ABSTRACT
The mystery of the dream experience has been a historic preoccupation of mankind. There has been speculation about the source from which dreams originate and what their purpose may be. There were direct references to dreaming in the earliest written records: in texts like the Beatty papyrus from Egypt, the Gilgamesh legend from Mesopotamia, the Old and New Testaments, the Koran and the Indian sacred texts.1 The Greek physicians accepted and utilized the belief that dreams have a revelatory and a curative nature. Professional dream interpreters existed in the temples of Aesklepios, the Greek God of Healing. The dreams initially were healing without interpretation and later were interpreted on the basis of symbols that had a fixed meaning for all dreamers. In the second century AD Artemidorus of Daldis suggested interpretation of dreams should be based on the individual characteristics and circumstances of the dreamer.2 The earliest explanation of why dreams occur, similar for many other unexplained but intriguing events, including natural calamities such as earthquakes, was that supernatural forces, good or evil, caused them. Many of the world’s religions believed that dreams communicated the will of the Gods or God. This belief was so widespread that the early church fathers distinguished between dreams from above, from God, and dreams from below, from the devil.1 It was only in the 18th century that there was a shift from the explanation of dreaming as a supernatural process to that of it being a natural one. This shift was coincident with the general shift in the Western world to understanding the world in a more naturalistic or scientific manner.
