All Dreams are True Dreams

One of the oldest and most enduring beliefs about dreams is that, whether magical or psychological, while some dreams are true and significant for our lives, many others are not. For instance, in Buddhism, dreams are either the result of clarity of mind or of the karmic traces of past personal problems. In Islam, dreams are either Ahkám, divine inspirations revealed by the archangel Gabriel, or Ahlám, illusionary phantoms sent by the agents of Iblis. For the Mohave, there are power-inducing sumach ahot or ‘lucky dreams’ and regular sumach dreams. While for the Congolese Yansi, dreams are ndoey ndeag, prophetic visions, or ndoey mutwe, “dreams of the head.”

Greek poet Homer provided the most lasting metaphor of the two types of dreams in the Odyssey (19.614-622), when Penelope, lamenting that her husband Odysseus has been lost at sea for ten years, asks a visiting stranger to interpret a dream she had in which Odysseus told her he would come home. When the stranger assures her to trust the dream, she tells him: 

Stranger, you should know that dreams 

Are hard to interpret, and don't always come true. 

There are two gates for dreams to drift through, 

One made of horn and the other of ivory. 

Dreams that pass through the gate of ivory 

Are deceptive dreams and will not come true, 

But when someone has a dream that has passed 

Through the gate of polished horn, that dream 

Will come true. 

The irony, of course, is that the stranger is actually Odysseus in disguise, suggesting that her dream is actually truer than Penelope realizes. The two gates of dream have been referenced in numerous later sources, both mythological and philosophical, from its appropriation in the Roman Virgil’s national epic, the Aeneid, to Neoplatonist and early Christians like Iamblichus and Tertullian, who tried to account for the veracity of dreams within their religious frameworks. While there is still speculation why horn and ivory were chosen by Homer as the substances for the gates of dreaming, Tertullian suggested that, “it is possible to see through horn, whereas ivory is untransparent.” 

The famed Lydian dream interpreter Artemidorus, in his Oneirocritica (1.1.1-4), distinguished psychologically-induced dreams, or enhypnion, from true and prophetic dreams, or oneiros, and even provided a fascinating (if fanciful) double etymology for oneiros that suggests how true dreams work and how to distinguish them from the false: true dreams “eirien,” that is, they ‘tell’ or ‘give tidings’ by “oreinein,” alerting and exciting the mind to action. An oneiros thus “shouts its message to each of us, saying, ‘Look at this, pay attention, use me to understand as best you can.’” True dreams, which have also been called ‘big dreams, ‘culture-pattern dreams,’ and ‘archetypal dreams,’ are those that are typically highly vivid and clear, emotionally evocative, spiritually numinous, highly-memorable, occur around critical or transformative points in our lives, and tend to incite the dreamer to waking action. 

Many ancient cultures believed that while the small number of highly vivid and impactful true dreams were sent by the gods or spirits, the majority of dreams were untrue because they are simply the result of psychological concerns or physiological symptoms bothering us while we sleep. This idea that dreams are the result of somatic effects became the bedrock for most modern scientific theories of dreams, which predominately reduce them to neurological and biological conditions, stripping them of any “truth value.” Because the kind of normal, insignificant dreams are the only kind that have been studied (due in part to the difficulty of producing powerful, spiritual dreams in the laboratory setting), some neurocognitive dream researchers like G. William Domhoff believe that the kind of vivid, magical dream that the ancients called true dreams don’t exist at all. 

Given the ubiquity of the idea that some dreams are true while others are false, it is perhaps surprising to find that in the most important ancient treatise on magical dreaming, the Neoplatonist Synesius’s De insomniis, Synesius refutes this dichotomy, declaring that Penelope “was not wise on the subject of dreams; if she had understood the art relating to them she would have made them all pass through the gate of horn.” Even if some dreams are more common and enigmatic than those which are divine and clear, Synesius makes the assertion that all dreams are true dreams. 

How can we reconcile the idea that some dreams clearly feel more viviid and veridical than others with this conviction that all dreams are true? The current depth psychological belief, following form the work of Freud and Jung, is that most dreams generally can tell us about our lives. But as anyone who has attempted to interpret dreams knows, a surprising number of dreams are confused jumbles of our daily events with no deeper meaning than as reflections of our most obvious anxieties and desires. However, when we work with dreams magically—that is, by taking the experience of dreams as an objective, lived reality—the dichotomy disappears. Just as in our waking lives, the events that happen in dreams are neither true nor false regardless of their significance to us or whether they are clear and comprehensible because they are what happened. They are the ontological facts of the dreamworld and our adventures within it. 

There is another way to consider how all dreams are true dreams that fits within a modern scientific paradigm and maintains the experiential distinction between insignificant and archetypal dreams. Proposed by cognitive psychologist Harry T. Hunt in his 1989, The Multiplicity of Dreams, Hunt’s ‘Dream Diamond’ model essentially considers true and false dreams not as two distinct types of dreams but as poles on a spectrum of imaginative structure and intensity. At one end, dreams are normative, cloudy, memory-based, subjective, and un-self-reflective, while at the other end dreams are archetypal, vividly clear, imaginatively symbolic, objective, and self-reflective (ie. lucid). All dreams fall along this spectrum and can shift from normative to archetypal as our imagination and the metaphors it uses to depict our cognitive states becomes more self-aware, emotionally-intense, and imagistically-vivid. As such, all dreams have the potential to become true dreams, not only in their ontological realness, but also in being the kind of deeply-impactful, powerfully-significant, and life-changing dreams that shout at us demanding to be used, that Artemidorus called oneiros.