The Principles of Dream Interpretation — Reading Symbols Through Tradition and Psychology
About 6 min read
After waking from a striking dream, anyone grows curious about 'what could this mean?' Dream interpretation is the wisdom that has answered such questions for ages, as people in both East and West have sought to read the symbols of dreams and find signs for life.
Why Have People Interpreted Dreams?
Because dreams are a flow of images not explained by logic, people have believed since ancient times that some message lay hidden within them. In the East, dreams were seen as omens of fortune and misfortune, and books of interpretation were made; in the West too, from antiquity, dreams were regarded as divine revelations or mirrors of the mind. Dream interpretation is, in this way, humanity's old attempt to converse with the unconscious.
Dream reading in the classics — Artemidorus and the Mengzhan Yizhi
The oldest surviving book in the West to set out dream interpretation systematically is the Oneirocritica, written by the Greek Artemidorus in the second century. He held that the same dream means different things depending on the dreamer's occupation, age and circumstances, and he warned against attaching one meaning to one symbol. In East Asia, the Mengzhan Yizhi (夢占逸旨), compiled by Chen Shiyuan (陳士元) of the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century, is counted as the representative book that gathered the old dream readings by category. That two traditions so far apart both tell us not to read a dream on its own but together with the dreamer's situation is still worth taking to heart.
The View of Traditional Interpretation
Traditional interpretation reads the symbols that appear in a dream as a language of fortune and misfortune. In the manner that pigs, dragons, and feces mean wealth, ancestors mean tidings or a warning, and a dream of teeth falling out means change or parting, long experience accumulated into a dictionary of symbols. The same symbol is read a little differently from country to country and culture to culture, which shows that dream interpretation is a cultural wisdom steeped in that society's life and values.
The View of Modern Psychology
In the twentieth century, dreams became a subject of psychology. Freud saw dreams as a channel through which repressed desire surfaces in altered form, while Jung understood them as the language of an unconscious in which symbols (archetypes) shared by the individual and by humankind speak. Modern psychology sees a dream less as prophecy than as the mind's work of sorting through the day's emotions and worries. So a dream is less a notice of the future than a mirror reflecting the state of your mind right now.
One symbol, two readings — comparing them on a snake dream
How traditional dream reading and psychology part ways becomes clear when you compare them on a single snake dream. Old dream lore puts the scene of a big snake slipping into your embrace near the top of its good signs and takes the snake as a herald of money coming in or of a cherished child on the way. Freudian interpretation sees the snake as a symbol of repressed desire, while Jungian interpretation reads in its shedding of skin an archetype of change and renewal. This site's detailed snake reading splits the scene four ways, showing that a snake that comes into your arms, a snake bite, a white or golden snake, and a snake that flees or dies each carry a different weight. If you first recall whether what you felt in the dream was gladness or fear, it becomes easier to judge which of the two readings fits you now.
Auspicious Dreams, Ominous Dreams, and Reverse Reading
Dream interpretation distinguishes between auspicious dreams and ominous dreams to be careful of, but interestingly there is also a tradition of the 'reverse dream,' read the opposite way. A dream of weeping hard is said to mean a joyful event instead, and a dream of fire blazing to mean wealth. This reflects the long experience that a dream's emotion and reality's outcome can be inverted, telling us that the same dream may be read differently according to its feeling and context.
When one dream holds several symbols
Real dreams rarely contain just one symbol, so the practical task of dream reading is how to read several together. If you type a whole sentence such as “a snake and a pig in my dream” into this site's search box, it finds the symbols in the sentence and shows the two readings, snake and pig, side by side. In traditional lore both are symbols tied to wealth, so the dream is read as one in which the two strengthen each other's meaning, and when one is auspicious and the other inauspicious, more weight goes to the closing scene and to your mood the moment you woke up. For a dream whose scenes changed several times, look up each symbol separately, then read with the longest-lasting or clearest scene at the center and the rest around it.
Three common misunderstandings
The first is the saying that dreams always mean the opposite. Symbols read in reverse are limited to a few, such as dung, blood or crying, and most symbols are read for what they are. The second is the idea that a bad dream means something bad will surely happen, yet even traditional lore treated inauspicious dreams as signals pointing to something to watch out for, not as fixed outcomes. The third is the belief that a conception dream reveals a baby's sex or future precisely. It is enough to enjoy conception dreams as stories that carry a family's hope for a new life, and they are not something to base the baby's sex on.
A Wise Attitude Toward Dreams
The best way to enjoy dream interpretation is to take the reading as a reference while reading it against your own situation. Even the same dream of a snake takes on a different meaning depending on your mood that day and the circumstances you face. Receive good dreams as encouragement and ominous ones as a sign to be careful, and above all, looking into the emotion a dream leaves behind is the path to the true message it offers.
What sleep science says about dreams
According to modern sleep research, people cycle between light and deep sleep four or five times a night in roughly 90-minute rounds, and vivid dreams with a storyline come mostly in REM sleep. Because REM periods grow longer toward dawn, it is natural that the dream just before you wake in the morning is the one that stays with you best. How well people remember dreams varies widely, and most people who barely recall any dreams are in fact still dreaming. Science does not tell us what a dream means, but the finding that dreams are tied to the process of reweaving the day's memories and feelings sits close to the view that reads dreams as a mirror of the mind.
Dream interpretation is an old wisdom and a delightful pastime for reading the symbols the unconscious hands us. If you are curious about last night's dream, search a symbol or choose from a category and see both the traditional and modern readings together.