The Dream Thread

[Poet]

I read another book by Erich Fromm (german psychoanalyst and philosopher). He writes that dreams are even more important than our thoughts and feelings during the day. Dreaming is the gate to our unconsciousness.

Fromm states that Freud and Jung were both wrong in their attempts to interpret dreams: Freud worked too much with associations and didn't sufficiently take the dream itself into account. Jung goes into the opposite direction: He interpreted the content of the dream too literally.

Fromm writes that a dream has its own symbolic language. This language is similar to the language of a writer. He puts forward an impressive example of a patient of him: This patient (a 28-old-woman) wasn't allowed to be in a relationship with a man because her parents forbade it. She (the patient) then had a dream where she was executed after a hearing while her parents were present. This dream was like a novel by Kafka.

I plan to read another book of Fromm about dreams called "The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths". I will report back if it turns out to be a good read.

Here is an article of Erich Fromm about dreams: The Nature of Dreams

(...)We are often more intelligent, wiser and more moral in our sleep than in waking life. The reason for this is the ambiguous character of our social reality. In mastering this reality we develop our faculties of observation, intelligence and reason; but we are also stultified by incessant propaganda, threats, ideologies and cultural "noise" that paralyze some of our most precious intellectual and moral functions. In fact, so much of what we think and feel is in response to these hypnotic influences that one may well wonder to what extent our waking experience is "ours." In sleep, no longer exposed to the noise culture, we become awake to what we really feel and think. The genuine self can talk; it is often more intelligent and more decent than the pseudo self which seems to be "we" when we are awake.
(...)
WHEN we dream we speak a language which is also employed in some of the most significant documents of culture: in myths, in fairy tales and art, recently in novels like Franz Kafka's. This language is the only universal language common to all races and all times. It is the same language in the oldest myths as in the dreams every one of us has today. Moreover, it is a language which often expresses inner experiences, wishes, fears, judgments and insights which much greater precision and fullness than our ordinary language is capable of.
Yet symbolic language is a forgotten language, considered by most as non-sensical or unimportant. This ignorance not only prevents us from understanding the wisdom expressed in myths but also from being in touch with a significant part of ourselves. "Dreams which are not understood are like letters which are not opened," says the Talmud, and this statement is undeniably true.(...)