PLACING FREUD’S THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS INTO THE CONTEXT OF ISLAMIC DREAM-ANALYSIS

 (An Elementary Critique)

Hafiz Abrar Ahmad

Dreams are an essential part of human life. People, regardless of any religion, want to be au fait with the interpretation of their dreams. In this regard, the dreamers may consult either Freudian system of interpretations or the Islamic system. The question, however, arises as to which system of dream-interpretation is more practicable in human life, the Islamic or Freudian? Freudian System is a man-made system based on Freud’s own experiences. The Islamic System, on the other hand, is based on divine sanctions and the laws interpreted first by prophets and then by certain scholars as well. However, to answer such questions, it is indispensable to make a comparison of the two systems and thus reach some conclusion.

Freudian Hermeneutics:

That every dream has a sensual background was never the claim of Freud. His time to time affirmation that

The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognize that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes.1

cannot be generalized. Perhaps it became Freud’s fate to feel like Cassandra, whose message was constantly and seemingly willfully misinterpreted. And, to be very accurate, it was this sort of misrepresentation that impelled him to assert his ideas. At one place, he explains his position that,

The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams …. But it is also true that many dreams which appear to be indifferent and which one would no regard as in any respect peculiar lead back on analysis to wishful impulses which are unmistakably sexual and often of an unexpected.² 

This, however, indubitably leads to another of his phenomena that a dream is a disguised and distorted expression of a repressed and forbidden wish. The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud divides the content of dreams into two categories, namely “manifest-content” and “latent-content”. What we remember of a dream is the manifest-content, what causes the dream is the latent, repressed and unconscious content. It implies that it is the manifest-content of a dream that actually expresses our repressed and forbidden wishes in the course of our dreams. And the latent-content of a dream is, in fact, what is stored in our unconscious from our near past. It was Freud’s general observation, and can be attested from our own dreams also, that most of the dreams originate from the most recent twenty-four hours of the dreamer. Yet he distinguished four specific ways in which a dream may originate:

1.       A recent and important fact of the dreamer’s emotional life is directly represented in the dream. Such dreams are very much self-explanatory and require no interpretation. Examples come mostly from the simple wish-fulfilment dreams of children.

2.       Several recent and important ideas are blended into a simple whole by the dream. In this case, an analysis of the dream, simply contingent upon that aspect of dream-work that Freud called ‘condensation’, is essential.

3.       One or a number of recent and important events in the dreamer’s emotional life may be represented in the dream by an equally recent but relatively apathetic memory. Deciphering such a dream entails what Freud called ‘displacement’.

4.       An important but long-past and buried memory or idea is represented in the dream by a recent and relatively indifferent impression. Such dreams are very frequent with the individuals whose emotional waking life is somewhat perplexed.

From the above perusal, one important fact that can be deduced is that a dream, according to Freudian Hermeneutics, has mainly two characteristics:

1. Wish-fulfilment;

2. Past link;

These two characteristics serve as a bridge between the latent-content and the phantasmagoria of manifest-content, and the mechanisms that serve to translate and distort the latent content into the manifest content were listed by Freud. He called them condensation, displacement, dramatization, symbolization and secondary elaboration.

Let us consider each of them in turn.

1.      Condensation

Under the heading of condensation, come the dreams (the manifest-content) in which one single idea stands for a great many associations which, in turn, lead to quite separate, although frequently overlapping, ideas in the latent content of the dream. In simple words, under this process, one recognizable idea or memory stands, in fact, for a number of previously unrecognizable, far more important and apparently irrelevant and unrelated ideas or memories. To this process, Freud gave a peculiar name, ‘over-determination’.

In his The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud gives many examples, in this regard, but the most suitable example rests with Frink in his Morbid Fears and Compulsions. Frink reports:

A young American woman dreamed that she was walking on Fifth Avenue with a friend, looking for a new hat. Finally she went in and bought one. This apparently trivial recollection was the total content of the manifest dream as remembered by the dreamer.

Association and analysis led to the following data:

The walk with the friend the previous day had actually taken place, and had indeed been along Fifth Avenue. There had however been no question of the purchase of a new hat. Moving on from this the dreamer said that in fact her husband had been ill in bed that day. The illness was only a trivial and transient one, but she had been worried by her private preoccupation with the possibility of her husband’s death. When her friend called, her husband, who had noticed her quietness and apparent gloom, had suggested that she and her friend should go out together to get out of the house for a bit. During their walk, the dreamer had found herself discussing a man whom she had known before her marriage. At this point her associations ceased. Frink asked her to go on, and eventually she said that this was a man with whom she had at one time thought she was in love. Frink asked her if she had ever considered marrying this man. She then laughed unhappily and said that he had never asked her, and that their financial and social positions had been so different that it would be fantastic even to dream of it. Despite this revelation, she was still unable to associate further to the idea of this man, and her next association concerned buying the hat. She then admitted that she was very partial to hats, and would like to have bought many, but in fact she and her husband could not afford this kind of expenditure. At this point, she suddenly remembered that the hat she had bought in the dream had been black hat. ‘It was a mourning hat….’, she added. This final detail began to make the whole dream clear.[2]

Freud himself is of the opinion that, during the course of interpretation, a previously omitted fragment of a dream frequently emerges, and the dreamer overtly admits that until then that fragment had been entirely forgotten:

This part of the dream which had been wrested from forgetfulness is always the most significant part. It lies on the shortest path to the solution of the dream, and it is for that very reason it was most exposed to the resistance….[3]

Frink interprets this dream as follows:

The day before the dream, the patient had feared that her husband might die. That night she dreamed that she had bought a mourning hat, which suggested a forbidden wish for her husband’s death, which had troubled her as an irrational anxiety in the daytime, and had then emerged as part of the latent content of the dream. In her waking life, she could not have afforded a new hat; in the dream she bought one without hesitation. This implied that she was better off, as indeed she would have been if she had married the man with whom she had first been in love. It emerged from the dream that in fact the woman had not only wished that she had married the first man, but had believed that despite the social difference which had seemed decisive to her, he too had wanted to marry her. Neither of them had ever got to the point of doing anything about it. The condensation in dream is of three different repressed wishes, all of them disguised, all of them forbidden by her real circumstances, to which consciously she was reconciled. She wished she were free to marry the first man, which would imply that she wanted her husband out of the way. She wished she were free to spend the money which this other marriage would have made available to her, and in spending it, she signified both the change in her marital and financial position, and the ending of her actual husband’s claims and need of her, by his death.[4]

In this dream, beneath one single idea or memory – that of buying a black (mourning) hat – lies the three-fold forbidden wish:

a)       For her husband’s death.

b)      For her to have married the man she first loved.

c)       For her to have plenty of money.

It implies that if her husband were dead and she had married her first love, the dream would have been a different one, or at least the hat she bought would not have been a mourning hat.

2.      Displacement

The term displacement, under Freudian Hermeneutics, can be defined as the removal of a significant and recognizable idea or memory from the manifest dream and its replacement by an initially incomprehensible symbolic idea or act. It implies that displacement is a process whereby the emotional charge is separated from its real object or content and attached to an entirely different one. One thing more that comes forth is that it is this displacement that makes an initially trivial dream appear emotionally significant, or conversely, an initially terrible or important dream appear trivial and insignificant. Moreover, it also indicates the involvement of symbolism in the manifest dream, which will be dealt with, later on, separately as a topic.

The dream already discussed under the heading of condensation is a good manifestation of displacement also, yet another case from Frink will provide an even more strong illustration. One of his patients was a girl suffering from an obsessional neurosis, who dreamed that she was in the presence of someone whom she could not identify, but who seemed important to her. She wanted to give him something and what she gave him was her comb. Once again this was all she could relate as the manifest content of the dream and, surprisingly enough, it seemed to mean nothing to her.

Analysis revealed that she, being a Jewess belonging to a strictly orthodox family, had wanted to marry a Protestant but could not as the rule against marrying out had prevented this, though she herself had believed that there was no real obstacle to such a mixed marriage. This forbidden wish of hers gave birth to the aforementioned dream where displacement had removed the idea of marrying the man from the manifest content, and replaced it by the initially incomprehensible symbolic act of giving him her comb. This displacement was, in fact, engendered by her remembrance of a phrase that she had heard in her childhood when she had been about to comb her hair with somebody else’s comb. The person had said to her, “Don’t do that, you will mix the breed”. Now, in her dream she had offered her comb to the man she wanted to marry, showing her urge to mix the breed, in fact to marry him and bear his children. It is exactly as though manifest dreams were smuggled messages in code, of the kind used in war to convey secret meanings to resistance movements within an enemy-occupied country.

3.         Dramatization

Dramatization in dreams, as Freud would suggest, can be defined as ‘the dramatic sequence of the dream linked with the unexpressed relationships which only interpretation can uncover’.

In other words, a dream is a series of phantasmagorias having no apparent relationships. Every picture bears a story but does not tell the story in terms of what it really means. The ideas, the feelings, the total sum of the dream remains without logic or explicit connexion. This is why nothing but free association and an understanding of symbolization can unfold the truth.

4.      Symbolization

Symbolization is an integral part of every human dream. When we say that every phantasmagoria of a dream bears a story in it but does not tell the story in terms of what it really means, we are, in fact, talking about the symbolism present in the dream. Freud’s own words about the symbolism of dreams were:

Symbolism is perhaps the most remarkable chapter of the history of dreams. In the first place, since symbols are stable translations, they realize to some extent the ideal of the ancient as well as of the popular interpretation of dreams, from which, with our technique, we had departed widely. They allow us in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer, who indeed would in any case have nothing to tell us about the symbol. If we are acquainted with the ordinary dream-symbols, and in addition with the dreamer’s personality, the circumstances in which he lives and the impressions which preceded the occurrence of the dream, we are often in a position to interpret a dream straightaway.[5]

In his The Interpretation of Dreams, most of the symbols presented by Freud are sexual.

Fraud says about symbolism that this would arouse tremendous resistance and opposition in many of his hearers and readers. In one way he understood this, in another he still found it ambiguous and obscure that even his professional colleagues should be so outraged by what he had to say, whereas the existence of such symbolism in myths, religion, art and language was not only beyond all doubt but unreservedly accepted by all educated people.

5.      Secondary Elaboration

The manifest content of the dream is not in itself to be expected to make sense, to be coherent, or necessarily to illustrate directly any aspect of the latent content. The more the dream work succeeds in separating manifest and latent content, the more incomprehensible will the manifest dream be and, therefore, the more indispensable the reversal or undoing of the dream work becomes. The technique of this reversal is simply free association to each separate item of the dream, and the understanding of the specific symbolic language common in varying degree to all dreams. The starting point of this free association is simply what we call secondary elaboration. It is, in simple words, the outcome of the dreamer’s natural tendency on waking to make some sort of sense, to himself, of his recollection of the dream. Most of us, awakening from dreams, feel called upon to undertake some degree of secondary elaboration to make them capable of expression in words. It needs, however, to be reiterated that the deciphering of one part of the manifest dream by another part, as though the dreams were a coherent conception, will be sheer naivety.

Freud believes in the twofold purpose of dreams, physiological and psychological. The physiological purpose of a dream, Freud suggests, is the preservation of sleep. It lets feelings and emotions to be worked through which otherwise may disturb sleep. Psychologically, the purpose of a dream is to deplete the tensions of a repressed wish which otherwise would charge the dream with anxiety, making the process unsuccessful and keep the dreamer awake. It implies that as soon as the compromise between the repression and the return of the repressed material matures the dream becomes relatively tolerable to the sleeper and succeeds in protecting his sleep. At this stage, the question may arise as to what is the force that engenders this compromise? The answer to this is ‘the censor’. Then what is ‘the censor’?

The censor simply denotes the sum of the urges which prevail in the consciousness of a given individual, in so far as the said urges exercise an inhibitory function upon the urges opposed to them, which they drive back into the unconscious. It must, however, be noted that in Freud’s views this inhibitory function is only consciously exercised in very early life; it soon becomes automatic, then unconscious, and repression takes the place of suppression. Not only does the censor consign to the unconscious the urges which oppose it and which have penetrated into consciousness, but its inhibitory power is exercised even before their entry into consciousness. This is one of Freud’s most highly original concepts.[6]

The censor is then, in fact, the outcome of an individual’s upbringing. To put it differently, it is the upbringing of an individual, at his early age, that shapes his censor force and that is why two different persons may exhibit different degrees of resistance towards one particular dream. 

Islamic Hermeneutics:

While discussing Freudian Hermeneutics, we had concluded that it based on two primary characteristics, viz past link and unfulfilled desire (forbidden wish). Freud had, in fact, juxtaposed two different kinds of dreams into an amalgam; and therefore, he left it to the future researchers to decipher. Keeping these two features in the mind, let us proceed towards Islamic Hermeneutics.

Early Islamic scholars believed that dreams based on the dominant humour* of the dreamer. The one who is overwhelmed by melancholy sees in his dreams either graves, darkness, terrors or frights; the one infected by choler sees fire and lights; the one overwhelmed by phlegm sees rivers, waters, waves etc; and the one with blood sees beverages, air, cymbals and flutes. Yet, after acute research, it can be claimed that dreams are intrinsically of two kinds; the ‘fallacious’ dreams and the ‘veracious’ dreams. The former can be subdivided into seven more kinds and the latter into five.[7]

(A) Fallacious Dreams

Fallacious dreams are those which have very little to do with the real life of the dreamer, and therefore need no interpretation. They are only meant to tease the dreamer in one way or the other. Following are the main examples of such dreams:

         i.            Monologue Dreams

In such dreams, the dreamer chats to his inner self and vice versa. Such a dream may be a corollary to some anxiety, unfulfilled desire, intricacy or bewilderment in the dreamer’s waking life. It may, also, be the dreamer’s inner evil force enticing him to commit some evil.

        ii.            Wet Dreams

The common dreams that result in orgasm are termed as wet dreams. They, too, may be a sequel of some forbidden wish ripe in the unconscious of the dreamer and may provide an outlet to the unfulfilled desires in order to prevent frustration.

       iii.            Pavur Nocturnus

They are satanic in nature and are fabricated by Satan or some phantom. Such dreams, though tormenting, never harm the dreamer. They only operate as evil forces to dissuade the dreamer from performing some specific good.

      iv.            Sorcery Dreams

They are as troublesome as satanic dreams. They include the frightening dreams wherein the dreamer either experiences or confronts necromancy, theurgy and conjuring. In such dreams, the dreamer may be visiting some fairy-world and may see himself busy in merrymaking with fairies. The dreamer may, sometimes, find himself entangled in some magical trap.

       v.            Devil-sighting Dreams

As is manifest from the heading per se, these dreams make the dreamer visualize the devil itself. They are also devised by Satan and the purpose of such dreams is only to indicate whether the dreamer, in his waking life, is following the devil’s will or not. If someone sees the devil gleeful in the dream, the connotation is not good, for to please the devil itself is impious and sacrilegious. On the contrary, if the devil is found in distress in the dream, it is a good sign, for the confounding of the devil contributes to the perfection of one’s moral self.

      vi.            Humour Dreams

In such type of dreams, the working force is that of the dominant humour of the dreamer. He, as already mentioned in the beginning, dreams under the compulsion of his dominant humour. So, he dreams of either storms, tides, darkness, rivers, waves, cymbals or flutes, as the case may be.

     vii.            Restoration Dreams

The dreams wherein the dreamer recalls his past, actually or symbolically, are categorized under the heading of Restoration Dreams. They are, in a way, the echo of the dreamer’s past emotional events and, as is obvious, are those described by Freud also.

(B) Veracious Dreams

Veracious dreams hinge not only upon the time of its occurrence but also upon the season and weather. The example, in this context, comes from the reverent hermeneutist Ibn-e-Sireen. Once a person came to him and said that he had dreamt of fire in the forest. Ibn-e-Sireen advised the dreamer to visit and explore that forest for there laid some hidden treasure for him. The dreamer followed his advice and soon found the treasure. After a certain span of time, another man came and narrated the same dream. But this time Ibn-e-Sireen advised the dreamer to evade visiting that forest for he may die there. Obsessed with love for wealth, the dreamer paid little heed to Ibn-e-Sireen’s advice and went to the forest. In the forest, some beast attacked him and tore him to pieces.  At the wonderment of his companions, Ibn-e-Sireen explained that the first dreamer had dreamt of fire in the winter and fire in the winter is comfort while the latter had dreamt it in the summer and fire in the summer is discomfort. All this betrays that two similar dreams may give two different interpretations, depending on the nature of the dreamer, time and season.

Muslim Hermeneutists are of the opinion that veracious dreams mainly acquire three parts of the daily twenty-four hours[8]:

a)                   the hours immediately followed by aurora;

b)                  the hours after the sunrise;

c)                   the hours of nap at noon;

It is, however, worth quoting that the most unreliable dreams are those dreamt in utter cold and rain. Moreover, a veracious dream does not require a dreamer to be necessarily a Muslim and adult. It may even come to a non-Muslim as well as a non-adult. In former case, the dream of the non-Muslim Pharaoh in the era of Prophet Joseph (AI) is evident:

And the king said: Lo! I saw in a dream seven fat kine which seven lean were eating, and seven green ears of corn and other (seven) dry. O notables! Expound for me my vision, if ye can interpret dreams[1] (Surah Yousaf, 43).

As for the dream of a non-adult, that of Prophet Joseph himself, when he was a child, suffices:

When Joseph said unto his father: O my father! Lo! I saw in a dream eleven planets and the sun and the moon, I saw them prostrating themselves unto me (Ibid., 4) 

Though the proper interpretation of such dreams, however, requires a vast Islamic knowledge, there are some parameters that can tell us about the main characteristics of a successful hermeneutist by Islamic standards. These characteristics can be enumerated as follows:

i)                     He should be well versed in the discipline of Quranic Hermeneutics (Tabeer);

ii)                    He should be well versed in Hadith Hermeneutics (Tabeer);

iii)                   He should have a high level mastery of Arabic language – its syntactic and paradigmatic rules, its idioms, comprehensions etc.

iv)                  He should be a devoutly true person in his daily life.

v)                   He should be aware of the interpretations made by the reverent Muslim hermeneutists of different dreams in the past, as precedents.[9]

These are the major, though not only, characteristics of an interpreter. Moreover, a righteous and sincere interpreter always tries to interpret a dream in a positive way and tries his level best to eschew the dark side of a dream, for, according to the saying of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), a dream is always contingent upon its interpretation.

It needs to be divulged here that in the parameters of the aforementioned characteristics (of the interpreter as well as the time of dreams) only repose and veracious dreams are interpreted by Muslim hermeneutists, since these have the capability of interpretation because they prophesy and effect future events. As far as the fallacious dreams are concerned, they have nothing to envisage for the future and possess no utility for interpretative systems.

i.                   Evident Dreams

They are incontrovertibly true dreams and are said to be the forty-seventh part of prophethood. They come directly from God without any intermediary. A very telling example of such dreams can be quoted from Quran itself:

Allah hath fulfilled the vision for His messenger in very truth. Ye shall indeed enter the Inviolable Place of Worship, if Allah will, secure, (having your hair) shaven and cut, not fearing. But He knoweth that which ye know not, and hath given you a near victory beforehand (Surah al-Fatah, 27).

ii.          Glad-tidings  

In such dreams, the dreamer visualizes God, the prophets, some religious scholar or his own righteous forefathers. Such dream is, in fact, a prophesy of some future event and the event may be a good as well as bad one. Thus it may be even a warning from the Creator, His messenger or some other source and is mostly symbolic in nature. This is the type of dream about which the beloved wife of the prophet, Hazrat Ayesha (GBH), said that in his early days of prophethood, the prophet (PBUH) got inspiration from God through dreams.

iii.          Inspirational Dreams

A dreamer may, sometimes, get inspiration from the Dream-Angel in some particular matter. The angel advises him in the matter by quoting some examples. These examples may be from Quran as well as from other divine books, depending on the mental disposition of the dreamer. If the dreamer, the angel thinks, is not capable of deducing any idea from the aforesaid sources, the examples are given from daily life wisdom. 

iv.         Symbolic Dreams

Akin to the Inspirational Dreams, these dreams, too, are devised by spirits (the angels). Yet, they are different in that these dreams may be from any type of angel, not necessarily from the Dream-Angel, and they warn the dreamer symbolically of some future mishap. For instance, if an angel warns someone in his dream that his wife intends to poison him through one of his friends, it would imply that his wife has been cuckolding him and has indulged in fornication with that friend.

v.          Paradoxical Dreams  

A paradoxical dream always bears opposite meaning and only an expert hermeneutist can decipher its interpretation. It sometimes presents a juxtaposition of good and evil and the dominance of one of them leads to its interpretation. For example, if someone dreams that he is playing a trumpet in a mosque, it portends that he would confess his sins and would lead a religious life in the future. Contrary to this, if someone dreams that he is reciting Quran in the lavatory, it presages that in his future, the dreamer would lead a sinful life.

Besides the kinds enumerated above, there is a very unique type of dream in Islamic dream-theory which exists nowhere else. This type of dream may be named as ‘Consultation Dream’. The Consultation Dream is an Islamic way of seeking advice from Allah in some particular matter. The seeker offers two raka’ats prayer and invokes Allah for an advice in the matter he wants. Then he goes to sleep with the idea in his mind that he would be guided by Allah in the dream. In his dream, he is given some right direction in the matter which he follows after he awakes. This method of seeking advice of Allah was taught by the Prophet himself to his companions and cannot, therefore, be gainsaid.

All this attests that Islamic hermeneutics covers a wide range of dreams and that it gives the dreamers an accurate understanding of their dreams – fallacious as well as veracious. That is why Muslims rarely fear from anxiety dreams because an anxiety dream, as Freud would name it, is of no significance according to the Islamic hermeneutics and Muslims, therefore, feel no need to ponder over its interpretation. To the veracious dreams, they, however, not only pay attention but also interpret them according to the Islamic interpretative system and thus escape any sort of mental perplexity.  

Conclusion

Being irreligious, and especially a non-Muslim, Freud had very little knowledge of the dream-theory propounded by different religions. Though his Interpretation of Dreams presents an unbiased and almost unerring analysis of dreams, it includes only a few types of dreams. It gives us an amalgam of different kinds of fallacious dreams while totally ignores the veracious dreams because veracious dreams have almost nothing to do with one’s psyche; and were, therefore, totally unknown to psychologists like Freud.  Freud amalgamates, in his book, the concepts of wet dreams, restoration-dreams, humour-dreams and monologue-dreams and holds that there are two characteristics of these dreams, past-link and wish-fulfilment. To the sorcery–dreams, pavur nocturnus and devil-sighting dreams, collectively, he gives the name of anxiety-dreams

Since the future is more important than the past of a dreamer, he would definitely prefer Islamic Hermeneutics in order to know about his future. Yet, there is another feature of Islamic Hermeneutics, the Consultation Dream, which makes it more comprehensive than Freudian Hermeneutics.

Finally, in conclusion,one could say that (a) Freudian Hermeneutics is the product of the researches/studies of one individual, in the Western context, in the ‘Modern’ post-Renaissance period; whereas (b) Islamic Hermeneutics represents a divinely revealed system incorporating the entire structure of human existence in this world and the next, which is in itself detailed, complete and traditionally active since many centuries in various parts of the Islamic world.

References

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