Posts Tagged ‘adaptive theory’
Ancient Greece – Dream Beliefs
Antiphon, a Greek living in the fourth century BC., wrote the first known descriptive book of dreams. It was designed to be used for practical, and professional interpretations. He maintained that dreams are not created by supernatural powers but natural conditions. In the second century AD. a similar book was written by Artemidorus, a Greek physician who lived in Rome. He claimed to have gathered his information from ancient sources, possible from the Egyptian dream and the dream book dating from the second millennium BC. He may have used works from the Assurbanipal library, later destroyed, which held one of the most complete collections of dream literature. Artemidorus classified dreams into dreams, visions, oracles, fantasies and apparitions. He stated two classes of dreams; the somnium, which forecast events, and the insomnium, which are concerned with present matters. For the somnium dreams Artemidorus gave a dream dictionary. He said Abyss meant an impending danger, a dream of warning. Candle: to see one being lighted forecasts a birth; to exhibit a lighted candle augers contentment and prosperity; a dimly burning candle shows sickness, sadness and delay. This latter is taken from folklore of the times, and because dreams tend to use commonly used verbal images, was probably true. He maintained that a persons name – that is their identity, and the family, national and social background from which they arose – has bearing on what their dream means.
Plato 429 – 347 BC. said that even good men dream of uncontrolled and violent actions, including sexual aggression. These actions are not committed by good men while awake, but criminals act them out without guilt. Democritus said that dreams are not products of ethereal soul, but of visual impressions which influence our imagination. Aristotle 383 – 322 stated that dreams can predict future events. Earlier Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’ discovered that dreams can reveal the onset of organic illness. Such dreams, he said, can be seen as being illogically representing external reality.
Hippocrates was born on the island of Kos. On the island was the famous temple dedicated to Aesculapius the god of medicine. There were about 300 such temples in Greece alone, dedicated to healing through the use of dreams. Hippocrates was an Aesculapian, and learned his form of dream interpretation from them. In such temples the patient would have to ritually cleanse themselves by washing, and abstain from sex, alcohol and even food. They would then be led into what was sometimes a subterranean room in which were harmless snakes – these were the symbol of the god, and are the probable connecting link with the present day use of snakes to represent the healing professions. Prior to sleep the participants were led in evening payers to the god, and thus creating an atmosphere in which dreams of healing were induced. In the morning the patients were asked their dream, and it was expected they would dream an answer to their illness or problem. There are many attestations to the efficacy of this technique from patients.
“But how did a small, dirty, crowded city, surrounded by enemies and swathed in olive oil, manage to change the world? Was Athenian genius simply the convergence of “a happy set of circumstances,” as the historian Peter Watson has put it, or did the Athenians make their luck? This question has stumped historians and archaeologists for centuries, but the answer may lie in what we already know about life in Athens back in the day.
The ancient Athenians enjoyed a deeply intimate relationship with their city. Civic life was not optional, and the Athenians had a word for those who refused to participate in public affairs: idiotes. There was no such thing as an aloof, apathetic Athenian. “The man who took no interest in the affairs of state was not a man who minded his own business,” wrote the ancient historian Thucydides, “but a man who had no business being in Athens at all.” When it came to public projects, the Athenians spent lavishly. (And, if they could help it, with other people’s money—they paid for the construction of the Parthenon, among other things, with funds from the Delian League, an alliance of several Greek city-states formed to fend off the Persians.)
All of ancient Athens displayed a combination of the linear and the bent, the orderly and the chaotic. The Parthenon, perhaps the most famous structure of the ancient world, looks like the epitome of linear thinking, rational thought frozen in stone, but this is an illusion: The building has not a single straight line. Each column bends slightly this way or that. Within the city walls, you’d find both a clear-cut legal code and a frenzied marketplace, ruler-straight statues and streets that follow no discernible order.
In retrospect, many aspects of Athenian life—including the layout and character of the city itself—were conducive to creative thinking. The ancient Greeks did everything outdoors. A house was less a home than a dormitory, a place where most people spent fewer than 30 waking minutes each day. The rest of the time was spent in the marketplace, or working out at the gymnasium or the wrestling grounds, or perhaps strolling along the rolling hills that surround the city. Unlike today, the Greeks didn’t differentiate between physical and mental activity; Plato’s famous Academy, the progenitor of the modern university, was as much an athletic facility as an intellectual one. The Greeks viewed body and mind as two inseparable parts of a whole: A fit mind not attached to a fit body rendered both incomplete.
And in their efforts to nourish their minds, the Athenians built the world’s first global city. Master shipbuilders and sailors, they journeyed to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and beyond, bringing back the alphabet from the Phoenicians, medicine and sculpture from the Egyptians, mathematics from the Babylonians, literature from the Sumerians. The Athenians felt no shame in their intellectual pilfering. Of course, they took those borrowed ideas and put their own stamp on them—or, as Plato put it (with more than a touch of hubris): “What the Greeks borrow from foreigners, they perfect.”
Athens also welcomed foreigners themselves. They lived in profoundly insecure times, but rather than walling themselves off from the outside world like the Spartans, the Athenians allowed outsiders to roam the city freely even during wartime, often to the city’s benefit. (Some of the best-known sophists, for example, were foreign-born.)
It was part of what made Athens Athens—openness to foreign goods, new ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, odd people and strange ideas.
The city had more than its fair share of prominent homegrown eccentrics. Hippodamus, the father of urban planning, was known for his long hair, expensive jewelry, and cheap clothing, which he never changed, winter or summer. Athenians mocked Hippodamus for his eccentricities, yet they still assigned him the vital job of building their port city, Piraeus. The writer Diogenes, who regularly ridiculed the famous and powerful, lived in a wine barrel; the philosopher Cratylus, determined never to contradict himself, communicated only through simple gestures.
While they didn’t know that their time in the sun would be so brief, the Athenians did know, as their famed historian Herodotus once noted, that “human happiness never remains long in the same place.” Neither, it seems, does genius. ”
See: Aristides and the First Dream Diary
The Amplification Method
This is an approach suggested by Carl Jung. In essence it is to honour what the dream states. In the dream example below David is sleeping on a mattress, but it could have been a bed or a hammock, or even a sleeping bag. So why a mattress and why in the garden, and why not alone? Having noted the specifics of our dream, we then amplify what we know about them. We ask ourselves such questions as ‘What connections do I have with a mattress? What does sleeping on a mattress on the floor mean? Have I ever done it? When? Why? Where? In what circumstances? Does it represent some condition?’ Thus we bring out as much information as we can about each dream specific. This includes memories, associated ideas, recent events, anything relevant.
Example: ‘I am sleeping rough in a garden with a woman I do not love. I think I should try to make the best of the situation, but my feelings against it are too strong. Then I decide I don’t ever want to live like that again and tear up the mattress we slept on. As I do this I realise, as if waking from amnesia, that Pat lives just across the road. She has specially moved there because of our love. I realise with horror I had forgotten and may have lost her.’ David H.
One of Carl Jung’s favourite questions in using amplification was to get to the very basic level by asking, ‘Suppose I had no idea what the word mattress (or whatever the dream symbol) meant, describe the thing to me in such a way I cannot fail to understand what it is.’ In response to this one might say that a mattress is something used to soften or cushion the contact between our body and the floor while we rest or sleep. It’s size might indicate whether it were used by one or two people, so might suggest relationship. In continuing the amplification using the questions suggested (when? why? where? what? how? who with? etc.) ones connections, feeling and conceptions of the symbol are slowly unfolded. In the case of David, he was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in his present relationship. But he realised from the dream that he had slipped back into attitudes which damaged his prior relationship, so might very well damage the present one.
P. W. Martin emphasises it is amplification not free association which is sought. Free association may lead to other ideas and feelings not directly connected to the dream specifics. Amplification honours the precise expression of the dream and attempts to uncover out of what memories, feelings, insight or experience the dreamer has formed or created the dream. Therefore the message of the unique dream is found.
If David had used free association with the dream, starting with the word ‘mattress’, it might have gone on to – duvet, shop, money, bank, overdraft, work, boss. As such it could end in a completely different series of realisations than the mattress and its direct associations. In using amplification, after moving out from the central symbol to find its associations, one then comes back to the symbol again to check for relevance with the dream theme. If one did not do this, one could simply start from any word and explore associations. The inward inclinations of the person doing the word association would lead to issues that are on their mind or deeply felt, but it would not throw light on the specific dream.
If a professional analyst is working with the dreamer, he or she may help the dreamer amplify the dream in other ways too. For instance the dream of David’s which included a mattress and a love affair, may have been preceded by other dreams with the same objects or themes. If so what might be understood by a comparison? When a dream is honoured specifically, there are often parts of it which not only state what a life situation is, but also comment on it. David’s dream once more exemplifies this. Not only does it illustrate his attitudes in the present relationship, but points out the love displayed toward him which he had forgotten. The dream specifically points to the lapse of awareness as leading to the attitudes of living without love. In other words David has forgotten how much love his partner has displayed in actually coming to live with him. In forgetting this aspect of their relationship he lapses back into old attitudes. In this second phase of amplification, the dreamer would also be helped to see their dream in the light of its social implications. Therefore an Asian dreamer might have different cultural responses to situations than a European. David daily life, for instance, included sleeping on the floor on a mattress. If it had not the dream would have signified something different, perhaps a sense of impoverishment.
A professional analyst would also help the dreamer realise any connections existing between their dream and similar themes in mythology, fairy tales and religious practices or beliefs. Jung would often use active imagination after the amplification, to further explore the dream. See: active imagination; association of ideas with dream; assisted passage; postures movement and body language; processing dreams; word analysis of dreams; settings.