bilities then when awake; the "open house" of dreaming is less guarded (Craig, 1992).Superficially, we are all convinced that we know just what a "dream" is. But the most cursory investigation into the dream's essence suggests that after describing it as a mental something which we have while sleeping," and perhaps, in accord with experiments currently being carried out in connection with the physiological accompaniments of dreaming, such as Rapid-Eye Movements (REM), the various stages and depths of dream activity as reflected in changing rates of our vital signs (pulse-rate, heart-beat, brain-waves), and the time of the night when various kinds of dreams occur, we come up against what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the "Ding-An-Sich" ('thing-in-itself'), and find ourselves unable to penetrate further into the hidden nature of this universal human experience (Fromm, 1980).It has been objected on more than one occasion that we in fact have no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them as they actually occurred. In the first place, what we remember of a dream and what we exercise our interpretative arts upon has been mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory, which seems incapable of retaining a dream and may have lost precisely the most important parts of its content. It quite frequently happens that when we seek to turn our attention to one of our dreams, we find ourselves regretting the fact that we can remember nothing but a single fragment, which itself has much uncertainty. Secondly, there is every reason to suspect that our memory of dreams is not only fragmentary but inaccurate and falsified. On the one hand it may be doubted whether what we dreamt was really as hazy as our recollection of it, and on the other hand it may also be doubted whether in attempting to reproduce it we do not fill in what was never there, or what was forgotte...
