ABSTRACT
Perhaps the earliest written record of a dream is 4,000 years old. It is a gloomy dream related by the Sumerian king, Dumuzi, to his sister, Geshitinanna, interpreted by her as foretelling the family’s death. A more ancient dream, rendered as a cave painting, goes back 18,000 years, and is interpreted by Michael Jouvet. It depicts a reclining man with an erection, which the psychoanalyst Charles Fisher and others have shown indicates dreaming. Because of their tendency to feature taboo contents, dreams have posed problems for some religious figures. St. Augustine (from whom Jung adapted the term archetype) eventually concluded that we are not morally responsible for our dreams. Dreams have played historical roles in religion, philosophy, medicine, and war. Hippocrates, Galen, and Aristotle held that dreams had special diagnostic utility. Cicero, however, argued “against taking dreams seriously.” In modern times, behaviorism inhibited scientific interest in dreams. Darwin and others demonstrated that animals—and humans—are expert interpreters of some behaviors. Helmholtz proposed the existence of “unconscious inferences” for interpreting distance and for preserving perceptual constancies. Memory is a basic issue for dreams. Depending on the stimulus, memory can be amnesic (with nonsense syllables) or hypermnesic (e.g., with poetry, pictures). If word-stimuli are mentally recoded into images, hypermnesic memory is obtained. Since dreams represent ideas imagistically, dreams may be expected to be hypermnesic, as Freud proposed and as evidence suggests.
