The Interpretation of Dreams in Long History
I was in the apartment where I lived in my childhood, but on the turn I met in front of the box of a supermarket, which strangely had my friend's face, but the body of a Martian. What you told me I don't remember; maybe it was a drowned sound, like an echo, or maybe it shocked half the direction I've been writing on a draft of my light table. Whatever you told me, I run now, because I chase some shadows in the middle of a dark alley that I think I have never passed into conscious life, but in some other previous dream. Do I remember everything when I wake up?
Dreams are weird. We depart from the base that in the year 332 BC, Alexander the Great dreamed of a satire dancing on a shield. And what does that mean? Well, it's fortunate that it's about Alexander the Great and we're in Ancient Greece, clearly has a personal guess. It is called Aristandro, and indeed accompanies him on all his travels. The question is that at that time they were harassing the Phoenician city of Tyre, and the seer takes place this game of words: satyros (satir), can be divided into two, sa Tyros, which means "Tyrus (the city they tried to conquer) is yours". With this prognosis in mind, Alexander continues the campaign and conquers the city. Dreams like that of Alexander the Great were quite usual in Antiquity, whose scriptures reveal a passive role of the dreamer, who, as an image observer, receives divine messages and ingenious premonitions on how to proceed. From these dreams were built temples, conquered civilizations and killing people, that is, decisions were made from the predictions that displayed the images they dreamed of, in which symbols and deities were depicted, both good and bad.
Joseph Interprets Pharaoh's Dream 1896–1902. Jacques Joseph Tissot.
Theories about the Origin and Meaning of Dreams
Of course, each one who had his theory to explain what was happening when the eyes were closed, and that bast body of possible interpretations would like to highlight two: the first is that of Aristotle (384-322 BC), who claimed that dreams were caused by the physiological activity of the bodies. The second, in turn, was that of Hippocrates (469-399 BC), and it was as simple as thinking that during the day the soul receives images, while at night produces them. Today we can talk about onirology (the scientific study of dreams), psychoanalysis, and other discourses, without leaving aside, of course, to the conceptions about dreams that supported religions and cultural contexts such as Hindu, Chinese, babilonio, Buddhist, Abrahamic, among others. In a few words: we all have something to say about our dreams. And how can we not say anything about these strange experiences in which we fly through the air and change the stage as by art of magic? Some think that in dreams we can visit our ancestors, others say that we dream in contact with our deepest unconscious desires, and even there are those who try to explain to the dreams of neurobiology. The right thing is that it's no longer about who's right, but what history can give us the tranquility we need to mean and provide a possible explanation for these dreamy images that visit us and visit when we sleep.
The nightmare,Henry Fuseli (1781).
Dreams as Creator Elements of Realities
However, in addition to what they mean, which elements have in common with those of other people and which are subject to exclusively personal experience, our dreams can offer us more than interesting elements to create, and I say "create" because dreams are, after all, creations. We create a scene with characters we can know or not, with a script to follow or with completely disconnected situations, with clear messages or rebuked clues that we just remember when we wake up. A world is drawn when we sleep and we, as dreamers, become demiurges of sleeping realities, making us unaware artists of the most wonderful or horrifying theater works, because there is always a quota of both. Dreams definitely keep a creative power that escapes any interpretation to invite us to learn a very particular language, one that Carl Jung tried to learn to read and that artists like Xul Solar or Joaquín Torres García intended to literate, a language that Erich Fromm defined as the language of the universal man.
" The language of dreams is a universal language, the language of humanity. The language of dreams can teach us something that today, more than ever, we need for life: in dreams we can become poets"(Fromm, 1984, p. 112).
The Creative Power of Dreams in Culture and Arts
In a 1971 radial interview, Erich Fromm, in the series "What do you know about dreams?", highlighted that what happens when we dream is that we are free. In other words, we do not have any kind of responsibility or do as in the wake, we do not pursue any particular purpose. "We don't have to do anything, we just need to be," says Fromm. How wonderful! We are free to create, everything can happen. Of this creative wealth is that the fact that a "interpretation" does not amount to the understanding of the dreamed creation, but, on the contrary, the devitalises. Understanding a dream means accepting that we cannot "interpret it", but we must respect its particular language, and to learn this we must first explore it. It is something like a hermeneutic of sleep, of a navigating in the grammar and morphology proper to what is dreamed of.
Panlengua letters. Xul Solar.
Places, people, objects, dreams can contain many elements. Some of them may be reflection of our memories and experiences, others may be totally new, and are those who directly mix known and unknown elements. The right thing is that dreams are an ideal way to get to know ourselves, especially in the times that run, where it is normal to confuse self-knowledge with identification, which can only strangle us in exaggeratedly general classifications. Knowing yourself through dreams implies being able to understand the creations we can develop asleep and from them to create awake. About identifying us, assigning massive features, buying the product of self-knowledge that the system intends to sell us, none of this works as raw material for any original creation and, what is most important, honest. An excellent recommendation, which in staff gives me a lot of result, is to write what we dream about immediately after waking up. In fact, while fewer rationalizations better, with loose words reaches. It really surprises the number of elements with which it can be found when reading old dreams.
"That not known to man or not thought, I wander in the night by the maze of his chest"(Goethe)
In the mythology of Australian natives there is a term called "altjeringa", which in Spanish we translate as "The Dream", and which is understood as "erase once" sacred, the time of creation. If we think well, even the most insulse dream begins as a "erase once", as a "time beyond time", according to Australian Aboriginal mythology. A time that escapes the logics in which we move when we wake up, the time of sleep, time to understand. In "Humano, too human", Nietzsche clearly expresses: "The dream returns us to the distant stage of human culture, putting in our hands the tools to better understand." It is in the dream where we speak an extraordinary and universal language as Erich Fromm proposed, which by the way points out: "we speak it every night" (Fromm, 1971).
The dream images and poetics are closely linked. Both supplant each other or complement each other in silence(Friedrich Hebbel). Extracted from "Sweden and Poetry", Otto Rank's work that appeared in Sigmund Freud's "The interpretation of dreams", until the seventh edition (1922) and was then eliminated along with another work, "Sweden and myth", in the eighth (1930), by differences never spelled out between the two co-authors.
Dream and feeling. Maria Izquierdo (1947).
This strange dream... What does it mean? Why did I dream it? I think human beings will always have to deal with the mystery of the causes. After all, dreams are as strange as works of art. We can focus on thinking what they represent (i.e. deciphering your content, interpreting your messages) and/or what they present, which is different from the first. Ask yourself what presents sleep is the first step to understand, understanding how integration into one of what is understood. Only in this way can we raise new issues that transcend fever by "what does it mean?", to create another kind of issues that allow us to learn the challenge and different language of dreams. At least that's what Jung criticized Freud: "The dream also manifests the dream and contains all the sense. What Freud calls the facade of sleep is the opacity of sleep, and in fact this is a mere projection of the non-comprender, that is, if it speaks of facade because it is not known the dream" (Jung, 1934). Presentation and representation exclude each other? Well, that depends on who you're looking at. What these people propose, however, is to be able to explore what is presented before they want to interpret their messages. In fact, there are those who took this problem even further, as the recognized painter René Magritte.
The forbidden representation (1937). René Magritte.
What is presenting to me this dream, what is manifesting in it? In what particular way are the elements that are dreamed of here, and other questions that can only be answered in the language of the sonants, where we are all free and poets willing to create. Dreams are a world with objects of a thousand worlds, mimetics and poetics. Given the lack of absolute answers about what we dream about, a good answer can be another question: what can we create from a dream? Perhaps from these creations we can relate to humanity, bringing a quota of poetry and sensitivity to the intellectual and conceptual way with which, without realizing, we insist on facing it. I finish and repeat, writing what we dream is a great way to know each other.
References
Jung, C. (1934). The practice of psychotherapy.
Fromm, E. (1971). Love to life. Paidós.
Marinelli, L. Mayer, A. (2011). Dream with Freud. The silver cuenco.
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