Most of us spend a third of our lives asleep, and 20 percent of those hours dreaming. Babies dream, the elderly dream, all of us between infancy and old age dream.

Our mysterious dream life has captured the fascination of humans since the beginning of recorded history. Theologians, psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists, artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, and others around the world have delved into their mystery. In the ancient world, dreams were a source of divination, examined to predict and sometimes forestall future events such as illness, famine, or war. We associate Sigmund Freud and modern psychoanalysis with codifying a method of dream interpretation, but the earliest written record of an interpretation of dreams comes from well before the time of Moses, in Mesopotamia, where dreams of important people were inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform. In The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE), Gilgamesh’s mother interprets his dream about a falling star as foretelling his meeting with a strong companion (Enkidu).1 Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Greeks believed dreams were direct revelations from the gods.

Where are we when we dream? Where do dreams come from? These questions continue to puzzle us. Dreams appear to be as real and palpable as waking reality, and yet we know they are not part of our day world. How should we relate to these vivid images and the stories they tell?

Dreams speak to us of the past, present, and future. Forgotten memories, friends of our youth, places we’ve visited, former pets and future children come unbidden in the depths of sleep, reminding us literally and symbolically of who we have been, who we are, and who we might become. They alert us to our inner world. If we dream about our child self, the dream may be referring to an actual

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