How important are dreams?
Should we pay attention to them?
Dear Classical Wisdom Reader,
Sometimes my teeth are so loose and wobbly, it feels as if I could gently pluck them out of my mouth. Other times they are chalky and crumbling, one crisp away from disintegration.... But no matter how it begins, it always ends the same: me losing my teeth.
It’s a common enough dream, one that I think most people have had. I would complain to my dear husband who noticed that it always occurred before a big trip, a move or some upcoming development. We had theories, of course, the predominant one being that these teeth dreams recall a subconscious childhood memory, our first physical oh so tangible embodiment of change...resurfaced in our minds to process new directions in our lives.
Seemed reasonable enough! It was an unpredictable time in my life... so the dreams' regular appearance made sense... and yet, looking back I recently realized I haven’t had that dream in years. Was my life calmer? Considering our peripatetic ways, that didn’t seem to be the case.
And then recently I found an article claiming to have ‘cracked’ the tooth dream code. No need for Freud or Jung... it was simply the physical act of grinding one’s teeth in their sleep (surely an act exacerbated by stress) and that sensation making its way into our dreams.
So no, I had not found some great inner peace... I just used a mouth guard.
Of course in the ancient world dreams were extremely important and could (and did) change the course of history. They were seen as both critical portenders of things to come, as well as genuine revelations into the state of things. The examples found in mythology and history are numerous...
For instance, a shocking 10% of all extant work before 350 AD belongs to one man who may have had a very different impact on the world if it had not been for a dream. The man was none other than the Greek/Roman doctor/philosopher, Galen, whose tutelage and career path was dramatically changed one day after his father’s dream that his young son would one day become a doctor... and become a doctor he did!
This was doubly appropriate since the god of Medicine Asclepius was known to visit his patients via dream mode... as well as the fact that Galen’s predecessor, the father of medicine Hippocrates said:
“Any man who judges well the signs given by dreams will feel their extreme importance; the intelligence of dreams is a great part of wisdom.” (Hippocrates of Cos, Regimen 4, or Dreams)
But it wasn’t just the field of healing that found dreams significant, it was remarked upon in philosophy as well. Plato recognized that dreams were one of the ways by which the gods conveyed their intentions to mankind (Apology 33c) while Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, wrote:
“Dreams allow us to realize our progress, if in a dream we do not rejoice, desire or do shameful, atrocious or unjust things: then imagination and affectivity are bathed in reason and shine.” (Stoicorum fragment, I, 234)
Following the Stoics, there is also the famous story of Marcus Aurelius’ dream that his shoulders were made of ivory the night before he was to become emperor on March 7, 161 AD. He took it as a sign that he was capable of becoming an emperor.
However, it should be noted that Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote:
"Dreams have no divine nature nor any prophetic force but originate from the impact of images" on the senses (Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 24).
On the other end, the importance and interpretations of dreams are heavily incorporated throughout the epics and myths. From Penelope’s vision of fifty geese eaten by an eagle and Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, pregnant with Paris, dreaming that she gave birth to a burning torch to Morpheus and his companions, the examples are too plentiful for this humble issue.
It’s clear that to the Greeks and the Romans (as well as the Egyptians and the Babylonians) dreams could do so much. They could link the mortal and divine, portend disasters, and heal the sick. Indeed these nightly visions could even reveal the structure of the cosmos.
I don’t know about you... but clearly I've been doing this whole dreaming business wrong! Why have I spent my evenings worrying about teeth when I could have been understanding the universe?
But seriously... Where does this leave us, dear reader, on how we should understand dreams? Are they universal and part of timeless existence? A window or revelation into who we are or what will happen? Or is not taking them so seriously something that separates us from the ancients?
Essentially, how important are dreams?
As always, you reply to this email, comment below or email me directly at anya@classicalwisdom.com with your own dreams...
Now, onto whether or not we can know what is true... We have excellent insights into this topic, including an exploration of Skepticism, for your learning and entertainment, below.
All the best,
Anya Leonard
Founder and Director
Classical Wisdom and Classical Wisdom Kids
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Monday Mailbag
Re: How can we know what is true?
My mother baked Christmas cookies and hid the cookie tins. We (I, brother, and sister) would find them. We thought, mom won’t notice one or two missing, but eventually she would—after multiple cookie thefts. If we all said “I didn’t take any,” she and we would know someone was not telling the truth. Kids know that a true statement accurately describes some fact of reality. For a teacher to tell a student “[we can never] really know if anything is true at all” is mental cruelty.
In all areas of knowledge, including ethics and politics, truth requires drawing logical conclusions from descriptions of facts of reality—from true statements. It can be done. We “can know what’s true.”
Robert H.
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Hello Anya,
I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s wise words: “It takes two to speak the truth. One to speak, and another to hear”. This points immediately to the public-private dichotomy that has always stalked the subject of truth. Western civilisation was formed and sustained on shared ‘truths’ which had grown out of a shared understanding of the source of all Truth, God himself.
As soon as you depart from that construct the very subject of truth becomes an impossibility, so atomised and individualized as to lose all meaning. The question cannot even be posed. A pastor once told me that there are only two churches - The Church of God and the Church of Man. If you worship at the Church of Man, the only truth that matters is what the powerful say it is. If you worship at the Church of God, Truth is a person.
The topic cannot be debated across that gulf, and need not be debated within either side.
Brien A.
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Only wisdom can tell us what is true and what to do with what we learn.
Thomas P.
Anya,
You wrote, "How can we attempt to comprehend the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
I would suggest that it is profoundly important to seek truth, but if we insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we are doomed to failure. This is simply not within our reach as mortal beings.
Karl Popper wrote that all scientific truth must remain forever tentative, since future discoveries or insights may cause what we believe today to be incorrect, or at least incomplete. Declaring that the science is settled or that there is no room for debate, is not scientific, but rather dogmatic, and probably wrong, as the vigorous debate and testing of ideas is the best way to weed out the incorrect ones.
As for the truth about current events, that is even harder. Unless I am physically present, I am limited to the reports of other people, and, with rare exceptions, people I do not know and whose biases are not clear. And this is not a recent problem. Robert Heinlein, noted science fiction author, once wrote, "...I have been on the spot eight or nine times when something that wound up as a news story in TIME happened. Not once - not once - did the TIME magazine story match what I saw and heard." (Expanded Universe, 1980, p. 384)
I will conclude that I strive to study, read, and learn, and to discern the truth, but I am always cognizant that my knowledge and perspective is limited and incomplete. I still do the best I can to discern the truth.
Gordon F.
Cuenca, Ecuador
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The ancient Greek philosophies took a variety of approaches to the question of how do we know what is true. The letter that asks for responses to this question mentions the skeptics, giving Cicero as an example. The problem with this is that ancient Greek skepticism comprised several philosophies. It is generally considered to start with Pyrrhonism, but the Cyrenaics were also skeptics of a sort and slightly predate Pyrrhonism. Academic Skepticism, of which Cicero was an adherent, came shortly after Pyrrhonism. They all had different answers to the question of what was true.
The Academics thought truth was unknowable. To get by in life, one had to consider the various points of view and to judge them based on how persuasive they were. Hence Cicero gets taken for, as you put it, an “eclectic philosopher” finding pieces of competing philosophies persuasive and even finding the usual Academic Skeptic position on theology less persuasive than the Stoic account.
The Pyrrhonists divided knowledge into two categories: knowledge of phenomena and knowledge of what caused those phenomena. Knowledge of phenomena we have. Knowledge of what is behind phenomena we do not have. We just have conjectures - conjectures we should not take on as beliefs, even if those conjectures are persuasive. The Pyrrhonists devised powerful sets of arguments that seemingly preclude that we can ever know anything beyond what is available to us empirically.
Pyrrhonists make decisions in life based on experience and eschew belief in theoretical doctrines, such as the Stoic dogma that virtue is the only good. Conducting one’s life in this way brings peace of mind (ataraxia) and allows for better decision-making, for both ordinary and ethical matters. In other words, the Pyrrhonists report that they have a prescription for eudaimonia.
The Cyrenaics - about whom much less is known - thought all we had access to was subjective experience. The Cyrenaics, however, did not go so far as to embrace the position of the philosopher Protagoras who held that man is the measure of all things, and thus we each have our own truth.
Douglas C. B.
Author of “Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism”
Anya, it is particularly apt that you bring up dreams and dreaming as part of a discussion about what is “true”. All dreams are “true” as a subjective experience of the dreamer, yet every dreamer knows that the content of their dreams frequently represent events which sometimes never happened or could never happen “in reality”. If the manifest content is untrue, then what “objective” truth is represented? There have been vastly different approaches to answering that question throughout human history.
Freuds approach to understanding dreams was perhaps the most methodologically rigorous. Simply put, he saw dreams as examples of unconscious thinking which were cryptic due to their representation in images, their hyper condensed meaning, and their (possibly) defensive disguise to allow unconscious thinking to ponder emotionally distressing material without waking the dreamer (see chapter 4 in “Interpretation of Dreams” for discussion of both distortion in dreams and distortion in dreams of loosing teeth). His method was to encourage the dreamer to provide all their associated thoughts to each of the dreams components so he could see what networks of underlying thoughts were connected to the dreams. He noticed there was frequently little surface relationship between the manifest dream and the underlying thought networks with which they were associated. He attributed these underlying thoughts as the “truer” meaning of the dream. It’s not possible to describe the meaning of any dream without these underlying associations in a given individual. Dreams were highly personal and idiosyncratic in expressing the dreamers “truth”, yet there were certain dreams which were common across individuals. Dreams of loosing teeth were one such dream.
BTW, tooth grinding as a stimulus for such dreams was discussed by Freud as one of the bodily sensations which can give form to a dream during sleep. Those feelings and other bodily sensations are woven into the stream of unconscious thinking when the dream constructs its manifest narrative.
Great topic.
Dreams and myth are like peas in a pod. Both bridge the subconscious and conscious, bringing archetypes and symbolism from the dark depths of the mind to the surface.
I tend to think there is much of importance and value that can be gleaned via dreams and contending with the subconscious. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing supernatural to dreams, and they can’t read the future or yield info on, say, a missing dog. But they can reveal aspects of oneself and how one relates to the world that are helpful for growth. Often this sheds some light something that had previously been repressed or hidden from oneself.
When troubles or conflicts are brought to the surface, they change from subconscious to conscious understanding. Subconsciously, there may be an unprocessed feeling or conflict that gnaws and has all sorts of subconscious consequences, particularly because the subconscious is not always rational.
But when realized consciously, one often can rationally contend with the issue, seek advice, experiment with different strategies and so forth. Grow.
This is the process of how we all expand our consciousness, our understanding of ourselves and the world around. And dreams can be a tool to help enable the process