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Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Lucid Dreams
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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The belief that obscure dreams have meaning, that they can be understood in spite of their seeming incoherence, is shared by most cultures: the importance attributed to the interpretation of dreams comes up several times in such sacred texts as the Bible and Talmud, where it is warned that an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter. However, even if such a point of view may justify the interpretation of obscure dreams, it does not provide a basis for a systematic interpretive approach. Roger Caillois considered the will to interpretation “one of the noblest flaws of the human spirit,” defining it as “this passion to find meaning in what has none, and thus to derive meaning from the meaningless.” And it is surely the human spirit's inherent need for intelligibility that underlies the desire to account for the existence of dreams, whether as a divine message or a symptom of neurosis. The act of interpretation consists of giving meaning to something that, at first glance, appears to have none; and this is done not arbitrarily but by discerning a meaning - with the help of methods created for this purpose - that is believed to be implicitly contained in the dream. Thus to interpret a dream we must explain it in relation to the context in which it takes it meaning. For Freud “the interpretation of a dream” requires specifying its “sense” and then replacing it with something that can fit within the chain of our psychic actions.
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- Copyright © 1995 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
Notes
1. Roger Caillois, L'Incertitude qui vient des rêves, Paris, 1983, pp. 18-19.
2. Sigmund Freud, L'Interprétation des Rêves, Paris, 1980, p. 90.
3. Freud, op. cit., p. 11. Emphasis by the author of the present article.
4. In what follows the lucid dreams that are quoted without explicit reference are taken from materials found in Christian Bouchet, Le Rêve lucide, Description et analyse du phénomène à partir d'expériences de rêves lucides spontanées ou préparées. Essai d'interpretation: mise en évidence des implications théoriques des procédés et techniques mis en oeuvre. Thése doctorat d'État non publiée, Université de Paris IV, Paris, 1994.
5. That is, the French word for oven is "four". (translator's note.)
6. Freud, op. cit., p. 97.
7. Freud, op. cit., pp. 485-486.
8. Freud, op. cit., pp. 485-486. Emphasis by Freud.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid. Emphasis by the present author.
11. George Gillespie, "Problems related to experimentation while dreaming lucidly," Lucidity Letter, vol. 3, nos. 2 & 3, 1984: 1-2.
12. Frederic W.H. Myers, "Automatic Writings-3", Proceedings of the Society for Psychi cal Research 4, part II, 1887, pp. 241-242. Quoted by S. Laberge, Le Rêve lucide. Le pouvoir de l'éveil et de la conscience dans vos rêves. Ile Saint-Denis, 1991, p. 42.
13. On this point see Bouchet, op. cit., pp. 205-206 and 296-297.
14. Ann Faraday, The Dream Game, New York, 1976, p. 339.
15. Ibid. p. 340.
16. Kenneth Kelzer, The Sun and the Shadow, My experiment with Lucid Dreaming, Virginia Beach, 1987, p. 31.
17. See, for example, what Descartes did in the last of his famous dreams of the night of November 10-11 1619, Olympiques, dans les Œuvres philosophiques, vol. I, Paris, 1988, pp. 52-63.
18. Patricia Garfield, La créativité onirique, Paris, 1983, pp. 139-140. Emphasis by the author.
19. Kenneth Kelzer, op. cit., p. 22.
20. Ibid., p. 24, Emphasis by the author.
21. Ibid., p. 22.
22. "Am I Dreaming or Not?", Ibid., p. 29.
23. Ibid., p. 31.
24. Freud, op. cit., pp. 115-116.
25. Kenneth Kelzer, op. cit., p. 32.
26. For examples of dream interpretations that analysts force on their patients, see Ann Farady, op. cit.
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