The lost discipline of dream interpretation

Raoul Glaber, an 11th-century French Benedictine monk, frequently recorded his experiences in a diary. Known to be superstitious, he wrote of being assailed by a demon who constantly tempted the monk to surrender himself to the ‘sweet repose’ of sleep and ignore the bell for prayers. He was writing at a time when night-time sleep was divided into two phases. The first sleep started around nine in the evening and lasted till midnight. For the next couple of hours, people bathed, socialised, prayed and meditated. When they were tired again, they lulled themselves to a second sleep and woke up for the day around dawn. The second sleep was forbidden for Benedictines.

In modern medical terms, the ‘first sleep’ is the NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, simply the body’s daily biological reset. The ‘second sleep’ is what is known as REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, characterised by rich and vivid dreams. Glaber, then, was not really being assailed by a demon; it was his own subconscious mind asking him to go back to sleep. But why couldn’t he simply, well, just go back to bed? Why should going to sleep be associated with the demonic?

Whether they have believed themselves to be channelling God or in league with the devil, human beings have always paid significant attention to dreams. Often seen as carriers of prophecies and future events, dreams were subjected to systematic interpretation in pre-modern societies. During the Middle Ages, the intervening period between the two sleeps was popularly considered to be the best time to reflect on one’s dreams for clues about what they could mean.

By the 12th century, the Church had begun to institutionalise confession, which often meant that priests were forced to contend with ‘sinful’ dreams. By the 1600s, dream interpretation was even seen as ‘heretical’. A couple of centuries later, reliance on dreams to make important trade decisions waned and augury fell out of favour at royal courts. When Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb at the end of the 19th century, artificial light became the dominant reality of the hours that constituted the first sleep. The world became more lit up than ever before while our consciousness retreated further into the darkness.

We went to sleep later and eventually a monophasic pattern of sleep began to emerge where we sleep for six to eight hours at length. No more did we come alive during the wee hours of the night when life could acquire a new meaning altogether. While we still experience REM sleep and dreaming, we no longer attach as much significance to those liminal messages from our deepest recesses. Dreams are just a glitch, a break, in our efforts to realise our conscious goals and aspirations. In 1992, a psychiatrist named Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which he placed a group of people in darkness for about 14 hours every day and found that, after a month, their sleep patterns settled into the pre-modern biphasic pattern of sleep.

The treasured eight-hour-a-night sleep cycle is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the process of shifting from biphasic to monophasic sleep, we have lost something vital. The historian A. Roger Ekirch writes that ‘with the transition to a new pattern of slumber, at once consolidated and more compressed, increasing numbers lost touch with their dreams and, as a consequence, a traditional avenue to their deepest emotions. It is no small irony that, by turning night into day, modern technology has helped to obstruct our oldest path to the human psyche. That, very likely, has been the greatest loss’.

Even though dream interpretation continues to survive in psychoanalysis, the branch of study founded by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, it is nowhere near as pervasive as the traditional belief in dreams as visions, which could be as enlightening as they were occasionally dangerous. What we lost in the process was not just our propensity for dream interpretation, but what those intervening hours of reflection meant for our sense of consciousness.

Dreaming, then, is not a mere cognitive residue of our waking hours but the foundation upon which we perceive the unknowable aspects of reality itself. Even Matthew Walker, a sleep scientist, posits in his book Why We Sleep that ‘sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged’. It may be reliably argued, then, that in mechanising our sleep, we mechanised our waking consciousness too.

We may not be able to go back to a biphasic mode of sleep today, but we can definitely investigate older imaginative and mystical worlds with a renewed sense of importance. We may just discover that the mystical power of dreamtime has not been lost, only obscured.