The Significance Of Dreaming

Alexander the Great dreamt of a dancing satyr before conquering Tyre. An interpreter said his dream meant, “thine is Tyre”, which fortified Alexander before the battle (Boxer 1). President Lincoln dreamt about his own death before it actually occurred several days later, but ignored the dream (Cartwright 3). Is it possible that if he had taken his dream more seriously he could have taken precautions that would have spared his life on that fateful evening at the theater? The course of U.S. history could have been altered just as history was altered when Alexander the Great dreamt of a dancing satyr that led to the courage to conquer Tyre.

Understanding dreams and why we have them is important, but shouldn’t influence how we react to our daily lives. Many diverse hypotheses have been made on how and why we dream and there is a wide-spread disagreement by psychologists and scientists to explain these strange happenings.

One of the foremost authorities on dreaming was Sigmund Freud, who attributed dreaming to psychological causes. Freud said, “The dream hides not a divine message, but a wish from the dreamer’s unconscious” (Boxer 1). He felt that all dreams were tied to desires that a person wasn’t aware of consciously, and dreaming allowed these desires to be fulfilled (Evans 84).

By way of contrast, Dr. J. Allen Hobson does not subscribe at all to Freud’s psychological notions, and suggests that dreams are the product of brain stem activity. He says a wish can’t be a cause of a dream because the non-thinking part of the brain, the brain stem, activates a dream. “Hobson believes that neurophysiology even explains why dreams seem so emotionally loaded…because the brain stem activates the emotional center--the limbic brain—and because the ‘startle network,’ the part of the brain stem that speeds the heart and breathing is turned on” (Boxer 3).

G. William Domhoff, Ph.D., of the University of California, Santa Cruz, believes that dreams reveal the cultural stereotypes and preoccupations of men and women (Boxer 4). “You break down a verbal report of a dream into its constituent elements and count the number of times each element appears” (4). Analyses of dreams, counting the number of men versus women, friendly versus aggressive interactions, indoor versus outdoor locations, day versus night time, etc., can find out a dreamers preoccupation’s, explains Domnoff (4). Analyses like these can prove what men and women both notice more in their dreams.