Virtually every culture has believed dreams carry important messages. To the ancient Greeks, dreams were great healers. People who were sick slept in special healing temples in hopes of receiving therapeutic dreams from the gods. The Talmud, the Hebrew sacred book of practical wisdom, states clearly that the Jews gave great importance both to the dream and to the dream interpreter. Mohammed began writing the Koran after an angel visited him in a dream.

Tibetan Buddhists see no distinction between dreaming and waking and consider all of life a dream.

Plato saw dreams as a release for fervent inner forces. Hippocrates thought dreams were windows on illness and that normal dream content indicated a state of wellness and bizarre content a state of illness. Aristotle believed that the beginning of illness could be felt in dreams before actual symptoms appeared. Likewise, Artemidorus of Daldi, a physician in the Middle Ages, believed that dreams were like magnifying glasses that detected the small beginnings of physical illness.

Artemidorus wrote the first Western dream book in the second century, and the dreams recorded were remarkably similar to contemporary ones. Ghengis Khan is reported to have received his battle plans from his dreams, while Hannibal attributed the battle plan to attack Rome over the Alps with elephants as something that came to him in a dream.

During the late Middle Ages, dreams began to fall into disfavor among Christians in spite of the fact that throughout the Bible, God spoke directly to people through dreams and visions. St. Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan Order as a dream directive from Christ.

In the United States, the traditional Iroquois were (and are) a people of dreams. Children were taught that dreams were the most important source of practical and spiritual guidance. The people of an Iroquois village began each day with dream sharing. The entire village became involved in dreamwork, especially if a dream seemed to contain a warning of death or disease. “Big” dreams were thought to come about in one of two ways. During sleep, the dreamer would have an out-of body experience and travel to many places, past, present, and future. Alternatively, the dreamer could receive a visit from a spiritual being. Dreams were considered to be central to healing by providing insight into the causes of illness, often before physical symptoms appeared. Dreams continue to be important tools for many traditional healers in the Native American population.

Among indigenous peoples, shamans are recognized as dream counselors but not as “experts” in the Western sense. They are often called to their vocation by dreams.

Shamans have a special relationship with the dreamworld, and through dreams are able to look into the future, communicate with spirits, and clarify the meaning of other’s dreams.

In 1900, Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams and proposed that dreaming might represent a unique avenue by which unconscious motivation could be explored. Freud’s theory was that dreams were disguised wish fulfillments of infantile sexual needs, which were repressed by censors in the waking mind. Freud’s protege, Carl Jung, believed that humans were spiritual rather than instinctual and saw dreams as a compensatory mechanism with the function of restoring psychological balance. Jung said that the conscious and unconscious minds speak entirely different languages. The conscious mind is analytical, critical, and rational while the unconscious mind thinks metaphorically, in similes, symbols, and intuitively.

In a society that discounted dreams, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of therapeutic dreamwork. He and his followers, however, began to associate dreams with illness rather than wellness, and reserved dream interpretation for professionals, who were deemed the only people competent to understand the latent content of dreams. This approach said, in effect, that individuals were not the experts on their own dreams. In contrast, Carl Jung stated that he “avoided all theoretical points of view and simply helped the patients to understand the dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and theories. That is how dreams are intended.”

Many contemporary therapists believe that dreams belong to individuals and they are the final authority on the meaning of their own dreams. This viewpoint is not to minimize the fact that the meaning of many dreams is obscure and that other people may be able to help unlock hidden meaning.

Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman is considered to be the father of modern scientific dream research. In 1957, he and Eugene Aserinsky identified rapid eye movement (REM), demonstrating the activity of the brain during sleep. This active sleep stage has consequently been called REM sleep. Today hundreds of sleep clinics operate in the United States, and sleep disorders constitute the second most common health complaint after the common cold.

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