Dream as Symptom, Dream as Myth: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Dream Narratives

Many of us have an image of a classic anthropological approach to dreams: in "traditional" cultures, dreams are used to predict the future; dreams are part of "folk healing;" dreams are a social phenomenon. As the anthropologist Ellen Basso has put it, folk dream theories tend to be "progressive" or forward-looking, in contrast to the "regressive" Western dream theory, which uses dreams as a window through which can be seen the repressed desires and conflicts stemming from the individual’s idiosyncratic personal history and from universals of the human condition such as the Oedipus complex (1). Freud emphasized this distinction between his own approach to dreams, as revealing an individual’s unresolved conflicts, and the prophetic use of dreams, even as he sided with traditional dream theories by recognizing that dreams have a meaning that must be interpreted. This emphasis on meaning was in contrast to the approaches of his more biologicallyminded colleagues, who limited their explanations of dreams to various somatic causes—such as the idea that dream images are merely random electrical discharges from the brain (Freud summarized some of the research being conducted in his own time in a lengthy first chapter of his classic The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud 1953 [2]). Similar debates continue today, as in the work of J. Allan Hobson, who (at least in his earlier work) saw the dreaming brain as struggling to make sense of the bizarre things it produces because of random chemical bombardment and electrical activity (3). On the other side, researchers such as Foulkes have argued that the scientific study of dreams has made little progress since the "discovery" of REM sleep in 1953, despite great advances in our understanding of the physiological processes of sleep (4,5). By the late 1980's, researchers have found few reliable physiological correlates of dreaming in experimental research (6), though more recent studies of brain activity during REM sleep have begun to show some significant findings that may account for some of the attributes of dreams (Allen Braun, for instance, has measured patterns of blood flow to various parts of the brain and found that areas of the brain associated with emotions and visual imagery are highly activated during REM sleep while the areas of the frontal lobes associated with logic and planning show markedly reduced activity. Such patterns may explain, on the one hand, the emotional power of dreams and, on the Dream as Symptom, Dream as Myth: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Dream Narratives