Carl Jung believed that unconscious archetypes broke into our dreams, often appearing as characters from myth or legend. The animus, for example, which Jung held to be the male energy in the female unconscious, could emerge in the form of an idealized man, such as a knight in shining armour. The trickster, the rebellious, mocking energy of the collective unconscious, appears as a jester or fool.
For centuries, people have believed that their dreams are significant. In ancient Egypt, the gods were thought to speak through the dreams of the Pharaohs, and in other cultures, too, dream experiences were given supernatural significance, often being seen as night time visits of the soul to other worlds. In Judeo-Christian tradition, angels often arrive in dreams, bringing revelations. Dreams seem to promise an understanding of the universe, the gods or the self; and decoding the often bizarre streams of events and symbols that populate our dreams has always been a preoccupation of inquirers into the nature of the mind.
Freud's theories of dreaming did not invoke supernatural causes. In his 'Interpretation of Dreams' (1899), Freud proposed that dreams are expressions of material that is too frightening or guilt-laden to find a conscious outlet and so becomes repressed in the unconscious; they provide a means of fulfilling our repressed infantile desires. Through interpretation, dreams become a "royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious."
Rather than appearing in our dreams in a literal form, the repressed material was woven into complex symbols that disguised its true nature. Protected from having to confront our unconscious desires and anxieties, we can enjoy the psychological and physiological benefits of sleep. The dream, therefore, was for Freud "the guardian of sleep".
Freud relied on the technique of free association to discover the latent content of dream symbols. He believed that the symbols that appeared in dreams are influenced by personal experiences and by what is current in the culture of time. Those that do not depend on personal associations and are wholly the result of cultural influences are the classic Freudian symbols, the source of endless comment and jokes. For example, anything that can penetrate or be erected, such as a sword, pistol or tower, symbolizes the male genitalia, while anything that can contain or be entered, such as a purse, jewellery box or cave, is a symbol of the female genitalia. At the same time, everyone has a personal history and that creates its own symbols.
The dream theories of Carl Jung owe much to the work of Freud. Like Freud, Jung believed that dreams were expressions of unconscious material, but he differed sharply when defining the meanings and origins of dream symbols. His theories, although interesting and influential, are also essentially impossible to prove or disprove.
Freud and Jung both maintained that there was a psychological "purpose" in dreaming, but other theorists dismiss dreams as trivial, seeing them simply as mental by-products of the mind's daily business.
This possibility seems unlikely, however, especially since studies have shown that dreaming sleep occurs in a wide range of animal species: its long evolutionary history strongly suggests that it is of some biological importance. Moreover, experiments on sleep deprivation show that when people are finally allowed to sleep after a long period of wakefulness, they catch up first on their dreaming sleep, which again suggests that dreams are somehow necessary.
There is at present no convincing biological explanation for our dream life. There are however, a number of rival theories: these include the notion that dreaming allows the consolidation of memory traces; that it helps the renewal of proteins in the brain; and that it is somehow associated with maintaining the integrity of the personality. This last theory is supported by Michel Jouvet, who argues that it is during REM sleep that an individual's DNA has time to reprogram itself. Jouvet suggests that "If you use drugs to suppress dreams in an individual... then his genetic reprogramming to be aggressive, to be himself, to be free-willed may disappear." If he is right, dreaming is not simply an altered state of consciousness but rather one upon which our normal, conscious behaviour depends. Jouvet's ideas remain controversial, adding to the many debates on the subject.
What do cats dream about?
In one of the most startling of dream experiments, Michel Jouvet surgically removed the pons of a cat -- the brain structure that suppresses movement of an animal's body during REM sleep. When the cat fell into REM sleep following the operation, it was able to move and literally "act out" its dreams. Jouvet observed the cat's behaviour and, to the dismay of cat lovers, reported the following," What you see in the cat is nearly always aggressive behaviour. Very stereotyped, extremely monotonous. Cats that are very nice normally become vicious tigers when they are dreaming and throw themselves at imaginary prey. I used to have one in my office that would terrify people when it was dreaming."
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