Origins and Significance

Theories about the origins of dreams can be divided into two main categories:
naturalistic and supernaturalistic. Proponents of naturalistic theories
of dreaming believe that dreams result from either physiological activities or
psychological processes. Aristotle was one of the first people to offer a physiological
explanation for dreams. His basic thesis was that dreams are the afterimages
of sensory experiences. A modern physiological approach to
dreaming was put forth in the 1970’s by J. Allan Hobson and Robert
McCarley. According to their activation-synthesis theory, emotional and visual
areas of the brain are activated during REM sleep, and the newly alerted
frontal lobe tries to make sense of this information plus any other sensory or physiological activity that may be occurring at that time. The result is that
ongoing activity is synthesized (combined) into a dream plot. For example,
a man enters REM sleep and pleasant memories of playing in band during
school are evoked. Meanwhile, the steam pipes in his bedroom are banging.
The result is a dream in which he is watching a band parade by with the
booming of bass drums ringing in his ears. Hobson does not believe that,
apart from fostering memories, dreams have any psychological significance.
Plato believed that dreams do have psychological significance and can reveal
something about the character of people. More recent ideas about the
psychological origins of dreams can be divided into symbolic approaches
that emphasize the hidden meanings of dreams and cognitive perspectives
that stress that dreaming is simply another type of thinking and that no
deep, hidden motives are contained in that thinking. The most famous symbolic
approach to dreaming was presented by Sigmund Freud in his book
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). For Freud, the actual dream content is
meaningless. It hides the true meaning of the dream, which must be interpreted.
David Foulkes, in Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (1985),
proposed a contrary perspective. His cognitive approach to dreaming states
that dreams are as they are remembered and that it is meaningless to search
for deep meanings. Foulkes proposes that randomly activated memories
during sleep are organized into a comprehensible dream by a “dreamproduction
system.”

The final category of dreams represents the most ancient explanation�"
dreams may have a supernatural origin. Often connected with the supernatural
approach is the belief that God or supernatural beings can visit a person
in a dream and heal that person of physical illnesses. This belief is called
dream incubation and was widely practiced by the ancient Greeks beginning
around the sixth century b.c.e. Several hundred temples were dedicated to
helping believers practice this art. Spiritual healing, not physical healing, is
the theme presented in the numerous references to dreaming in the Bible:
more than one hundred verses in nearly twenty chapters. The Bible presents
a balanced picture of the origins of dreams. God speaks through dreams to
Abimelech in the first book of the Old Testament (Genesis 20:6) and to Joseph
in the first book of the New Testament (Matthew 1:20). However, Solomon
(Ecclesiastes 5:7) and Jeremiah (23:25-32) warn that many dreams do
not have a divine origin. 288