Exploring the Power of Healing Dreams

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Freud enlisted Carl Jung, a brilliant young Swiss analyst, to help him dispel what he viewed as centuries of encrusted superstition. In one letter to his heir designate, Freud expressed his delight that they were setting out together to “conquer mythology,” unaware that the obverse would soon come to pass. Jung had already begun to treat the dream less as a libidinal rebus than as a labyrinth leading to humanity's “collective unconscious.” If Freud saw a snake as a phallic symbol, Jung was interested in its mythic heritage as a creature associated with wisdom and healing. And if Freud believed symbols were a dream's way of concealing the truth, Jung believed they were more an attempt to reveal it.

History has judged the founding work of both Freud and Jung to be a mix of brilliant insight and misconception, a legacy their successors still contend with. A therapist once remarked to me that it was a shame there were only these two lights to illuminate the vast region of dreams, but this is hardly true. The world's indigenous peoples possess a treasure trove of dream knowledge. The opinion endures among many Western psychiatrists that tribal peoples do not understand how to interpret their own dreams—indeed, naively believe them to be real occurrences. But non-Western cultures have long been aware of subtleties in dream-life that the West has myopically missed.

In dreams, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm once pronounced, “we are concerned exclusively with ourselves. . . .'I am' is the only system to which thoughts and feelings refer.” Yet the privatization of the dream remains a peculiarly Western practice. Dreams in many cultures—among the Plains Indians, for example—are a key component of social problem solving, with vital public and even political implications. The Zuni Indians of New Mexico have a custom of making public their “bad” dreams (“good” dreams, however, are sometimes withheld even from close relatives). Anthropologist Barbara Tedlock reports that dreams are of such integral importance to Mexico's Quiche Maya people that one out of four people are initiated as “daykeepers,” their term for dream interpreters. An Australian Aborigine told me, “We tell our dreams to the group because different people have different gifts and might help understand it.” It sounded to me like the informal dream-sharing groups that have sprung up in Western societies over the past several decades (until he added a comment I found intriguing: “We often meet each other while we're sleeping.”) The psychoanalytic idea that one's dreams pertain solely to the intricacies of one's own personality is a viewpoint that indigenous peoples find almost laughable.

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