The renowned and extremely influential psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s work was based on the belief that dreams were disguised expressions of what went on below the surface of the mind. Carl Jung, who was originally a pupil of Freud’s, had a more spiritual perspective and said, ‘Dreams may give expression to ineluctable truths, to philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies… anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions and heaven knows what besides. ’Herbert Silberer, a contemporary of the two, took a much more mystical approach and studied the state between waking and sleeping. He formed the theory of Intraversion, which necessitates the descent of the individual into the soul/psyche from which a great deal of information and knowledge can be drawn.
Calvin Hall in the mid-20th century developed a cognitive (relating to intellectual activity) theory of dreams which states that dreams express ‘conceptions’of self, family members, friends and social environment. With Robert van de Castle he developed the quantitative analysis of dream content, perhaps the first time that truly scientific methods had been applied to dream analysis. He also saw dream content as metaphor – one thing conceived as representing another: a symbol.
