Post by Freya on Jun 7, 2002 22:43:51 GMT -5
Everybody dreams during one time or another.
It has been speculated that a human being could not stay alive for very long if dreaming stopped. Thus dreams are mental hygiene. Dreams are both a species of thought as well as a language. It is not a verbal language, which is why we can understand the dreams of all humans even if we don't always grasp their conscious cultural speech. Dreams are, of course, driven by culture and environment, but they also seem to operate out of a universal template, a language of visual variety and surreal logic that anybody can recognize and learn from with just the slightest effort.
The importance of dreaming as an altered state of consciousness has always been recognized in societies which are not overtly intellectualized. The dream has been one of the standard patterns of communication for the intuitive self, even perhaps for the soul. Even in the context of modernity, the dream has acquired fresh relevance. Freud and Jung have based a large part of their systems on the analysis and interpretation of these messages from the unconscious. However it is not only in the psychological sciences that paying attention to one's dreams has tangible benefits. In the most famous example from chemistry the pioneering organic chemist, Friedrich August Kekule von Stadonitz, was struggling in the 1850s with the nature of benzene, a chemical which seemed to defy analysis. He fell asleep in front of a fire and in a vivid dream he cracked the structure of benzene. He saw a whirling serpent that was swallowing its tail, and realized that benzene was structured not in a chain, but as a ring.
In the extremely urbane civilization of classical Sanskrit in India, the dream was the single most important source of communication with the divine. Vivid and plentiful dreaming is often regarded as a sign of spiritual progress in the Cultural Unconscious of India. The Ancient Greeks held that from the Gate of Horn, Creative dreams were released by Morpheus, god of sleep; while dreams that were nightmarish, or delusional, used to issue from the Gate of Ivory. The Greeks even used to practice healing with dreams at the Temple of Asklepios physician to the gods, in Epidauros.
Dreams are very often, both a warning signal of a crisis of soul as well as a way out of that situation.
And as Shakespeare once said: We are such stuff as dreams are made of...
It has been speculated that a human being could not stay alive for very long if dreaming stopped. Thus dreams are mental hygiene. Dreams are both a species of thought as well as a language. It is not a verbal language, which is why we can understand the dreams of all humans even if we don't always grasp their conscious cultural speech. Dreams are, of course, driven by culture and environment, but they also seem to operate out of a universal template, a language of visual variety and surreal logic that anybody can recognize and learn from with just the slightest effort.
The importance of dreaming as an altered state of consciousness has always been recognized in societies which are not overtly intellectualized. The dream has been one of the standard patterns of communication for the intuitive self, even perhaps for the soul. Even in the context of modernity, the dream has acquired fresh relevance. Freud and Jung have based a large part of their systems on the analysis and interpretation of these messages from the unconscious. However it is not only in the psychological sciences that paying attention to one's dreams has tangible benefits. In the most famous example from chemistry the pioneering organic chemist, Friedrich August Kekule von Stadonitz, was struggling in the 1850s with the nature of benzene, a chemical which seemed to defy analysis. He fell asleep in front of a fire and in a vivid dream he cracked the structure of benzene. He saw a whirling serpent that was swallowing its tail, and realized that benzene was structured not in a chain, but as a ring.
In the extremely urbane civilization of classical Sanskrit in India, the dream was the single most important source of communication with the divine. Vivid and plentiful dreaming is often regarded as a sign of spiritual progress in the Cultural Unconscious of India. The Ancient Greeks held that from the Gate of Horn, Creative dreams were released by Morpheus, god of sleep; while dreams that were nightmarish, or delusional, used to issue from the Gate of Ivory. The Greeks even used to practice healing with dreams at the Temple of Asklepios physician to the gods, in Epidauros.
Dreams are very often, both a warning signal of a crisis of soul as well as a way out of that situation.
And as Shakespeare once said: We are such stuff as dreams are made of...
