Even though Freud and Jung disagreed on many points, one thing that emerges from twentieth century psychoanalysis is the fact that dreams go beyond their individual dreamers and often show patterns that are common to all cultures. Indeed, dreams are only partially rooted in consciousness and tend to reveal deeper parts of the human psyche.
One of the eldest books on dreams - the Oneirocritica «The Interpretation of dreams” - was written by the Greek thinker Artemidorus in the second century AD. In it he distinguishes between dreams that forecast the future and “allegorical dreams” that need interpretation.
Unlike Freud that reduced dreams to repression of infantile sexual experiences, Jung stated that besides these personal dreams, there was an unconscious collective dream, the very backbone of imagination. He saw then in dreams the manifestation of a certain truth that went beyond the dreamer, as if planted by a higher consciousness that he calls “the soul”.
Borrowed from Paulo Coelho's Blog
