ABSTRACT

Few topics in psychology have aroused as much interest as dreams, and yet it is true that there are few which illustrate better the gulf that exists between what lay people expect from psychology and what scientific psychology delivers to them. Reasons for this chasm are not hard to find. Freud’s theory of dreams (Freud, 1900) was to a large extent the foundation upon which psychoanalysis was constructed. One consequence of this was that the popularization of psychoanalytical thinking led to the widespread dissemination of ideas about dreaming which had and continue to have little empirical evidence in their favour. The negative impact of this was perhaps heightened by the reluctance of analysts to challenge the Freudian orthodoxy on our night life. Jung maintained that his own ideas in no way constituted a theory of dreams (see also Rycroft, 1981), while Freud himself famously remarked that ‘The analysts behave as though they had no more to say about dreams, as though there was nothing more to be added to the theory of dreams’.