ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical background to the study of dreams and dreaming. The origins of dreamwork in psychotherapy begin with Sigmund Freud at the turn of the last century. His famous text The Interpretation of Dreams introduced his theory of the unconscious mind through the interpretation of his own, and other people's dreams. The extension of Freud's idea that dreaming facilitates the "safe" exploration of subconscious wishes, has been put forward by Hans Eysenk, Joe Griffin, and Ivan Tyrell who postulate a more developed theory as to the purpose of dreams that they have referred to as the expectation-fulfilment theory. The continuity hypothesis of dreaming simply states that dreams are continuous with the waking experiences of the dreamer, and that their waking lives then inspire, inform, and guide their subsequent dreaming. First proposed by J. Allan Hobson in 1977 the activation–synthesis hypothesis is a complex neurobiological model of the proposed purpose of dreaming.
