In the preceding blurb on understanding the role of puns in dream language, we focused on how the imagery of coins (change) could be used to reflect a modification or ‘change’ in behavior, if the language used were English. Conceptions of how change can occur and the type of causative factors that lead to shifts in behavior or outcomes can be culturally based. If a Latin-American person were holding a glass of water in his hand and it were to come crashing down to the floor, the person would typically explain this event by saying: ‘el vaso cayó de mi mano’ (the glass fell from my hand), whereas an English speaking person would typically say: ‘I dropped the glass,’ which indicates a sense that the person holding the glass was responsible for this outcome. In other words: ‘I personally accept responsibility for what happened,’ rather than considering that ‘the Universe was causing this to happen.’ Attribution of causality is therefore an important factor to appreciate if we wish to understand how cultural or ethnic factors influence our understanding of how waking behavior or dream awareness occurs. [Read More...]

Puns are involved whenever one word is substituted for another because they both sound the same. Our dreaming unconscious likes to match words that have similar sounds and assign them similar meanings. To dream about a ‘sun’, for example, might be saying something about a ‘son’. Of course, such comparisons fall flat when applied to another language. In Spanish for example, the word for ‘sun’ is ‘sol’ and the word for ‘son’ is ‘hijo’. To dream about a ‘sun’ might mean something about money in some Latin America countries, because a ‘sol’ is a unit of currency. Puns are thus only meaningful in their native language. That’s why some translations of ancient dream texts seem so incomprehensible to us today. An old Egyptian papyrus states that to dream about buttocks signify that a dreamer will soon be an orphan. This makes no sense unless we realize the word for buttocks and orphan sound the same in Egyptian. [Read More...]

In the previous teaching unit (Is There a Rosetta Stone to Decipher Dream Language?), I highlighted several points to keep in mind when you attempt to understand and translate your dream imagery. I referred exclusively to 20th century theorists, but some important points regarding dreams were also focused upon nearly two millennia ago by our dreaming ancestors. [Read More...]

The most visited object in the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone from Egypt, which dates back to 196 BC. The inscriptions carved on it show the same text in three different scripts and enabled scholars to obtain valuable information about ancient Egyptian literature and civilization. The term “Rosetta” is now used to describe a variety of techniques for the "decryption of encoded information" and is used in various forms of translation software such as the one that enables applications for a Power PC Processor to run on Apple systems. It's also used in software to learn a foreign language. [Read More...]

In the preceding blog, you were asked to review the content of one of your dreams and come up with a suitable title for it. In your reviewing efforts, you may have noted that some type of rather complicated or perhaps confusing incident from the preceding day was being described. Recognizable linkages between experiences you had during the day that seem to be replayed in your dreams are referred to as ‘day residue’. If you watch a TV show in which some police or soldiers are trying to control a shouting group of protestors and then dream about a similar situation, that would be a good example of ‘day residue’ influencing your dream. There are obviously many people, events and emotions that you encounter every day, so the question arises as to why certain elements are repeated again as ‘day residue’ material. The answer given by dream theorists is that there is an important emotional linkage between the remembered, witnessed, or experienced daytime events and unresolved conflicts that are harbored in the dreamer’s unconscious mind. [Read More...]