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Books

Dreaming Souls by Owen Flanagan

Ilya Farber discovers a dream of a book by the quirky and perceptive Owen Flanagan.

What are dreams for? Why do we spend part of every night experiencing crazy stories, which we remember only dimly upon awakening? Where do these stories come from, and what do they mean?

Most traditional answers assume that dreams really are stories, in the sense that they have a meaning and are told for a reason. The earliest dream theories held that dreams were messages from dead relatives or from the gods. These messages might be simple or complex, might be straightforward or might be so obscure as to require the interpretive assistance of an oracle or shaman; but in each case, dreams were to be understood as communication, as somebody else telling us something while we sleep.

Within the scientific tradition, it has become implausible that there are any such entities out there to be talking to us, but the model of dreams-as-messages has not lost its appeal. What Freud and Jung saw was that dreams could be messages from ourselves, as long as there is some part of ourselves that we don’t have direct access to.

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