A Short History of Dream Science
From Artemidorus to the hot zone: who thought what, and when it was tested.
Dream interpretation is older than dream science by three thousand years. The Egyptian dream book of the Chester Beatty papyrus (c. 1275 BC) lists dreams with their meanings, good and bad; Artemidorus of Daldis (second century AD) wrote the Oneirocritica, five books of a working interpreter who distinguished the dream that merely reflects the day (enhypnion) from the one that foretells (oneiros), and classified the latter by whether its meaning was direct or allegorical. Aristotle, in On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep, held them to be residues of sense impression, denied they came from the gods, and allowed that a physician might read an illness in them before the patient felt it.
The nineteenth century began the measurement. Alfred Maury (1861) had himself woken and stimulated and recorded the dreams that formed around the stimulus; the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys (1867) kept a dream journal for decades and taught himself to direct his dreams, which is the first scientific account of lucid dreaming; Mary Calkins (1893) coded 375 dreams for their content and found the continuity with waking life that Hall would find again. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) proposed the dream as disguised wish, with a mechanism of condensation and displacement, and set the century’s agenda; Jung’s compensation and archetypes (1916 onward) were the chief alternative within the analytic tradition.
The laboratory arrived in 1953, and the chapter on what it found gives the sequence: Aserinsky and Kleitman, Dement, Foulkes, Jouvet, Hall and Van de Castle; the activation-synthesis theory of 1977 and Solms’s answer from the lesion studies; the content analysis that found continuity and not compensation; the lucid-dream signals of 1981; and the imaging of the dreaming brain since 2000, with Siclari’s posterior hot zone (2017) and Horikawa’s decoding (2013). The analytic theories have mostly not survived the tests that could be put to them; the folk observations, that the dream is emotional, personal, continuous with the day, and sometimes useful, have.
What remains open is the function, if there is one, and the relation of the dream to the sleep in which it occurs. The reader of this site stands where Aristotle stood, with a better instrument: the journal, kept honestly over months, remains the best record of one person’s dreaming that anyone has, and the laboratory’s norms are what it can now be read against.
Sources
- Artemidorus. Oneirocritica, trans. Harris-McCoy (Oxford, 2012).
- Aristotle. On Dreams and On Divination in Sleep, in Parva Naturalia, trans. Gallop (1996).
- Maury, A. (1861). Le sommeil et les rêves. Didier.
- Hervey de Saint-Denys, L. (1867). Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger. Amyot.
- Calkins, M. W. (1893). “Statistics of dreams.” American Journal of Psychology 5.
- Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. Deuticke.
- Hobson, J. A. (1988). The Dreaming Brain. Basic Books.
A review of the literature for readers; not medical advice.