Dream Interpretation for Discovery of Oneself CORE101: Fundamentals about Myself CORE1314: Year 1 Unity in Diversity AY2016/17 In order to find out the mysteries about dreams, we have invited Prof. Stephen Palmquist, the instructor of the interdisciplinary GE course GDAR1877/ GDSS1877 Dream Interpretation for Personal Growth, to share his views on the relationship between dream interpretation and personal growth. 。 GDAR1877/ GDSS1877 Dream Interpretation for Personal Growth 3 I think of dreams as being like letters (or emails) written from our unconscious to our conscious selves, offering images that hint at new possibilities that we might explore for our future development. In our daily life, if we write to a friend but they never write back, then the friendship probably won't last very long. Remembering our dreams is like opening and reading the messages from the friend who lives in our unconscious. Trying to interpret them is like writing back to the friend. In other words, to interpret a dream is to offer a conscious response to the message our unconscious has sent to us. Personal growth happens as we learn to balance the often conflicting tendencies of our conscious and unconscious selves. If we neglect our dreams, we will need to find some other good ways of balancing these aspects of our personality. Otherwise, we may remain at a stage of psychological immaturity. My dear friend, 4 One of the greatest ancient Chinese philosophers, Zhongzi, told a story about a man who fell asleep, dreamed he was a butterfly, and then after waking up found it difficult to determine whether he was himself, who had just dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming that he was a human being. The story ends with the surprising statement: "This is the transformation of things." I take this ending to mean that dreaming offers us a daily reminder of the importance of continually transforming ourselves into a new person. But it also expresses the fact that interpreting our dreams will not always be easy! Almost every culture has stories or myths relating to dreams. In fact, some cultures refer to their own ancient history, their Golden Age, as a "Dreamtime". So it's not surprising that the collective memory of that time is often about dreams. A good example of a culturally specific dream myth is that of the Ojibwe, a tribe of Native Americans who believed that their ancestors were protected by Asibikaashi, a spider woman. She would spin her spider webs while they slept and the webs would catch the bad dreams (i.e. the nightmares) while allowing the good dreams to pass through the webs. They believed she was also responsible for catching the sun and ensuring that it rose again each new day. As the tribe grew larger, Asibikaashi was no longer able to watch over all of them, so she taught them to make dreamcatchers, which protect their dreams in the same way when they are hung near a person's bed at night. 5 Ojibwe Ojibwe Asibikaashi Asibikaashi Ojibwe Asibikaashi Asibikaashi Asibikaashi 6 When I teach my GE course, I try to discourage my students from depending on this kind of fixed interpretation. Sometimes such "codes" for dream interpretation can give us helpful hints, but they are often irrelevant to many readers. According to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, two of the greatest dream interpreters in the history of psychology, the same dream image or event can have very different meanings for different people. In order for the interpretation to be more scientific, we need a principle that applies to all interpretations but that gives freedom for each person to apply to their own situation. I especially like Jung's key principle, which he calls "compensation": the unconscious shows us images or events that compensate for something that we are viewing in an extreme way in our conscious life. So, for one person a dream of being chased might indeed be telling them that they are under too much pressure in their daily life, in which case the dream would suggest that they need to find ways to relax. But for another dreamer, the same dream might be warning them that they are being too lazy in their waking life and that if they don't apply more pressure to their commitments, they might encounter pressure later on. Similarly, one person might associate a shooting star with danger (a heavenly body coming into a foreign place where it doesn't belong), and this could indeed send the message of an impending illness. But another dreamer might associate the same image with hope (as when a person says that when you see a falling star you should make a wish and it will be granted), in which case the dream might send the message that they should be more optimistic in their daily life. What is important in dream interpretation is ensuring that the message relates to the individual dreamer, not that a magic formula is being applied. 7 Prof. Stephen Palmquist