Dare to Dream

Although dreaming is not unique to human beings, our species has always paid particular attention to the experience of dreams, even to the point of being obsessive. From the ancient beliefs of divination or oneiromancy, which endowed dreams with prophetic meaning (the dream turned towards the future), to the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (the dream turned towards the past), dreams have been used as powerful tools of self-knowledge or world-control. In the call for papers for this issue, the editorial committee asked the following question: “Does the interpretation of dreams kill their ability to affect life?” Drawn from a Weird Studies podcast, in which writer J.F. Martel and musicologist Phil Ford discuss The Dream and the Underworld by psychologist James Hillman, the question is intriguing.

In his book, Hillman writes: “A dream compared with a mystery suggests that the dream is effective as long as it remains alive. … This implies to me that dreams can be killed by interpreters, so that the direct application of the dream as a message for the ego is probably less effective in actually changing consciousness and affecting life than is the dream still kept alive as an enigmatic image.¹ 1 - James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper Perennial, 1979), 122. We might wonder therefore if the will to analyze dreams by rationalizing them does not divest them of their multifaceted possibilities. This idea is addressed in our pages along with the suggestion that interpretation can be a violent act of extraction and a reminder that the rationalist Eurocentric perspective does not take into account the social and cultural specificity of dreams (for example, the holistic character of Indigenous epistemology). Maintaining their mystery might be a more interesting avenue to consider.