Oneiromancy: Encyclopedia - Oneiromancy

Oneiromancy

Oneiromancy is a form of divination by the analysis and interpretation of dreams. Oneiromancy is a part of psychoanalysis that intends to look beneath the manifest content of a dream, i.e., what we perceive in the dream, to the latent content of a dream, i.e., the meaning of the dream and the reason we dreamt it. The seminal work on the subject is The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.

Oneiromancy - Ancient

In the Tanach, Joseph intrepreted the dreams of the Pharaoh of Egypt; Daniel also interpreted dreams.

Artemidorus gives a list of authors mentioned in this longest of the ancient dreambooks. All are lost, but fragments are preserved in Artemidorus and other ancient authors. Aristotle and Plato both discuss dreams in various works. Achmet wrote an edition of Artemidorus Oneirocritica in addition to his own. Astrampsychus was the pseudonymous author of a number of divinatory, magical and medical works, including an Oneirocriticon.

Oneiromancy - Contemporary

There has been much scientific research on dreams, and modern theories attempt to explain as many facts found in scientific research as possible. These include:

• Why we dream the most before being born; why the amount of dreaming decreases at old age; why mammals born prematurely, such as rats, dream more than mature animals.
• Why depressed people dream more.
• Why we may have evolved to dream.

Oneiromancy - Hall

In 1953, Calvin S. Hall developed a theory of dreams in which dreaming is considered to be a cognitive process [1]. Hall argued that a dream was simply a thought or sequence of thoughts that occurred during sleep, and that dream images are visual representations of personal conceptions. For example, if one dreams of being attacked by friends, this may be a manifestation of fear of friendship; a more complicated example, which requires a cultural metaphor, is that a cat within a dream symbolizes a need to use your intuition. For English speakers, it may suggest that the dreamer must recognize that there is more than one way to skin a cat."

Oneiromancy - Freud

In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, first published at the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud argued that the foundation of all dream content is the fulfillment of wishes, conscious or not. The theory explains that the schism between ego and id leads to "censorship" of dreams. The unconscious would like to depict the wish fulfilled wholesale, but the preconscious cannot allow it — the wish (or wishes) within a dream is thus disguised, and, as Freud argues, only an understanding of the structure of the dream-work can explain the dream. In every dream in which he attempts to do so, he is able to establish a multitude of wishes on a variety of levels — conscious wishes for the immediate future ("I hope I pass this test" (V§D.δ)) to unconscious wishes pertaining to the far past (VI§F.II).

Freud listed four transformations of wishes to get past the censor as a dream:

• "Condensation" where one dream object could stand for several thoughts
• "Displacement" where the dream object's significance is less important than the disguised significance
• "Representation" where a thought is translated to visual images
• "Symbolisation" where an action or a person is replaced by a different symbol

These transformations help to disguise the latent content. The basis for all of these systems, he claimed, was "transference", in which a would-be censored wish of the unconscious is given undeserved "psychical energy" (the quantum of attention from consciousness) by attaching to "innocent" thoughts.

He claimed that the counterintuitivity of nightmares represented a clash between the ego and the id: the id wishes to see a past wish fulfilled, while the ego cannot allow it; he interprets the anxiety of a nightmare as the ego working against the id. (He further claimed that in nearly all cases these anxious dreams are products of infantile, sexual memories.)

Freud is careful to argue that the wishes are not revealed in dream analysis for the sake of conscious fulfillment, but instead for conscious resolution of the inner conflict. His relaxed attitude towards what could be seen as "depravity" in the unconscious is summed up in Plato's words: "the virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does" (emphasis not added: I§F, VII§F; Plato Republic IX).

According to his theory, the most basic desires come from the "id", the childlike portion of the unconscious, and as such often contained material that would be unacceptable to the ego. As the text was written relatively early in his career, he does not use the terms "ego" and "id", but rather "preconscious" and "unconscious", respectively. These terms themselves are not introduced until the seventh chapter of the book, until which his system of dream interpretation is incrementally constructed and argued.

Freud arrived at his theory of dreams by research (though he rejects much of the prior work), self-analysis, and psychoanalysis of his patients (I, VI§H, VII§C); as his theory developed, Freud often used dream interpretation to treat his patients, calling dreams "[t]he royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind" (VII§E).

Oneiromancy - Jung

To Carl Jung, dreams are communications from the unconscious. Most of the time, dreams can be regarded as "compensatory" views to the conscious, expressing aspects of the individual that are suppressed or neglected. This idea of compensation, of the natural tendency for the conflicting conscious and unconscious to approach a balance, is the basis of Jung's overall theory of psychological self-regulation. It is also important to note that due to the fact that they are often highly symbolic, dreams can be hard to understand and are subject to nuance and misinterpretation.

Oneiromancy - New Age

Interpretation of dreams is also a part of contemporary pop and new age culture. Edgar Cayce is an example.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Oneiromancy", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki