ABSTRACT
There are few topics in psychology which arouse as much popular interest as dreams. No doubt this is because dreams can express intimate and intensely personal aspects of our lives – aspects which we alone are privy to. Long before Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung appeared on the scene, dreams have been accorded great significance in myriad human cultures. How our own cultural and personal relationships to dreams have changed over time constitute important historical landmarks in the aesthetics of personal transformation. Harris (2009) provides a review of early Greek and Roman views of dreaming, while Rahman et al. (2023) reflect on changing cultural, religious, psychological, and scientific perspectives. In the Western world the history of our cultural and intellectual preoccupation with dreaming arguably begins with the Oracle at Delphi and the temples of Asclepius. Alongside Aristotle’s reflections on catharsis in the Poetics (Aristotle, 1996), they form a trio of self-purification, self-knowledge, and divine dream interpretation. Catharsis, self-knowledge, and the meaning of dreams constitute the bedrock upon which Freud built psychotherapy and paved the way for humanistic psychology. Yet despite the widespread desire for self-knowledge in Western societies, there are few better examples than the study of dreams to illustrate the gulf that still exists between what laypeople expect from psychology and what scientific psychology has so far managed to deliver to them.
