In a recent talk in Zurich, German psychoanalyst Konstantin Roessler surveyed the current state of dream research. Tracing some of the earlier scientific studies on dreams, he made a renewed case for the importance of dreams. Even formerly skeptical neuroscientists have now begun to see the meaning, purpose, and value of dreams for everyday life and overall psychic health.

Not too long ago, it was a widespread view that dreams were mostly meaningless nocturnal activities. Roessler cited one of the leading scientific voices on dreams, Allan Hobson, who argued that there were no functions of dreams.

As Hobson described, dreams were “meaningless electrical discharge” (1977). This view is echoed in a lot of colloquial reports of dreams, by people who say either that they don’t dream (which is not true) or that dreams are merely random “stuff” in the psyche that is “too weird” to be of any real meaning.

Hobson also critiqued the idea that there was hidden meaning within dreams, calling this notion the “mystique of fortune cookie dream interpretation” (1977). Since he was a psychiatrist and M.D., it seems likely that his resistance to interpretation rested on the idea's scientific merit, or lack thereof. How could we claim, for example, that being........

© Psychology Today