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In general medieval opinion seems to have been that dreams are either
divinely (always true or diabollically (always false) caused. These
dreams may show the future or impart knowledge in a super natural way.
Dreams were thought to have purely physical, purely psychological or
supernatural causes**^.
Many interesting remarks have been made about the dream throughout the
centuries. Some of these seem to lead directly to modern dream theory,
others have been included to show that examples of dreams can be
compared to reflections in distorting mirrors**. Gerard de Nerval said
"Our dreams are a second life." Manfred Weidhorn reached the conclusion
that certain types of dreams occurred in certain types of litarary works,
heuristic dreams in dream vision works, love dreams in lyrics, ominous
man tic dreams in drama and supernatural monitory dreams in narratives*"^.
The hallucination or daydream is not mentioned in medieval literature.
Interesting is Nashe's definition of the dream
"A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or a froath of the
fancie, which the day hath left undigested; or an afterfeast
made of the fragments of idle imaginations Our thoughts,
intensively fixed all the daytime upon a mark we are to hit,
are now and then overdrawne with such force, that they flye
beyond the mark of day into the confines of the night. When
all is said, melancholy is the mother of dreams and of all
terrors of the night whatsoever. 14)"
Here we find the foundation of the modern view that dreams can function
as an outlet for reality. As Freud said
"Dreams refer to those past experiences that the individual is
unable to accept in the light of his conscious attitudes. 15)"
He considered the dream a symbolic representation of every repressed wish
or desire that lives on in the unconscious after having been banished
from the conscious*^. Werner Wolff reaches the same conclusion "We
synthesize our experience in sleep, asking for solutions of various
sorts." and continues to say "Any dream is either a reduction or
an elaboration of its underlying thoughts."**7 This is the same as
what Aristotle says: "What we plan to do the next day is likely to
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occupy our minds beforehand." Every dream provides us with an active
picture of our situation in life at that moment. Our soul says this
is what it is like.