Interpretations

Questions will always be with us. Who am I? Where am I going? What does life mean? What are memory, thought, consciousness, free will, love, hope, fear? What are ethics, morals, justice, and responsibility? What constitutes virtue and vice? What are art, poetry, and beauty? What is logic? What are fallacy and folly, what are truth and deception? Do others exist or am I alone? Does God exist? What is life? What is death? Why do we fight wars?

Referring to a dream, people always ask, "What does it mean?" What I call Dream Vision is the enduring quest to answer perennial philosophical questions. Our nightly dreams ask all these questions. The dream allows you to plug into the planetary rituals of light and darkness. Thanks to Dream Vision, you may enter a hypertext labyrinth for how the mind organizes philosophy, art, literature, politics, religion, economics, science, civic rituals, environmental forces, consciousness, time, space, and people.

The interpretations below, are divided into categories to help achieve a unified Vision of the human condition and how we live on this planet we call earth and home.

ABC of Dreaming: A Cultural Literary Guide of Dream Vision

We collect dreams at the International Institute for Dream Research (IIDR) partly to provide the interdisciplinary basis for a peaceful understanding of national dreams. We delve into science, medicine, art, film, literature, poetry and theatre as they relate to dreams and dreaming. The dream reports we've received have come from many countries, and give us specific insights into the psychological landscapes of ethnicity, class, gender, culture, race, economics and politics of these places.

Dreams offer a conceptual lens though which to read and view the cultural organization of life in the Global Village (read article). The interpretation and understanding of dream texts then proceeds from this basic cultural research of memory, imagination, communication, and organization. E.D. Hirsch Jr. Cultural Literacy, provides a interdisciplinary perspective which is intended to promote literary understanding of one's own culture. Without understanding the background of how the cultural idiom shapes knowledge, and how this knowledge circulates in culture, it becomes near to impossible to accurately understand the meaning of dream texts.

American Dreams

In Dreamers of the American Dream Stuart H. Holbrook, tells us that since before the time of the American Revolution, dreamers were in search of the "birth certificate of democracy" and utopian reform. Holbrook believes; "The greatest American dream is outlined in the majestic periods of the Declaration of Independence and given substance by the Constitution."

The American stage imprints a distinct language and socialization pattern on its children. This socialization pattern is visible in the dreams of American's. The distinct communal frame-work of historic, political, economic, religious, domestic and ethnic institutions and industries shapes the everyday drama of American life, social order and American Dream.

Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel sees American literary history as driven by the paradigm of psychosexual (read erotic) development and conflict. Fiedler sees the American imagination dominated by the "obsession with violence and the embarrassment before love".

Art, Science and the Creativity of Dreaming

Many dreams received at the IIDR speak of the artist's desire for growth and development. For Freud, the dream was a plastic art form, where life and living were sublimated. The art history of Western civilization from the ancient Greeks to the present is an odyssey and metamorphosis of Dream Vision and the philosophy of mind.

The dream has always found durable employment in religion, philosophy, literature, the visual arts, music, and science. The human cosmos has strived towards artistic sublimation and interpretive social order. With what Samuel Taylor Coleridge first called "suspension of disbelief," you may enter Dream Vision. Every night, suspension of disbelief allows fiction to become reality.  If life imitates art, then the dream uses and orders words and the imagination to conceptually shape the artistic material, transforming word and image into a work of art.

Canadian Dream

The Canadian Dream (read article) provides a distinct national vision, as it relates to all the other nations in the Global Village. Northrop Frye, in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, writes "it is simpler to notice the alternating current in the Canadian mind, as reflected in its writing, between two moods, one romantic, traditional and idealistic, the other shrewd, observant and humorous (see CBC TV clip)." Frye in The Educated Imagination believes that "The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don't get in any other way. That's why it's important for Canadians to pay particular attention to Canadian literature, even when the imported brands are better seasoned."

Crime and Punishment

Dream research indicates that the media has an enormous influence on dreams and dreaming, especially in its depiction of crimes. It has been argued that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is the greatest of crime fictions. In the dark city (read article on film noir) of the imagination, crime unfolds.

Society for its' own security is vitally concerned with curbing crime, which is institutionally entrusted to the police and judicial system. Institutions act, to maintain social order in the face of anarchy, when they fail social disorganization and civil disorder is often the result.

Traditional models of justice are based on the separation of moral good and evil. Most of us are good, by and large; only a few are truly evil. Criminals can be identified, isolated and punished into submission, leaving the good free to pursue life unhindered.  Yet crime persists. "Why won't they learn?" good people constantly ask. The film Sudden Impact furnishes a catchphrase in the words of a detective, Dirty Harry Callahan. Harry has gone for a cup of coffee, when a hold-up ensues; a criminal holds a waitress hostage. Holding his .44 magnum at the criminal's head, Callahan says "Go ahead, make my day." (see video clip)

Medical Humanities and Therapeutic Metaphor

Dreams provide insight into how we live and "The Human Condition". If the medical humanities would re-institutionalize the dream as an important source of information concerning the individual and the community's well-being, a great deal of needless suffering could be avoided.

Do national health institutions such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States or Health Canada pay attention to the healthy or unhealthy dreams of their citizens? The political rhetoric that they promote health and safety is superficial as long as the dimension of dreams is not covered. Health is a psychosomatic whole in which dreams and dreaming play a vital role. Nowhere do I see the vital statistics of the dreams of the poor, of native peoples, of the elderly, of the sick and dying. When we have an accurate sample of everyone's dreams we will be able to discern the true nature of everyone's health concerns.

Nietzsche had already asked; "What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred and adorned, and after long use seemed solid, canonical, and binding a nation." The truth is, that many social problems are censored, repressed, silenced and made invisible. The truth survives in our dreams. Making the truth of these "private troubles" visible, that are in fact public social issues, is imperative if we want to restore the dream and everyday dream work. Working in the Global Village, the medical humanities need to create a mobile army of therapeutic metaphor to restore the dream, the human condition and our social order.

Misantropic Dreams: Anatomy of Destructiveness

Dreams received at the IIDR often speak of militarism, racism, sexism, and classism. The dream measures the dynamics of discrimination and prejudice as it begins to grow in children. I have been able to observe the process in therapy, in everyday life, and in children's circle of friends and peers.

Gordon Allport On the Nature of Prejudice has provided a scale for measuring and reading hate and prejudice within a society. It is possible to adapt the scale such as Allport's to measure hate, prejudice, violence and harm in all its' vicissitudes in individual and the communal (i.e. nations) Dream Vision patterns.

The mind can take one of two personified positions of the imagination: philanthropy, a creative force, and misanthropy, a destructive force. In everyday life, the psychodynamics of love and hate become anthropomorphized, revealing the forces of eros and thanatos, life and death motivations.

Psychopathology

The editor Joseph Natterson The Dream in Clinical Practice provides an anthology of articles related to the clinical use of dreams. Dreams provide a medical foundation for diagnosis and treatment. The Holy Writ of psychiatry the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) provides a literary plotting and scripting device for psychiatrists and medical professionals.

W.I. Thomas On Social Organization and Social Personality tells his reading audience that; "The difference beteen the schizophrene or the day-dreamer and the artist is that the artist selects his material and elaborates then with regard to social patterns and social values." 

If we collect the dream texts of individuals from around the planet, what we will find are the psychodynamic roots of the psychopathological imagination and consciousness caused by failed dream work washing over the planet as we speak. A vicious cycle and pattern of plotting, speaking, writing and reading about social  problems exists.

Relationships: Varieties of Thought and Feeling

In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm asks, "Is love an art?" He believes it is, an art whose theories and practices must be learned in order to attain mastery. Fromm finds that disintegration of love in modern society has a destructive effect on personalities, marriages, intimacy.

Is it true to say, "it is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all?" Robert M. Polemus Erotic Faith; Being in Love from Jane Austin to D.H. Lawrence tells us; "Love takes shape out of the imagination, and the erotic imagination both creates and is created by art."

Dreams, like love poems, cannot be read reductively or literally; memory, sentimental feelings, and psychological needs are reshaped in the imagination. This is one reason that sexuality in dreams is seldom witnessed as raw sex, but as an artistic kaleidoscope of images. Love becomes the imaginations circuit-cycle of pursuit, triumph and defeat, love and hate, attraction and rejection, loneliness and ennui. The dream of love invites both contemplation and participation.

Social Problems

The Problem Novel is a modern type of drama that was popularized by Henrick Ibsen such as the play A Doll's House whose thematic still appears in women's dreams. George Bernard Shaw Widowers' Houses which was Shaw's first play addressed and criticized the social problems of capitalist behaviour. In problem novels the hero or protagonist is faced with the imaginary yet real canvas of broad contemporary social and political issues and problems such as the militarism, class system, racism, sexism, homophobia, prostitution, abuse, chauvinism, crime, violence, poverty, political corruption and moral values clarification. Applying the sociological imagination to dreams, we can enter these nightmares, with the aim of understanding these problems. We can then begin to imagine solutions.

Spiritual Dreams and Dreaming

The evolution of the oral tradition into writing produced the sacred texts of Judaism (Torah), Christianity (New Testament), Islam (Koran), Hinduism (Vedas) accessible to the introspective imagination. The temple, the synagogue, the church, the mosque, the ashram are all places of worship and prayer. "To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing", Martin Luther King Jr. said.

Some religions profess belief in life before birth; others believe in reincarnation or in life after death. The question of whether an afterlife exists is impossible to answer, I think. Instead I ask, "Is there quality of life after birth, and before death?" Philosophy of religion is devoted to this question and the search for its answers. What is the meaning of life and death? What many seem to desire is a "mystical" experience that affirms the presence of God or a higher force, yet they feel nothing, philosophical "nihilism." Nihilistic feelings could represent a crisis for spirituality.

Stress and Dreaming

Louis Breger The Effect of Stress on Dreams shows that stress influences the content of dreams providing further support to the pioneer of stress research Hans Selye The Stress of Life discovery of the medical basis of the wear and tear on the mind and body. We have come to learn that war, rape, child abuse, armed robbery, or auto and industrial accidents can result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The nightmares that relive traumas are invariably part of the clinical picture. They represent the polyphonic voices of the walking wounded. Reading symptoms in dreams provides a way out of social psychopathology.

The Dream of Masculinity

In ancient Greek society the myths of creation depict the powerful forces of order battling the primordial forces of chaos.This war of the gods establishes a sacred ritual social order of a male creation mythology which lives on in men's dreams (read article) and fantasies. We find these masculine fantasies in literature, films, advertisements and dreams: heroic, self-sacrificing warriors battle against evil adversaries to make the world just and secure again. In the Iliad, the shield of Achilles is as an artifact of the Trojan War that symbolizes Athenian honor and its code. 

Leo Braudy in From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Chivalry finds that male honor involves the policing of boundaries of families, tribes, and nations.  Film westerns like High Noon confirm this idea, as does the noir film The Maltese Falcon, the historical romance novel and film Gone with the Wind, the Cold War film Top Gun, and Japanese samurai film Seven Samurai. Braudy tell us that from the time of the Ancient Greek theatre, masculinity has always been in search of an audience, to witness its virility.

United Nations, Cultures and the Global Village

As Michael J. Arlen comments in Life and Death in the Global Village, the TV set is a global icon that has the power to be an "exorcisor of grief." On the noir day in November 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, the TV set to which nearly everyone (especially in North America, myself included) was glued to, was a watershed event for the Global Village.

Today, global positioning systems have mapped the planet and put it under surveillance for military and commercial purposes. With the advent of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, the world started to shrink further and the pace of interaction and communication became faster, allowing story cycles to be shown instantaneously, such as through eyewitnesses embedded with troops in a combat zone. Dreams act as a news media channel that screens documentaries about life on the planet.

As a platform for dialogue, the United Nations, is an institutional body, whose mission is to "maintain international peace and security...develop friendly relations...achieve international cooperation...be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations." Until all nations and all individuals on the planet understand that the real communication platform that connects us all is the dream, the human condition will remain fractured, leaving only a divided planet.

Varieties of Sleep and Dreaming

Science has been unable as yet to determine the function of sleep, however progress was made when William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered the four phases of REM and Non-REM sleep. The varieties of sleep and dreaming phenomena such as sleep paralysis, sleep learning, sleep apnea, lucid dreaming, out of body experiences and so on, will continue to generate interest in the experience we call sleep and dreaming.

Women's Dreams

The IIDR has attempted to give Women's Dreams (read article) a voice. Patricia Garfield Women's Bodies, Women's Dreams tells us "Women's dreams are special: their dreams change as their bodies." The book is intended as a dream guide through each phase of a women's life journey, to help "suggest that positive growth is going on and when emotional trouble is brewing." Garfield's advice, "Value every dream, distressing or uplifting, as a night letter from the inner self that can help guide your days."

In search of a feminist poetic Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic use a variety of metaphors such as the battle of the sexes, the metaphor of literary paternity and the Freudian parables of the Platonic cave. The cave as Freud pointed out is a womb shaped place, a sacred shrine, a secret house of the earth. Gilbert and Gubar attempt to understand and describe "both the experience that generates metaphor and the metaphor that creates experience". Western literature and therefore the "family romance" are viewed as being based on a patriarchal poetic. They ask, "Where does such an implicitly or explicitly patriarchal theory of literature leave women?"

All material Copyright © 2006 International Institute for Dream Research. All rights reserved.