Dream interpretation is unfashionable in intellectual circles. Social scientists deemed it unrigorous some time ago, I don’t know how long after Freud’s heyday, and that distaste spread to broader society. I think this is unfortunate.
The most charitable description of dream interpretation to date is that it is not actually interpretation, it is construction. Dream interpretation is people guessing what their dreams mean with no way to know if they’re wrong. In dialogue with real people, we can find out if we’re wrong about what they meant to convey.
We do not have a sense for the language of dreams, but we do have an ability to tease apart emotionally associated thoughts and relate them to other knowledge we have. If “dream interpretation” between say a therapist and a patient helps bring in important, emotionally charged information and process those emotions, that is great.
But this is an act of creation, of an improved psychological state, and not an interpretation. At the same time, while I think we do not know what dreams mean, I think they really do mean something.
I think dreams mean something because they have story structure. They have ups and downs, tension and resolution, characters and transitions. It’s true that some dreams appear to have no real structure, and others may but it’s hard to tell or the host of the brain that had the dream doesn’t remember well enough to have a judgment on the question. But many dreams, for example, have a protagonist with a conflict and a journey. There are other types of stories of course, like ones about exploration.
Dreams aren’t nonfiction media, there isn’t a coded argument to unveil. If there is, I have no reason to believe it. But I suspect there are themes that are being worked out in some sense. I think that because as a rule good, consciously-designed stories have themes like conscience versus loyalty.
Any particular dream probably isn’t worth any study. A dream happened already, that bit of cognition is done with, and so the brain has been processing it. There may be some exceptions like a recurrent dream or an emotionally charged one, unless that emotional charge is rooted in a post-wake dream interpretation.
Absent a special reason, any given dream is probably worth no more than any other non-dream thought. Out of all the thoughts you’ve had over the course of the day, how many are worth recalling and scrutinizing? Not many.
Even so, it would probably be worth knowing how to interpret any dream, because that understanding might improve the complexity of dreams and make our thoughts during sleep more interesting.
All these things can be true at the same time:
- Dreams mean something.
- We don’t know what they mean.
- It’s not worth trying to find out what any particular dream means with a few possible exceptions.
- It is worth being able to figure out what dreams mean, to have a fluency with the language of dreams.
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