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There has always been a debate in the scientific community about what causes dreams.
Is the purpose of dreams to reveal some profound creative source within ourselves, or the confused residue of thoughts and images left over from our waking life?
Is the dreaming mind a window into the mysteries of the dreamer's deep- est self, or a psychic garbage can containing random mental material that we would be wisest to ignore?
Although scientists tend to agree that there must be a purpose to dreaming, they differ over what this purpose might be. Why do we dream?
Theory for Understanding Dreams
The view to which most dream interpreters since the ninteenth century would subscribe is that dreams alert us to important aspects of the state of our unconscious minds.
Why Can't We Remember Sleep and Dreams?
So, you may ask, if the dreaming process is so important, why do we forget some dreams before we wake up, while we remember others for years?
There are several theories about this, one of which has to do with the manner of which the person dreaming is woken. We no longer wake up suddenly as our primitive ancestors did, alert to the dangers of living in the open: instead, we emerge gradually from sleep in the safety of our beds, and it is possibly this which consigns most of our dreams to oblivion between sleeping and waking.
Another theory is that we simply sleep too much, and the hours that we spend in dreamless sleep may smother the memories of our dreams. In dream workshops, people often report that their dream recall is greater than usual when away from home and in fresh surroundings, or when sleeping on a hard bed.
Two Theories on Why We Dream
The two most important and most recognized dream theories come from Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Freud was Jung's mentor until a disagreement caused them to part ways.
Freud's psychology of dreams theory believes that dreams are the result of our repression of certain desires, but that those desires are so foreign to our waking natures that our dreams could refer to them only through symbolism.
He believed that dreams often blended two or more symbols that represented something from our waking life. He also believed that the mind was divided into two "sections": the conscious and the unconscious (he later renamed them the unconsious "Id").
He suggested that the unconscious "contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the constitution - above all, therefore, the instincts." Freud claimed that it was in the unconscious where the wishes and desires expressed in our dreams were hidden.
Freud thought that all "healthy" people were to some extent repressed, and that they used a lot of mental energy in sustaining those repressions. He suggested: "...a healthy person...is virtually a neurotic, but dreams appear to be the only symptoms which he is capableof forming."
However, Jung had a different view of the cause of people dreaming. He thought that "the dream is a natural occurrence, and...nature shows no inclination to offer her fruits gratis or according to human expectations." In other words, he recognized that we have an unconscious (or "Id"), but also believed in something called the "collective unconscious" - a part of the mind that contains a store of information common to all humans.
Fontana, David. The Secret Language of Dreams: A Visual Key to Dreams and Their Meanings. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1994: 12.
Parker, Julia & Parker. Parker's Complete Book of Dreams: The Definitive Guide to the Meaning of Dreams. New York, New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, Inc., 1995: 12.