Dreaming - A Creative Process

Man in his dream becomes a creator: there are no real chariots in that state, no horses, no roads. There are no blessings there, no joys, but he himself creates blessings, happiness and joys… He indeed is the creator.

Thus, Three Thousand Years ago, the Upanishads saw the dream as a creative process. In the course of centuries, scarcely any other human phenomenon has become so much the victim of underestimation as the dream. The dream has been misused in the service of superstition and it has been seen as a meaningless by-product of sleep, as a kind of “short-circuit of the brain.”

Modern dream research, both on the psychological and physiological level, has begun to re-establish the inherent, vital and creative character of the dream. This rediscovery started with Freud's pioneering Interpretation of Dreams. Here the dream is no longer seen as a result of magic forces or as a mere byproduct of somatic processes, but as a meaningful phenomenon: “the royal road to the unconscious.”

The dream has remained a “royal road” but, having been built during the end of the nineteenth century, today this road clearly reveals the impact of the period in which it was constructed. In accordance with the mechanistic concepts of physics and evolution which prevailed at that time, the dream was considered an escape valve for increased instinctual pressure, providing relief by fulfilling infantile libidinous wishes.

In an unconscious internalization of the main aspects of the Victorian culture, dream symbolism was seen as occurring in the darkness of lessened apperception and necessitated by censorship. This censorship transformed tabooed libidinous content into innocent-looking substitute images. The “unconscious” to which the royal road led was envisaged, a priori, as being inhabited exclusively by libidinous, aggressive and destructive instincts. Thus, the dream could express no more, and the royal road became a narrow and, often, a dead-end road.

However, on the unconscious level, not