Dialogues of judgement and dream interpretation in folk tales

Some of the kings in the narrative actually follow Kantian orientation in their judgment and allow the right of necessity to enter into their thinking: they listen to others or (the good sense of) the truthful heart because of their limited or deficient knowledge. Others, delighted with their self-belief and mania for power, throw scorn on the law, on mercy, pardon, and forgiveness, and let themselves be led by anger, stupidity, complacency, stigma and desire for exclusion. In the tale narratives, they are further represented as scholars/wisemen, fortune-tellers, the ‘foresighted’, ancient old men, old women, wizards, taltoses (in the words of folklorist Ilona Nagy “mysterious people of fate”), doubles/doppelgangers, or animals with extraordinary abilities (the ability to speak human languages, or to transfigure themselves), prestigious kings from another country, ministers, advisors, witches who deceive the king (not uncommonly Gypsy women), depending on whether the intention is to link the giver of advice and the meaning of what he says to the sacred (biblical) or the profane (sometimes mythical), as it illuminates his/her existential character.

Towards a New Model of Dream Interpretation?

The discussion of an analytic session which includes the dream of a patient is followed by some theoretical reflections on contemporary dream interpretation in clinical psychoanalysis. The approach to dreams is increasingly intersubjective and relational. The focus is more on the dream as a curtain of illusion. Contemporary analysts are focused on the unconscious message in the dream about transference-countertransference dynamics, the functioning of the analyst and his way of intervening, the use of the dream as play material, the portrayal of the unconscious intrapsychic and relational situation, countertransference dreams and sequential dreams. The way of working with dreams is much influenced by the work of Bion and his followers.

Dream interpretation from a cognitive and cultural evolutionary perspective: the case of oneiromancy in traditional China

Why did people across the world and throughout history believe that dreams can foretell what will occur in the future? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question within a cultural evolutionary framework by emphasizing the cognitive aspect of dream interpretation; namely, the fact that dreams were often viewed as significant and interpretable has to do with various psychological and social factors that influence how people obtain and process information regarding the validity of dream interpretation as a technique. Through a comprehensive analysis of a large dataset of dream occurrences in the official Chinese historical records, I argue that the ubiquity and persistence of dream interpretation have both a theoretical component (supernatural worldview) and an empirical component (predictively accurate dream cases) which is particularly vulnerable to transmission errors and biases. The overwhelmingly successful records of dream prediction in transmitted texts, I suggest, is largely due to the fabrication and retrospective inference of past dreams, as well as the under-reporting of predictive failures. These “positive data” then reinforce individuals’ confidence in the predictive power of dreams. I finally show a potential decline of the popularity of dream interpretation in traditional China and offer a few suggestive explanations drawing on the unique characteristics of oneiromancy compared to other divination techniques.

The Will of the Gods: Patterns of Dream Interpretation in Early Tamil Literature

Societies interpreted their dreams in various ways. While dream interpretation has always been an essential part of medical and philosophical discourse, it was only recently that historians began to show certain interest in writing what is called the cultural history of dream interpretation. In fact, dreams, rituals, myths, social memories and consciously constructed histories all share certain similarities since they engage with the past and are expressed in a narrative form. Dream psychology, therefore, may provide a useful analytical tool for historians who are interested in mapping the mental structure of societies. This article is an attempt to unearth the patterns of dream interpretations by analysing the dream expressions found in Tamil literature up to the twelfth century ad. The social attitude towards dreams in the Sangam literature, early Tamil epics and Bhakti literatures is studied in the sociocultural context of their times. One can presume that the literary language of dreams more or less reflected the contemporary cultural beliefs and social practices.