Dreams can be seen as metaphorical means of dealing with the everyday and crisis, putting ourselves in odd or on occasion nightmarish situations. Dreaming of losing your teeth, that is they fall out together, can point to a fear of growing old-the disfiguring changes age brings.

Although Freud noted the nature of dreams, I'm not aware that he spent much time on their metaphorical patterns.

I think it might pay to see the conscious parts (in the sense of most accessible and capable of notation) of the mind/brain as perhaps the most superficial and least engaged with the actual world-only engaged at points of activity, of specific events. The rest, dream states or less intense periods of consciousness, engage with the real world of flux, indeterminate activities and nuances.

Dreams are the subject/object of thousands of scientific and scholarly studies, and you might start by going to the website of the International Association for the Study of Dreams at https://www.asdreams.org/

Their journal is the best single scientific source for answers to your questions.

You might also find it helpful to read the article on dreams and dreaming in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dreams-dreaming/

and a similar article in an online encyclopedia of philosophy at http://www.iep.utm.edu/dreaming/

Aise, you have raised a very important observation. If dreams are considered as kind of sensory experience (arising in unconscious mind) that happen outside awareness, and we are only aware of them through some awareness mechanism I.e. consciousness, then dreams would be phenomenologically similar to some externally determined perception. As you have talked about schema, we can think of some cognitive theory of dreaming, where either dream itself is a cognitive phenomena or a sensory experience that is filtered through schemas and interpreted as per the subject.

Though I have not looked into any such cognitive theory of dreaming, as it may be existing in some form, this line of inquiry seems valid but only , in my view, when dreaming is considered an equivalent of imagination or daydreaming, which involves conscious manipulation. That's is, dreaming itself is a cognitive process, not something "external". Because it is difficult to conceptualize dreaming as happening outside awareness, like a sensory experience. Dreaming IS internal. It takes it's content from memory, and has processes similar to imagination. Simit can't be totally autonomous.

I have found this about cognitive theory of dreams by Calvin Hall. This suggests that dreams are conceptions being played as imagination. Nothing like wishful thinking, as Freud propounded. Concepts take on the form of images in dreams.

http://dreamstudies.org/2009/12/03/calvin-hall-cognitive-theory-of-dreaming/

In my experience as a psychotherapist and writing down my own dreams every night over the last 50 years, dreams do not have a singular function or interpretation.

Some dreams construct themselves building on sensory sensations during sleep, as Freud and others have observed. Some dreams are problem-solving. Some dreams just meander around the days events. Some dreams are more or less literal. Others metaphorical. Some dreams are prospective (prophetic, warning, etc.) and may or may not come 'true'. Some dreams aim to express trauma memories that have been repressed (Freud). Some dreams are symbolically archetypal, spiritual revelations (Jung). Some are totally bizarre and take decades to suddenly find their interpretation. Others literal except for one small aspect that is bizarre -- and that's where to let the client go deep and find their voice. Some dreams show how the individual's psyche 'reads' disturbances in the collective psyche, and may offer ways to make moral/ethical, social or political contributions to the community for increasing its health and well-being. For artists and other creatives, dreams not infrequently offer material for overcoming a creative block and for a work-in-progress. Some dreams reveal memories of transgenerational hauntings and traumas, as pointed out by the Freudians Abraham and Torok and more recently by relational psychotherapists. In a sense these might be called 'past life' dreams. In the past therapists such as Freud and Jung interpreted animals in dreams as representing the instincts (for list of instincts see Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience). This may be a way to interpret animals in some dreams. Others might get a hint of an interpretation as symbolic (e.g. using dictionaries of symbols, Animal Speaks, etc.). However, such interpretations may by-pass that an animal is addressing the dreamer by calling for help out of its own desperation facing extinction in the Anthropocene, and the dreamer is now responsible for making a response to alleviate this.

In my experience both personal and as a therapist, the sequence of the night's dreams have a 'ring-structure', a term I take from Ancient Greek poetics.

(1) Problem, predicament, difficulty, challenge, question the dream addresses, e.g. unfulfillment, unconscious purpose in life (Jung); (2) Wish-fulfillment, preconscious evasion of fate (Freud); (3) Ways of fulfillment, prospective, hortatory; rehearsals, potential problem solutions; (4) Consequences of non-fulfillment, not infrequently presented as a nightmare in the last dream of the night.

Compare the hermeneutical Medieval Quadriga for interpretation of symbolic texts (1) Literal; (2) allegorical (personages or other agencies represent abstract values); (3) anagogical (trope as referring to spiritual realm or afterlife); (4) tropological (trope as morally edification).

Dear Aiste,

The fascination with the world of dreams reaches back to the earliest part of human civilization. The first written mention of dreams and their uses goes back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, written 6000 years ago. We use the word "dreams" or "dreaming" rather loosely even now, but it is important to note that there are at least, at least, three different phenomena we refer to as dreams. Non-REM dreams are very different than REM dreams, and Phasic-REM dreams and different than Tonic-REM dreams. To answer your question, we need to first and foremost be more specific as to what types of dreams we are talking about. They are not all the same and they accomplish various tasks. So, lets begin the dialog and delve into your question in more depth. Ultimately, we can say that the dreaming processes are purposive. To support this, we can deprive people of various forms of dreams and observe that physical and physiological disorders tend to ensue.

An excellent question! Let's explore it in more depth.

Warm regards,

Micah

Across the polarities of subjective/objective and unseen/seen, dreams are viewed as vehicles for symbolic transformation of inner or incorporeal and spiritual experiences to be outward or corporeal realities, socially or collectively communicated and discussed. There are two forms of transformations, dream transformation and awakening transformation. Dream transformation means that dreams enable individuals to unveil the hidden and unseen dimensions of the universe and the person transformed into signs or symbols. I take awakening transformation to mean the attempt to change the reality through interpreting dreams and relating them to that reality.

For more information see el-Aswad, E. (2010). Dreams and the Construction of Reality: Symbolic Transformation of the Seen and Unseen in the Egyptian Imagination. Anthropos, 105: 441-453.

Link:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289814992_Dreams_and_the_Construction_of_Reality_Symbolic_Transformations_of_the_Seen_and_the_Unseen_in_the_Egyptian_Imagination

or

https://www.academia.edu/2044001/Dreams_and_the_Construction_of_Reality_Symbolic_Transformation_of_the_Seen_and_Unseen_in_the_Egyptian_Imagination

Micah,

The reason I asked the question was to sort of imagine what came first: the vision of divine or questioning existence. For even though it does not seem important if answers come from within or not, this would help understand if evolution of consciousness could have been 'assisted'. So in this case it would not be the kind of dreams that are drawn from collection by the mind, but rather some sort of guidance, so dreams that could be considered 'visionary'.

Dear Aiste,

Your question is a deeply philosophical one and indeed a very meaningful one! The word "Religion" comes from the Latin "Religare," which literally means to reconnect. Imagine humans of millennia ago who woke up in the morning wondering where they were the night before, who they were visiting or who was visiting them. Hence, dreams must have played an important role in the evolution of our consciousness. Fears and hopes were in time attributed to such nocturnal encounters. "There must a world beyond," perhaps they pondered. It is very likely that they did not attributed such encounters to world within. The "inner world," if you will, was not discovered until Augustine's explorations in the 4th century, most notably in his Soliloquies. The inner world, he concluded, was the path to the Divine, which he so compellingly described in his Confessions. In a true sense we can say that Augustine was the founder of psychoanalysis!

I gave a lecture at Trinity in Dublin a few years ago in which I explored the connection between the unconscious, dreams, and creativity. If you are interested in that lecture, I will be happy to send it to you. It is a 8000 word PDF, yours for the asking.

In the known civilization, the idea of dreams and their connection to divinities appeared first in the oldest story ever told: The Epic of Gilgamesh. I wrote a paper about it, examining it from an existential perspective. I am attaching it to this email.

Keep exploring your ideas. You are on your path to a deeper understanding of consciousness, its origins and needs--it needs an object--it needs relationship! Read the attached paper and ponder such thoughts. See what happened to Enkidu!!

Keep searching, Aistle, and my best wishes to you.

Micah

Thank you! The paper was truly eye opening!

Dreams and dreaming have been topics of philosophical inquiry since antiquity. Historically, the topic of dreaming has mostly been discussed in the context of external world skepticism. As famously suggested by Descartes, dreams pose a threat towards knowledge because it seems impossible to rule out, at any given moment, that one is now dreaming. Since the 20th century, philosophical interest in dreaming has increasingly shifted towards questions related to philosophy of mind.

Hope you good luck.