psychological source such as experiences and memories. In Freud's article On Dreams he says describes this dream he had and then goes on to connect it to what had happened previously in his life. He made associations between the symbols in his dream and the people and the things in his life he could relate them to. At one point in this dream he sees spinach being served at the table. Once he awoke from the dream he wondered why spinach of all things was being served at the table. He then states, "The answer was that spinach reminded me of an episode which occurred not long ago at our family table, when one of the children…refused to eat any spinach." (Freud 11) As you can see he has found an obvious realistic link between what he saw in his dream to an experience he had in real life. Toward the end of his piece Freud clearly says that, "…every situation in a dream seems to put together out of two or more impressions or experiences." (27) With this closing statement, I would have to say that this theory is quite realistic in its beliefs. It explains a little more where our dreams come from and how the images we have appear. If we sit here and analyze the dreams, which we have had, there is probably some connection that can be made between them and what has happened to us in our lives. The only downfall to this theory is that there are some unexplainable dreams that have nothing to do with what has happened in our lives. There are those unexplainable situations where we may have a dream without having any previous knowledge to base that dream upon. This is exactly what Jung tries to prove in his piece The Undiscovered Self with Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams. Jung argues that "elements often occur in a dream that are not individual and cannot be derived from personal experience". (107) They are simply "thought forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life, but seem to be… patterns of the human mind." (107) In one concise statement he summarizes his belief that dreams don't come from experience but from mind patterns alone. In this piece, he defines archetypes as "inherited tendencies of the human mind to form representations that vary a great deal without losing their basic patterns". (108) He stresses the idea that dreams are solely based on the brain and the messages it chooses to send. As proof of this theory, Jung sites a specific example of a little girl and the dreams she had at the age of eight. These dreams seemed to have no personal association to this child because of the peculiar character of the dreams. Her dreams deal with destruction and restoration, a clear theme in the bible. However, this child had no previous Christian influence or education. This fact led Jung to believe that there was no reasonable connection between dreams and experience. Although, this may seem like a logical conclusion, I don't see his theory as solid. There are some positive aspects to this theory when questioning the source of dreams but there are also some solid drawbacks. It is definitely a pro to consider that the unexplainable or horrific dreams we have don't have any particular meaning, but then again this is not always the case. As a society we like to have a reason for everything and this theory states that there isn't a true reason for our dreams. It tries to prove that they have no meaning and that they are just an effect of some kind of mind patterns. Whether the source of dreams stem from the gods, your experiences, your mind, or some other unknown the desire to know where they come from will never cease. Dreams seem to pose a sort of mystery in our lives, an unexplainable, which keeps us guessing every morning we wake up. To have such dreams whether good or bad, explainable or outrageous adds a little color to our somewhat dull lives. Who said it's fun to have all the answers anyway? Bibliography:

Word Count: 1382