The history of dreams

Abstract

I am presenting a short overview of the many different takes on the meaning and role of dreams through time, viewed in dependency of the social, political and cultural contexts of the period. I start my overview with the Greeks before Homer and finish with the period between 1880 and 1900 - therefore shortly before Freud's Interpretation of dreams was published – which was of extreme importance for the development of dynamic psychology, in which theory and the interpretation of dreams are of great importance, as well as it is of great significance for the development of psychodynamic psychiatry. I am presenting the concepts of dreams during the periods before Aristotle, who was the first scientific in­terpreter of dreams with his theses that dreams are the continuation of psychic activity during sleep, and not god’s hint at the future. It was Artemidorus Ephesius who first drew attention to the dreamer’s life situation and culture in which they lived. Freud highly appreciated Artemidorus’s insights on the interpretation of dreams and included many of them in his work Interpretation of dreams. We can see that in all discussions, from the Hellenistic era on, the basic dilemma stays the same – are dreams divine inspiration, therefore sent from outside, or are they the continuation of human activity during sleep.