. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 If I were not the sort of person who takes dreams seriously, it would not even have crossed my mind that my dream had been curative (if I even remembered it—if I even woke up knowing that I’d had a dream). But I have been paying close attention to my dreams all my life. I can’t recall a time when I did not wake from a dream and think, Now, what does that mean? As it was, I didn’t have to think very hard about last night’s dream for it to “work.” The dream itself did everything, making use of what had been on my mind all day that I had been doing my best not to think about even as it also made use of what was well beneath the surface of my mind. The dream reminded me of what my feelings reminded me of, making plain the links between what I was experiencing in my waking , present-day, “real” life and what was alive only in my mind—in my memory, in my sense of myself. Thus a dream that was rooted in how deeply unhappy I had been all day had yanked from the ground of the day all of that unhappiness and cooked it overnight—set it on the heat of sleep, stirred it, left it simmering—and managed to produce a sort of healing broth. It’s no wonder that ancient cultures considered dreams to be gifts from the gods. It was Aristotle who first proposed that dreaming was the mind’s activity during sleep. Before him (and long after, too—for in his thinking about the mind, as in his thinking about ethics, aesthetics, politics, zoology, and formal logic, he was centuries ahead of his time), dreaming was considered to be a matter of metaphysics, portents, and secret messages from the spirit world. The idea of repressed thoughts showing up in dreams wasn’t formulated until over twenty-two hundred years after Aristotle. This was Dream Life 13 the contribution of “W. Robert,” a nineteenth-century dream theorist whose idea was cited by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Robert’s notion was that dreams were the manifestations of thoughts “stifled at birth” (a crackpot idea, reported soberly by Freud). It was Freud himself, of course, who offered the theory that emotions buried in the unconscious mind will turn up in disguise in our dreams, that the fragments we remember of these dreams can be interpreted, and that these interpretations can help us uncover such buried feelings. Freud considered dreams to be the “royal road to the unconscious.” But dream narratives have been contemplated and interpreted by dreamers at least as far back as we have evidence of human beings contemplating anything at all. Dream content begs for interpretation. The early Greeks used dreams for medical diagnosis; the Romans established temples dedicated to Aesculapius, the god of medicine, in which people would bathe, fast, perform rituals, and then sleep, hoping to be granted a healing dream. Dream interpretation is mentioned in Homer; the Greek orator and statesman Demosthenes, in the fourth century b.c.e., claimed to have received messages from the gods in his sleep; Artemidorus (second century c.e.) was a professional dream-diviner, telling people’s fortunes based on their dreams. Ever since Freud, however, we have made use of dreams for what the contemporary “sleep and dream scientist” J. Allan Hobson derisively calls “psychological divinations.” To Hobson, a psychiatrist, dream content is meaningless—it’s “cognitive trash.” Dreaming is like psychosis, he says, for in our dreams, places and even people change without reason or warning; there are sudden inexplicable time shifts that seem to make perfect sense. Are these not some of the very cognitive deficits that characterize psychosis? Night after night, we tell ourselves lies about ourselves in our dreams—and in our dreams we are certain that these lies are true; night after night, things happen that in our right minds we would know were impossible. In the dream I had last night (Hobson might point out), I was convinced that people who are dead are actually alive—something I would never be confused about in my waking life—and an event was taking place, a family gathering in my grandmother’s “new” apartment , that never happened in real life (and yet I had no doubt that it was happening). And although my grandmother, by the end of...