Last November I asked Dr. Virginia Barry, a psychoanalyst who teaches at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, if she’d consent to be interviewed for this article on dreams. In her work Dr. Barry takes careful note of the physiologists who try to find a biological basis for dreaming, but her primary concern is the interpretation of dreams.
When the registrar showed me the courses I would need to take, I was bewildered. It was all Greek to me, especially the course in “Vedula,” a subject I’d never heard of. (There is no such word, but it is close to Vedanta, a Hindu philosophy to which I was exposed recently without much enthusiasm. Knowing how things get distorted in dreams, I figured that was what Vedula referred to.) It was all too much for me. I fled the campus. End of dream.
Barry went on to say, “If we were to dig more deeply, we might find that the anxiety in this dream is more deep-seated than just about this one article.” Yes, I thought, and this is what made me anxious about talking to a psychoanalyst. I was perfectly content with what might be a superficial interpretation of my dream. It told me quite enough about what was going on in my head. Like most people, I’m content to let sleeping dogs lie.
In the second century AD, a Greek soothsayer, Artemidorus Daldiamus, compiled four volumes of commentary on earlier writings that he called Interpretation of Dreams. He believed that dreams were to be understood by the words a knowledgeable interpreter, not the dreamer, associated with the dream (as a priest might interpret a vision), and that dreams held great meaning. (Freud later used the same technique of word association to interpret dreams, but now the interpreter became the dreamer, guided by Freud.)
In the l9th century, some thinkers began to view dreams as what came to be called psychological. Friedrich Nietzsche said that in dreams “there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can no longer reach by a direct path. . . . In our sleep and in our dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity.” Anticipating Freud, Nietzsche wrote, “To a certain extent the dream is a restorative for the brain, which during the day is called up to meet the severe demand for trained thought, made by the conditions of a higher civilization.”
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To Freud, a dream was “the mark of the heart,” “the guardian of sleep,” a “psychic act full of import.” The dream, Freud said, “is not comparable to the irregular sounds of a musical instrument, which, instead of being played by the hand of the musician, is struck by some external force; the dream is not meaningless, not absurd, does not presuppose that one part of our store of ideas is dormant while another part begins to wake. It is a perfectly valid psychic phenomenon, actually a wish fulfillment; it may be enrolled in the continuity of the intelligible psychic activities of the waking state; it is built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity.”
“Dream symbolism extends far beyond dreams: it is not peculiar to dreams, but exercises a dominating influence on representation in fairy tales, myths, legends, in jokes and folklore. It enables us to trace the intimate connections between dreams and those latter productions. We must not suppose that dream symbolism is a creation of the dream work; it is in all probability a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream with [its] material.”
