Up until the time of Aristotle, dreams were divine – messengers from the Gods or spirit world with the power of prophecy or healing. Priests or shamans were the intermediaries for these messengers, and in ancient Greece a network of temples, dedicated to the half God Aesculapius were popular sites for dream healing. Aristotle declared that dreams were not from the Gods and were not prophetic but leftover sensory impressions from waking life.
At the beginning of the twentieth century dreams were not only mortal but crazy as well. Freud published his Interpretation of Dreamsin 1900 not only to distance dreams from the divine, but also to rescue them from insanity. Dreams had meaning, and he demonstrated how the meaning was disguised. Freud was a product of classical science with its reductionism and determinism, and his dream work follows that tradition, one that had no place for the mystical or the divine. His was a one-person model with forces both outside and inside creating dreams....
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Bibliography
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of dreams, SE 5.
Jung, C. G. (1974). Dreams. Princeton, NJ: Bolligen.
Ullman, M. (1996). Appreciating dreams. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Hagood, L. (2010). Dreams. In: Leeming, D.A., Madden, K., Marlan, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71802-6_184
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