International Journal of Philosophical Practice

Volume 1, No. 3 (Summer 2002)

ISSN: 1531-7900
pp. 34–61

Philosophical Counseling and the

Interpretation of Dreams
Peter B. Raabe

Abstract: Philosophers are generally reluctant to say much about the meaning of dreams,
especially since Sigmund Freud appropriated the interpretation of dreams as part of psy-
choanalysis. In this essay I will first review some of the theories of dreams proposed by early
philosophers that are now considered largely out-dated. I will then critically examine the
two powerful theories instituted by Freud and Jung by explaining them and then pointing
out their flaws and weaknesses. In response to the failings of these theories I offer a lesser
known but more recent theory formulated by Ernest Hartman that is supported by both his
own empirical research and that of others. And finally I discuss how this intuitively more
reasonable approach can be very helpful to the philosophical counselor whose client wishes
to discuss the meaning of her dreams.

I know I am not dreaming right now. I can say this without the slightest doubt.
People who are not ill or on medication are easily able to determine confidently
and correctly whether they are dreaming or awake. It’s only academic philosophy
instructors who still goad their students into spending hours agonizing over this
so-called problem of epistemology. The philosopher who is perhaps the best known
for his struggle with the question of how he could be sure whether he was asleep or
awake was seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes. He put it this
way in his Meditations:
How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in
this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality
I was lying undressed in bed! At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it
is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move
is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and
perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as
does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I
have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this
reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we
may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment.
And my astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I
now dream.1
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 35

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German philosopher of the same century, reflect-

ed Descartes’ skeptical position when he asked rhetorically, “What prevents the
course of our life from being a long and well-ordered dream, a dream from which
we could be awakened at any moment?”2
At first glance the apparent credibility of the idea that life is just a long dream
(or “an unusually persistent and recurrent nightmare” as British philosopher Ber-
trand Russell put it)3 can send a frigid finger of existential terror up the spine of any
philosophy freshman. But once neophyte students have been given the freedom,
and accepted the responsibility, of thinking for themselves, rather than simply hav-
ing to memorize what reputed experts have said, many of them quickly consider
Descartes’ epic epistemic struggle a rather silly academic exercise that is not worthy
of further consideration. Other students, after more careful reflection and discus-
sion, judge his declaration—that there are no certain indications by which we may
clearly distinguish the state of being awake from being asleep—to be a remarkably
hasty conclusion which is obviously false. They point out that dreams are often
brief, chaotic, and fantastic worlds whose erratic events defy logic and causal rela-
tionships, and lack the kind of continuity and predictability we can depend on in
waking life (Descartes also came to this conclusion, but not until his ‘Sixth Medita-
tion’). They argue that, while there are times when a dream may seem real enough,
in fact most dreams don’t seem real at all, and that if you say all of life is a dream
just because last night’s dream seemed real then you are drawing an unwarranted
conclusion and making a hasty generalization. What is often far more interesting to
students of philosophy, and to most other people as well, than the question of how
they can be sure they are not living a life trapped with in a dream is the question of
why they have dreams at all, and what their dreams might mean.
Despite the fact that there has been a great deal written about the function
and interpretation of dreams in academic psychology books and journals, in sci-
ence and medical journals, in so-called New Age publications, and in the self-help
manuals of popular psychology, philosophers generally appear reluctant to venture
into this territory.4 Sigmund Freud said at one time that it is vain to expect phi-
losophy to yield information about dreams.5 He then succeeded in putting such a
powerfully paradigmatic psychological stamp on dreams that many of today’s phi-
losophers and philosophical counselors are worried if they show even the slightest
professional curiosity about their clients’ dreams, or if they discuss the theories of
36 Peter B. Raabe

dream interpretation with any sort of enthusiasm, they will be accused of having
abandoned philosophy (this actually happened to me when I gave a public seminar
on this topic). But if philosophy is the attempt to come to a better understanding
of the complexities of human life, and sleep and its dreams are a significant part
of that life, then why can’t an inquiry into dreams be part of modern philosophy?
Perhaps the best approach for arriving at how a philosophical counselor might
interpret the enigmatic contents of a client’s dreams is to begin by systematically in-
vestigating the most significant theories that have been formulated to explain them.
Therefore, the first section briefly examines what some of the earlier philosophers
had to say about dreams. The second and third sections summarize the familiar
theories formulated by Freud and Jung respectively, and highlight some of the crit-
ical weaknesses and limitations inherent in each. The fourth section then presents
the clinical findings of sleep and dream researcher Ernest Hartman, and explains
why his lesser known theory of dream interpretation is a more empirically sound
alternative on which to base philosophical counseling. And finally, the fifth section
discusses how to integrate Hartman’s conception into actual practice.

What Is A Dream?
In order for the examination of anything to make sense, especially when that ex-
amination is meant to produce a theory of meaning, it is first of all necessary to
understand what the nature and function are of the items under examination.
Philosophers have spent relatively little time discussing dreams. For example,
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy allows only two-and-one-half column inches
for the subject of dreams, consisting of three unanswered questions (it gives the
same amount of space to the subject “snow is white”), while on the other hand
devoting a full fifteen pages to academic logic.6 Macmillan’s classic eight volume
Encyclopedia of Philosophy allots only slightly over two pages to the topic of dreams
but logic-related essays span a massive one hundred and fifty pages over two vol-
umes.7 And yet a much larger portion of our lives is taken up by our engagement
in the mysteriously private, and yet biologically necessary, activity of dreaming
than in puzzling over the scholastic complexities of formal logic. Are dreams being
treated by philosophers the way our tonsils were treated by physicians at one time,
when they were dismissed as mostly vestigial and generally unnecessary for human
well-being? Or are they simply too mysterious, too impenetrable, for philosophers
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 37

who feel the subject is better left to empirical scientists, clinical psychologists, and-
shamans?
However the discussion of dreams has not been avoided by all philosophers.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato postulated that dreams are “residual motion”
from waking life when we have fallen asleep. Such motion engenders “visions with-
in us, . . . which are remembered by us when we are awake and in the external
world.”8 Plato’s student Aristotle agreed that a dream is a kind of phantasmic vi-
sion, “a presentation based on the movement of sense impressions.”9 Yet in order
to differentiate the illusory dream of the average human being from the revelatory
dreams of those claiming to be prophets, seers, and messengers from the gods he
simply called ordinary dreaming a kind of imagination which occurs in sleep. But
Plato went further still, noting that dreams are not as innocent as a person’s waking
imagination. For him dreams were an indication that “there exists in every one of
us, even in some reputed most respectable, a terrible, fierce, and lawless brood of
desires, which seems are revealed in our sleep.”10 For Plato then dreams were a rath-
er nasty exhibition of the unspoken desires of even the most respected members
of his society; unspoken because these were not just ordinary desires, they were a
“terrible,” “fierce,” and “lawless brood.”
Thomas Aquinas, said to be the greatest philosopher-theologian in medieval
times, believed that dreams are partly caused by memories of what the dreamer
felt and thought while awake, partly by internal and external stimuli occurring
while the dreamer is asleep, and partly by God or demons influencing the dream-
er’s imagination. He held that dreams sometimes influence future events and may
therefore be used by the dreamer to choose an appropriate course of action, and
that at other times dreams can actually foretell what is fated to happen in the real
world regardless of what the dreamer may choose to do while awake. While Aqui-
nas wisely recommended that it would be advisable to rely only on those dreams
which are of divine origin, he failed to suggest a serviceable methodology for accu-
rately determining which dreams are divine and which are demonic.11
Writing some four hundred years later, during the period of history in which
the authority of scientific empiricism was beginning to seriously overshadow the
authority of religious ideology, British philosopher John Locke proposed that
dreams are not at all visions from God or demons. In his opinion they are “for the
most part, frivolous and irrational” because they are simply “made up of the waking
man’s ideas, though, for the most part, oddly put together.”12
38 Peter B. Raabe

These three theories of dreams—Plato’s belief that dreams are a kind of ex-
hibition of dark desires, Aquinas’ belief that they are imagination influenced by
God or demons, and Locke’s belief that they are frivolous nonsense—sum up the
predominant theories of dreams still held today. The most important question for
the practice of philosophical counseling is, Are any of these theories appropriate as
an approach to the interpretation of dreams presented by a client in a philosophical
counseling situation? And if not one of these then what?
It goes without saying that the most precarious approach is the one which holds
dreams to be somehow connected with the supernatural or paranormal. It is, first
of all, imprudent from a pragmatic perspective because it may lead a counselor to
help a client base an important decision or a significant action on what is believed
to be a message from God that turns out to in fact be demonic. Second, it is reckless
from a scientific perspective in that the counselors imply assumes the supernatural
nature of dreams, which is an assumption that has not yet been rigorously tested
and proven to be true. The current body of research evidence concerning the para-
normal powers of dreams—such as the ability of dreams to foretell the future, com-
municate with the dead, or view distant locations—is still intensely controversial
and convincingly inconclusive.

Sigmund Freud
The theory that dreams are the release of “a terrible, fierce, and lawless brood of
desires” which are normally held in check during waking hours may have been first
suggested by Plato before the Christian era but it was brought into prominence by
a nineteenth century neurologist and psychopathologist named Sigmund Freud.
However, Freud went beyond Plato in that he did not stop at merely trying to iden-
tify the function of dreams; he developed a theory, or actually two theories, of how
this “brood” of dreams are to be interpreted. There have been a number of different
approaches developed by psychotherapists for the interpretation of dreams, such as
Jungian analysis, Gestalt techniques, the body feeling approach,13 and others, but it
is the methods developed by Freud which were the first and are considered foun-
dational to all other methods.
According to Freud dreams are messages from an area of the mind—the un-
conscious—that is completely concealed from, and inaccessible to, the individ-
ual when she is awake. Freud postulated that most dreams have two aspects to
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 39

them: the manifest dream content, which is the images, sounds, and emotions of
the dream experienced by the dreamer, and the latent dream content, which is the
deeper meaning hidden within the dream’s maze of symbols. Because he defined
the unconscious as inaccessible to the dreamer, Freud was able to maintain that in
order to understand the latent content of a dream it is necessary for the dreamer
to consult an expert who can unlock its secrets with a special interpretive ‘key.’ It is
interesting to note that Freud’s interpretation of his patients’ dreams was not a new
invention. In fact it was a revival of a very old tradition that harks back to at least
ancient Biblical times. Both Joseph and Daniel of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old
Testament presented themselves as having God-given interpretive skills that would
let them explain the meaning of the symbolic features of other people’s dreams.14
But Freud’s approach was unique in that he claimed to have developed a means of
dream interpretation that was not reliant on divine inspiration. Freud claimed that
his method was scientific, which is a claim no one before him had ever dreamed of
making.
For Freud the manifest content of a dream always acts like a screen which
blocks or ‘censors’ its substantive core. The latent content of a dream is almost al-
ways, according to Freud, a forbidden childhood desire (predominantly sexual in
nature) that has been hidden in the unconscious.15 This means that “the interpreta-
tion of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the
mind.”16 To get at these unconscious activities Freud taught his followers to use two
very different ‘keys’: free association, and translation of, what he believed to be, the
archetypal or universal symbols found in all dreams.
Unfortunately, there are several major problems with his approach. First, re-
garding dreams themselves, there is what Freud himself cited as the problem of
“dream-distortion,” or “disagreeable” or “counter-wish” dreams. These are dreams
whose manifest content is distressing and which display events clearly contrary
to those the dreamer would actually wish to experience. Freud explained these in
several ways. At first he wrote that disagreeable dream content “serves only to dis-
guise the thing wished for. . . . Dream-distortion proves in reality to be an act of
censorship.” According to this explanation a wish hides within a dream within a
disguise, and requires the dream analyst to examine first the disguise and then the
dream it disguises in order to ferret out the wish that the dreamer wants fulfilled.
A few pages later he claimed that the seeming contradiction of his wish-fulfillment
40 Peter B. Raabe

theory can be explained “with the principle that the non-fulfillment of one wish
signified the fulfillment of another.” As an example he offered the instance of one of
his patients who dreams what she would never wish for: traveling with her mother-
in-law to the place they were both to spend the summer. When she told this dream
to Freud as a counter-example to his wish-fulfillment theory, Freud argued that the
dream “was her wish that I should be wrong, and this wish the dream showed her
as fulfilled.” In this sort of case, according to Freud, a ‘counter-wish dream’ is just
symptomatic of the patient’s state of neurotic resistance to his psychoanalytic inves-
tigations. Counter-wish dreams then, according to Freud, are not at all counter- ev-
idence against his wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, and this can be easily proven
simply by going not only behind the manifest dream to its latent wish, but behind
its latent wish as well, that is behind the latent dream’s ‘disguise,’ during the psycho-
analytic process of free association. The question this raises is, can the disguised
latent dream content itself be disguised, and so on, in an absurd infinite regress?
Regarding the interpretation of dreams, in one method, which Freud called
‘free association,’ and which he first documented in 1900, the patient is asked to
simply say whatever comes to mind. Elements of the dream that come up repeated-
ly in the form of recurring thoughts or wishes are what Freud refers to as the latent
dream that is buried in the dreamer’s subconscious. The unearthing of this latent
dream is the revelation of the dreamer’s desires and wish-fulfillment fantasies.
One of the problems with this method of dream interpretation is that many
people find it exceedingly difficult to adopt the particular attitude which is required
to articulate their ‘freely-rising’ ideas. The act of free association at the heart of psy-
choanalytic dream interpretation is not an easy feat—although Freud argued that
it is not difficult to learn.17 Second, the process of free association can be absolutely
endless. Saying everything that comes to mind about every element of a dream can
lead to an overwhelmingly disparate, and ultimately discouraging, amount of mate-
rial. The third, and perhaps most troublesome, problem is that free association may
bring to the patient’s mind thoughts which don’t necessarily constitute the thoughts
and material that originally formed the dream. Many factors other than the dream’s
content may be intruding on the patient’s thoughts at the time he is reporting on his
dream such as his mood on that day, his feelings about the therapist, some recent
annoyance, and soon.
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 41

Freud’s other approach to dreams, which he developed from 1909 to 1914, is

based on the idea of universal or archetypal dream symbolism. He maintained that
the relationship between dream elements and symbols is constant. This facilitates
the translation process so efficiently that the dreamer may simply be left out of the
interpretation process altogether.18 Among the most common imagery Freud found
universally in all dreams was sexual symbolism. He wrote that
All elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks umbrellas (on account of the opening,
which might be likened to an erection), all sharp and elongated weapons, knives,
daggers, and pikes, represent the male member. A frequent, but not very intelli-
gible symbol for the same is a nail-file (a reference to rubbing and scraping?).—
Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female organ; also
cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels.—A room in a dream generally represents
a woman; the description of its various entrances and exits is scarcely calculated
to make us doubt this interpretation.19

This method of symbol interpretation raises the question of whether in the in-
terpretation of, say, sexual imagery the analyst is correct in making the concretistic
or simple symbol-to-organ translation Freud advocates. In other words, how does
the analyst differentiate those times when a dream about an umbrella symbolizes a
male sexual organ and when it is simply a dream about an umbrella? Furthermore
problems can arise when the analyst takes into account not only the dream’s sym-
bolism but it’s supposed inherent wish-fulfilling function. When a female client
dreams of an umbrella is this to be interpreted as her having unconscious wishes
about some other individual’s male sexual organ, or her unconscious wish to have
such an organ of her own? Or when various male clients dream of an umbrella does
it necessarily signify homosexual wish-fulfillment fantasies in all of those clients?
Despite its inherent problems, the interpretation of dream symbolism has be-
come very popular among the general public. Hundreds of so-called ‘dream dictio-
naries’ have been published which catalogue thousands of stereotyped interpreta-
tions of dream motifs claiming to reveal their hidden ‘meanings.’ They are sold as
the ‘keys’ that allow for effortless dream interpretation with the highly incredible
implicit claim that, just like a single horoscope is accurate for millions of individu-
als world wide, likewise, an umbrella has the same sexual meaning in every culture
and for every person in whose dream it may appear. Of course the irony of these
dream dictionaries, like the irony inherent in horoscopes, is that the meanings
which various dream dictionaries attribute to a particular symbol often blatantly
contradict one another.
42 Peter B. Raabe

An additional element of Freudian dream interpretation, related more to free

association than to dream symbolism, involves what has been called the anagram-
matic approach. This is a process whereby the individual concepts and words con-
nected with dream imagery are meticulously scrutinized by the analyst. For exam-
ple, in their book about Freud, professor Nicholas Rand and psychoanalyst Maria
Torok attempt to prove that the rather obvious inconsistencies and contradictions
in Freud’s model of psychoanalysis were caused by his deeply unconscious struggle
with an unresolved ‘trauma’ which he experienced as a nine-year-old boy: the ar-
rest of an uncle for counterfeiting, and the scandal this brought to the Freud family
name. Rand and Torok proceed to reanalyze one of Freud’s own dreams, which he
originally analyzed himself. They claim to demonstrate where he is wrong in the
translation of his own dream’s imagery in order to prove their point.
It is important to bear in mind that the fifty-two-year-old Freud had a severe
nicotine addiction (he would eventually undergo numerous surgical procedures to
remove malignant tumors from his palate), and he often suffered physically from
the discomfort and pain of hemorrhoids. In the preface to the second edition of his
book The Interpretation of Dreams Freud also explains that he had undertaken his
self-analysis in October of 1896 in reaction to his father’s death earlier that same
year. In his nightmare he observed
a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs . . . The pelvis
had been eviscerated, and it was visible now in its superior now in its inferior as-
pect, the two being mixed together. Thick flesh-coloured protuberances (which,
in the dream itself made me think of hemorrhoids) could be seen. Something
which lay over it and was like crumpled silver-paper had also to be carefully
fished out.20

By using a classical Freudian anagrammatic approach to this dream Randand

Torok argue that Freud’s dream suggests, in part, the following interpretation:
The crumpled silver-paper—to be “fished out,” in the original German, to be care-
fully pieced together one by one (= ausklauben)—leads us to the like-sounding
syllable (in German, silver = Silber: Silbe = syllable). Did the dream’s syllables get
crumpled or mixed up? Did the words describing Freud’s self-dissection con-
dense other words concerning his family’s counterfeiting affair? The German
names of the two bones that make up the pelvis, on which Freud chose to operate,
are no doubt telling about Uncle Josef ’s impact on the family: a cross and a shame
(sacrum = Kreuzbein: cross bone; innominate bone = Schambein: shame bone).
Freud’s self- analytical operation seems to hover around these hidden thoughts.21
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 43

It seems incredibly far-fetched to imagine that Freud’s unconscious was ‘hid-

ing’ this important message from him like some sort of ‘backward masking’ on the
soundtracks of his mind, and then leaking only cryptic hints about it through his
dreams.22 It is more likely that Rand and Torok found the meaning they wanted to
find, something like discovering a face in a cloud. Yes, of course, the face is there
in the cloud, but the impetus for it being there is located in the observer not in the
cloud. Naturally, if we were to believe that the unconscious does in fact leak such
ambiguously clues about what the mind keeps hidden from its owner, it would
prove to be a convenient justification for the existence of psychoanalysts who claim
exclusive expertise in their discovery and interpretation. Granted, Rand and Torok
present their fantastic interpretation as only a possibility; they make no claim to
hard evidence that would prove them correct. But a more plausible approach to
interpreting Freud’s dream would be to keep in mind that he was not only dealing
with the anguish of having lost his father, he was also attempting what no one had
ever done before: a self-examination of the very intimate material in his personal
dreams by means of a controversial form of analysis which he was still developing.
He knew this ‘self-dissection’ would expose to his colleagues and to the public at
large not only his nascent psychoanalytic method but, in a sense, his own interi-
or (cognitive and affective) mechanisms. Again, he was struggling with a severe
nicotine addiction, and the physical pain of hemorrhoids. These issues in Freud’s
life at middle age easily lead to the conclusion that perhaps a more credible inter-
pretation of his dream is that it simply represented his emotional concerns about
both his own mortality (due to the death of his father) and his physical problems in
combination with the metaphorical ‘opening up’ inherent in the publication of his
pioneering attempt at self-analysis.
Then again, perhaps Freud’s dream was just so much nonsense, as Locke would
have it. But the theory that dreams are just random nonsense is also counter-in-
tuitive. There are often times in which the dreamer, in retrospect, is easily able to
recognize the people in his dreams as having been individuals he came into contact
with during the previous day; or he may recognize the story line of his dream as
having a close resemblance to the plot of a movie he watched before going to sleep,
and so on. These dream elements would not be nonsense at all to the dreamer.
They would be something more like recent, although somewhat jumbled, mem-
ories. Freud himself acknowledges that while a dream may bring to light memo-
44 Peter B. Raabe

ries of early childhood, “the dream clearly prefers the impressions of the last few
days.”23 Even those dreams whose imagery is extremely bizarre often seem to have
an obvious connection to the people or events of the dreamer’s waking life. For ex-
ample, I had a very vivid dream recently in which I was approaching a female bird
resembling an eagle sitting on a branch in a rather nondescript environment. The
bird was covered in small but very heavy brass plates which it was struggling, and
failing, to remove with its beak. When I tried to help it pick the armour plates off
its back it turned and pecked my hand. I tried several times but the bird persisted
in trying to peck me. I finally gave up, at which point I woke up from the dream.
At first this odd bird perched in a non-identifiable context seemed like a typically
nonsensical and very bizarre dream image indeed. But it was not at all nonsense,
and neither was it necessary to interpret the bird in terms of ‘universal symbolism.’
It was simply a matter of recognizing the feelings I was dealing with in that dream
in relation to events of the previous day. My struggle with the bird had felt very
similar to the real-life struggle I was experiencing with a troubled client. She was
coming to see me for help in sorting out her problems but after several visits she
continued to keep me at a distance from her by remaining closed and secretive. This
seemed like a perfectly reasonable interpretation to me, and because I understood
the imagery in this way the dream certainly did not appear to be either symbolic or
random nonsense. The dream helped me to come to the decision be less insistent
in offering my help. Naturally, for a follower of Freud, the question remains, Could
there not also be a deeper meaning to this dream that I have overlooked?
Today the views which Freud held regarding dreams and their interpretation
are, for the most part, no longer taken seriously by professionals. Many psycho-
therapists and most experts in sleep and dream research no longer believe, as Freud
did, that dreams are irrational or psychotic mental products, that they are the royal
road to the unconscious, that every dream is the fulfillment of a childhood wish
(typically sexual), that they are disguised products of psychical ‘censorship,’24 that
there is a latent dream underlying each manifest dream that needs to be interpreted
by an expert (by means of free association, the decoding of archetypal symbols, or
anagrammatic deciphering), that dreams are rife with sexual symbolism, and that
the function of dreams is to preserve sleep.25 But if not according to Freud’s model,
then how are dreams to be understood?
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 45

Carl Jung
One of Freud’s best-known disciples, and one of his earliest critics, Carl G. Jung,
held a far less sinister view of both the unconscious and the content of dreams. He
believed that not all dreams are the fulfillment of repressed forbidden childhood
sexual wishes as Freud had claimed. Similar to Plato’s claim that dreams are “re-
sidual motion” from waking life, Jung held that dreams are due to “an incomplete
extinction of consciousness.”26 They are not one-sided in either form or content but
lend themselves to many different readings of their ‘text’ which can only be success-
fully accomplished through the combined efforts of the interpreter and the dream-
er. Yet he agreed with Freud that ‘average’ dreams have a personal character reflect-
ing the dreamer’s conscious impressions of daytime activities, and ‘deep’ dreams
derive directly from unconscious sources. But according to Jung, deep dreams have
a collective character; they are composed of a rich tapestry of symbolic images de-
rived from a ‘universal unconscious’ which contains archaic elements of primitive
myths and religions, which he designated ‘archetypes.’ For Jung these archetypal
images “prove that the human psyche is unique and subjective or personal only in
part, and for the rest is collective and objective.”27 As well as common archetypal
elements, dreams also contain typical dream motifs such as flying, climbing stairs
or mountains, being naked in public, losing teeth, being chased by frightening an-
imals or ghosts, and so on.
Jung observed that a succession of similar dreams can often run into the hun-
dreds and that they “resemble the successive steps in a planned and orderly process
of development.” He reasoned therefore that these dream-series were “a kind of
development process in the personality,” the spontaneous expression within the
unconscious of the dreamer’s individuation. By ‘individuation’ he meant the pro-
cess of “becoming a single, homogeneous being,” a “coming to self-hood or self-re-
alization,” “of psychological development . . . in which a man becomes the definite
unique being that he in fact is.”28 The function of the dreams themselves in this
process of individuation is to counter-balance the individual’s conscious attitude
held during waking life, so that if the conscious attitude to a life situation is posi-
tive while awake then the dream takes the negative side and vice versa. A dream is
thereby a compensatory mechanism which aims “at establishing a normal psycho-
logical balance and thus appears as a kind of self-regulation of the psychic system.”29
46 Peter B. Raabe

The problem for Jung’s etiological claims of dream origins is twofold: first, it
is not at all self-evident that because the dreams of people of different cultures, or
people of the same culture but of different generations, contain within them what
appear to be similar images of gods or demons this means their dreams necessarily
spring from a ‘collective unconscious’ in which the memories of past generations
and all cultures are stored.
Other, far simpler, explanations are available. For example, evolutionary psy-
chology and evolutionary epistemology maintain that shared biological experienc-
es have produced in human beings a common understanding of the world despite
their superficial cultural differences. This has lead diverse civilizations to postu-
late analogous ‘gods’ and ‘demons’ to explain the universal occurrences of natural
phenomena and human suffering. This sort of existentially-generated explanation
seems far more plausible than the extravagant ontological proposition that there
exists a universal or collective unconscious. Second, there is an inherent, and possi-
bly unresolvable, epistemological difficulty when attempts are made to differentiate
between which images ought to be understood as the experiential and intimately
personal content of a dream and which as the universal or collective archetypal
symbol. Once this is accomplished—if indeed it can be—there exists the further
psychological difficulty of explaining how the dreamer benefits from the so-called
‘counter-balancing’ effects of the various elements of his dreams. And, finally, Jung
states categorically that without the unconscious, “the dream is a mere freak of
nature, a meaningless conglomeration of fragments left over from the day. . . . We
cannot treat our theme (the practical use of dream analysis) at all unless we rec-
ognize the unconscious.”30 But this clearly begs the question whether this either/or
dichotomy is in fact necessary, whether, without the unconscious, dreams are in
fact just “a meaningless conglomeration of fragments left over from the day.”
At the end of his work on dreams, Jung acknowledged that, although the
study of dream psychology had contributed substantially to his understanding of
far-reaching philosophical and religious problems, he was not yet in possession of
a generally satisfying explanatory theory of this complicated phenomenon.

The Philosophy of Dreams

When it comes to dream interpretation there is a significant gap between popular
conceptions of what dreams are all about—based on a lay reading of Freud’s and
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 47

Jung’s theories—and what modern research is revealing. The director of the Sleep
Disorders Center at Newton-Wellsley Hospital in Massachusetts, and professor of
psychiatry Ernest Hartmann, offers a perspective based on many years of his own
empirical and clinical research. The conclusions he reaches not only seem more in-
tuitively correct when applied to one’s own dreams but are much more compatible
with philosophical counseling than the other approaches to dream interpretation
discussed above.31 Hartmann maintains that his own research, as well as the work
of other specialists in the field, clearly indicate that dreams are not crazy or random
meaningless brain noises, or some form of psychical and symbolic hints concern-
ing previously censored obscene desires stored in the cryptic unconscious which
only a highly trained expert in psychology can decipher.32 They can in fact be ex-
plained in a very simple and practical way.
Hartmann suggests that the mind is best imagined as a widespread net, or a
network, within which there are specific regions that are more tightly organized
because they contain well-learned material. This material is stored as memory by
means of various inter-connections throughout the net. This net, like the ocean,
is never absolutely still; it is always busy making connections to some degree, and
never completely calm except perhaps in some deeply meditative states. Though
continuously active, it is also always trying to settle itself into a condition of least
agitation, that is, a relatively calm or stable condition with a minimum amount
of disturbance. But because of the constant unsettling inputs from various kinds
of external events, especially trauma, stress, and emotional concerns, the calming
process is never quite complete and the net requires on-going ministration. Partic-
ularly strong emotional concerns, such as the breakup of a significant relationship,
a career-threatening workplace confrontation, having to make a major life-direct-
ing decision, financial difficulties, or a serious health problem, are like localized
‘storms’ on this net that effect not only a person’s wakeful thinking and imaginings,
but her dreams as well.33 In the natural world the severity of a storm is diminished,
and its potential to cause damage is reduced, if it becomes somehow less concen-
trated, that is if it becomes diffused over a greater area. This is somewhat analogous
to what dreams do in the mental world.
Dreams, according to Hartmann, make connections guided by the dreamer’s
emotions and emotional concerns in the “nets of the mind.” This is not radically
different from the theories of Freud and Jung which state that it is the most pow-
48 Peter B. Raabe

erfully emotional daytime events which most often occur again in dreams.34 But
Hartmann argues that dreaming makes use of our visual/spatial picturing abili-
ties and, rather than being symbolic guides to what is hidden in the unconscious,
dreams provide explanatory metaphors for the dreamer’s emotional state of mind.
The difference is that a metaphorical image is meant only as a comparison or an
analogy, while a symbolic image is meant to definitely represent something else.
Hartmann maintains that people’s dreams are simply the mind’s metaphorical pic-
tures about what is important to them, what they feel strongly about. Dreams typ-
ically consist of very odd combinations of backgrounds, foregrounds, characters,
time periods, childhood memories, recent memories, and real and fictional plots.
As Jung puts it, dreams bring together “the most heterogeneous things.”35 But the
pictures in dreams are not meant as simple entertainment.36 Hartmann says the
seemingly random dream process serves an important purpose.
The making of connections simultaneously smoothes out disturbances in the
mind by integrating new material—“calming out the storm”—and also produces
more and broader connections by weaving in new material. It does not simply
consolidate memory, but interweaves and increases memory connections.37

In other words, the aetiology of a dream becomes evident when its two prac-
tical functions are understood: first a dream reduces the ‘localized storms’ caused
by the emotions which were experienced while awake by diffusing them across a
wide area of ‘connections,’ and second, these connections to other memories are
the mind’s attempt to better understand those events in waking life which caused
the heightened emotions in the first place in order to reduce their negative impact
when the dreamer is awake.38 This teleological theory of dreams is corroborated by
a number of other clinicians and researchers. For example, dream researchers Ra-
mon Greenberg and Chester Pearlman in Boston have continued clinical explora-
tions along the lines initiated by earlier dream researchers and have added research
work on Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep as well. Concerning function they sug-
gest that the dream is the dreamer’s effort to cope with a currently meaningful
issue, and they emphasize especially that it is clearly an attempt to solve a current
problem. Their studies also suggest that there is an important role for dreams in the
mind’s attempt to adapt to emotionally important situations.39
The following example illustrates how a dream will draw from waking events
with strong emotional content, located under various ‘headings’ in the memory,
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 49

and then recombine them in order to diffuse their impact on the dreamer: my wife
and I watched a program on TV which I found very troubling about male inmates
who were pleading with prison officials for their early parole; I struggled all day to
get the wording of one chapter of this book just right; on the late evening news we
were told the disturbing story of a woman in hospital who had to give birth to her
premature baby by herself because the nurses and doctors, for some reason, had
ignored her cries for help; and just before going to bed I looked at my inadequate
notes for the class I’d be teaching the next day and worried about how to improve
them. One of my dreams that night—the one I recalled most clearly after waking
up—was about my being a teacher to only two male students, one of whom was
pregnant and was pleading with me because he seemed to be going into agonizing
labor.
At first the dream seemed rather silly, but the elements in it from the previous
dayare actually fairly obvious (when you know what to look for): I am a teacher, and
the dream that I had only two students was probably due to my actual concern over
my poor class notes; the real-life inmates who were pleading in front of the parole
board supplied the image of the pleading student; and the birthing elements could
have been furnished by the ‘birthing pains’ I was feeling over the chapter of my
book I had been working on, but are probably better interpreted much more simply
as the actual story of the woman in hospital. So what may at first have seemed like a
totally nonsensical dream actually reflected and ‘dealt with’ a number of somewhat
stressful events from the day before. Medard Boss, professor of psychotherapy at
the medical school of the University of Zurich, studied a series of 823 dreams of one
of his patients over three years of therapy and found that they closely resembled the
patient’s mode of existence in waking life. He wrote that dreams are revelations of
existence and not concealments, they “are an uncovering, and unveiling and never
a covering up or a veiling of psychic content.”40
According to Hartmann’s theory dreams may be considered a coping strategy,
or even a form of self-therapy. Fear and anxiety appear to be overall the most com-
mon emotions reported in dreams, and when there are several competing concerns
in waking life the individual’s dreams will tend to deal primarily with the most seri-
ous one.41 Dreams are palliative care. They ameliorate both physical and emotional
suffering by reducing the violence or intensity of the mental impressions of waking
experiences. They are the therapy of strong emotions, especially ongoing negative
50 Peter B. Raabe

emotions which can contribute to serious physical problems, such as ulcers, heart
disease, a weakening of the immune system, digestive disturbances, and even what
psychotherapists call mental illness, ifthey are left unresolved. Dreams are the an-
tibodies of the mind; they are the mind’s way of reducing the toxic effects of strong
emotions that were felt but left unexpressed, or that were simply too complex and
confusing to resolve during waking hours. They are an integral and essential part
of the adaptive self-restoration and self-preservation mechanisms the human body
has developed. They may be related to the automatic self-preservation system
which causes a person to descend into unconsciousness when any sort of suffering
becomes overwhelming and unbearable. In fact individuals who are suffering from
severe emotional stress often have the urge to go to sleep, and then remain asleep
far longer than the norm. From this perspective dreaming can be understood to be
a much more positive and restorative life experience than presented in the model of
the rather secretive and sinister unconscious formulated by Freud. Hartmann also
points out that a dream does not need to be analyzed by the dreamer in order for it
to have a restorative effect. Even when a dream is forgotten—which they frequently
are—that dream has already performed its therapeutic function of diffusing strong
negative emotions and reducing the sort of stress that would ultimately prove phys-
ically or mentally harmful to the dreamer.42
While they work to preserve both the physical and mental health of the dream-
er, dreams can only express the dreamer’s emotional state and the state of his mind
“in terms of the language available in the neural nets as they function in the dream-
ing, auto- associative mode—visual-spatial imagery and picture metaphor.”43 Again,
there is an important distinction to be noted between Hartmann’s views and the
views of psychotherapists who speak of Freudian ‘dream symbolism.’ Hartmann
does not claim that the dream translates one object or stimulus into another, or
that the unconsciousmind produces a concretistic, and Freudian, object-to-object
symbolism as an intentional or active concealment of true meaning. Hartmann
maintains that his research, and the recent work of other sleep researchers, indi-
cates that the dreaming mind, in dealing with the current emotionally important
state, typically uses metaphoric pictures because that just is the language in which
it operates.44
Another good example of dreams working with the dreamer’s daytime emo-
tions—or in response to the suppression of those emotions—is the experience of
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 51

one of my clients who told me, “In many of my dreams I’m angry. When I’m awake
I work hard at controlling my emotions. I was taught to never let my anger show.
But when I’ve held my anger in during the day with some person I’ll often meet
that same person in my dreams, or just that person’s head, and in some very bizarre
places, and I find myself arguing very loudly with them. And I’ll sometimes even
wake myself up because while I’m in the dream argument, and fast asleep, I’ll yell
something right out loud and it wakes me up. I think I wake myself up because I
feel very uncomfortable arguing even in my dreams. In my dreams I often become
very emotional, which is something I never allow myself to do while I’m awake.”
The recognition that she often does in dreams what she considers wrong to do
in waking life helped this client to begin to identify some of the problematic restric-
tions she and others had placed on her need for the expression of strong emotions.
In this case, with the help of a philosophical counselor, the dream brought to light
for the client an issue that would prove to be of central importance in the philo-
sophical inquiry into her unhappy life without the need to search for symbols. In
a sense this dream had already presented to the client an answer to the question
which I was only able to ask her several sessions later: What is troubling you? It
seems reasonable to generalize from this that dreams often reveal answers to ques-
tions the dreamer has not yet asked, or is simply unwilling to dwell on while awake.
But this is not to say that dreams present answers in an intentional manner. A
dream does not act like a homunculus, or little man, in the mind which sends cryp-
tic messagesto tease the dreamer with something censored and hidden.45 And the
forgetting of a dream is not at all an unconscious and deliberate act full of “hostile
intentions” as Freud suggested.46 A dream is simply a process of the mind which,
like digestion, serves an important function without having to be observed. The
restorative process inherent in dreams take place regardless of whether or not the
dream is analyzed, understood, or even remembered. But when dreaming is under-
stood to be a restorative mechanism it can render insights into the most pressing
issues and concerns being experienced by the individual having that dream. This
will explain why a dream or nightmare will sometimes reoccur night after night:
not because it has not yet been clinically analyzed by an expert but because the
individual having that dream continues to struggle daily with the same issues or
concerns which generated the dream in the first place.
52 Peter B. Raabe

Dream Interpretation in Philosophical Counseling

The advantage of philosophical counseling over other forms of therapy is that the
philosophical counselor may use any means of inquiry available. The philosophical
counselor is not constrained by any particular school of therapy or systematized
methodology. Therefore, although commonly considered a psychotherapeutic ap-
proach, an inquiry into the meaning of dreams can be very useful in philosophical
counseling as a means of helping a client come to a better understanding of what
is troubling him.
As discussed in my book Philosophical Counseling: Theory and Practice, it is
not always obvious to a client in the early stages of counseling what the problem is
and why he is unhappy.47 This is when an examination of his dreams can offer some
helpful insights. But just as the reasons for his unhappiness are not always imme-
diately apparent to the client, the meaning of a dream can also be very elusive to
the client’s individual interpretive efforts. A competent philosophical counselor can
help a client reach an understanding of both his emotional distress and his dreams
by helping the client examine how the dream images reflect the troubling events
in his life. For example, a client may present a dream he has had of rolling down a
steep hill in a car with defective brakes. The philosophical counselor knows that in
his private life this client is in fact in a turbulent and failing personal relationship
which he refuses to give up despite the fact that the future of this relationship is out
of his control. He may not necessarily make the connection that the dream of the
malfunctioning car is a metaphor for the emotional risk he is taking by refusing
to accept that his obsessive drive to maintain the relationship is doomed to end in
emotional disaster. Aristotle said, “A good dream interpreter is one who notices
similarities.”48 By helping this client to notice the similarities between his life and
his dream, the philosophical counselor can help him to recognize that his dream is
dealing with the concern he is feeling regarding his own well-being which he has
not allowed himself to dwell on while awake. In this way the dream, rather than
being a symbolic concealment of unconscious material, becomes heuristic: it has
explanatory value in philosophical counseling.
Hartmann maintains that ordinary dreams are simply concerned with solving
interpersonal problems, ethical concerns, or personal problems dealing with one’s
health or one’s work, in order to diminish the emotional and somatic disturbanc-
es those concerns are producing.49 Given Hartmann’s clinical research into dream
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 53

function, it is reasonable for the philosophical counselor to assume that the client’s
dream material will show the way to serious emotional concerns which have been
carelessly neglected, intentionally ignored, unintentionally forgotten, or sometimes
simply missed while awake. The astute philosopher will recognize that strong nega-
tive emotions in dreams are a guide to the subtle areas of the client’s distress or per-
plexity, and that they are a clear indication that there is some sort of inter-personal
issue, ethical conflict, or emotional problem—all related to his waking life—with
which the client is struggling.
When it comes to the most serious disturbances in a person’s life it is important
for the philosophical counselor to keep in mind that in the earliest dreams after
a traumatic event, terror and fear usually predominate. Sometimes these are fol-
lowed by dreams of extreme vulnerability, after which survival guilt may surface.
Research on dreams and nightmares after trauma shows that, although a trauma
itself may sometimes occur in a dream, dreams very seldom replay a trauma real-
istically and exactly as it occurred.50 A person who has been extremely terrified by
an auto accident, absolutely overwhelmed by a family disaster, or anxious about an
upcoming event may find her distress and concern metaphorically pictured in her
dreams as a burning house from which she can’t escape, a tidal wave breaking over
her, or being chased by a gang of thugs. Similarly, the daytime worries and fears of
children often manifest themselves in dreams of mythical monsters, fierce animals,
and bogeymen. But while these images may exhibit a common theme among var-
ious individuals, and even among various cultures, they are not at all the kind of
childhood sexual wish fulfillment fantasies hypothesized by Freud, nor are they the
primitive archetypal symbols arising out of a collective unconscious postulated by
Jung.
Dreams following trauma or severe stress, as well as so-called normal dreams,
don’t need to have each little detail interpreted in order to be of practical value.
A dream is like a jigsaw puzzle in that the overall picture can be understood long
before the last tiny piece has been set into place. Useful subjective insights can be
gained when the fragmentary material in a dream is correlated with the overall
context of the dreamer’s waking life. This is not at all contrary to some aspects of
the approach to the interpretation of dreams presented by both Freud and Jung.
But there can be a significant difference between how a philosophical counsel-
or will use dream material to help the client examine his life, and how that same
54 Peter B. Raabe

material is acted upon by a Freudian or Jungian therapist. For example, in his essay
“The Practical Use of Dream Analysis” Jung offers the case of a man with “hum-
ble beginnings,” a peasant who, by virtue of ambition, hard work, and talent, had
had an extraordinarily successful career but suffered from a sense of anxiety and
insecurity. The man related two dreams to Jung, both exemplifying his insecurity
about his own career successes. In the first dream he ignores some former class-
mates while walking in his own village. This is interpreted by Jung as meaning “You
forgot how far down you began.” The second dream—actually more of a night-
mare—involves the man missing a train he was trying to catch on the way to work.
He explains that the track has a dangerously sharp S-curve in it but “the engine
driver puts on steam, I try to cry out, the rear coaches give a frightful lurch and are
thrown off the rails. There is a terrible catastrophe. I wake up in terror.”51 Jung then
analyses the dream as follows:
Here again no effort is needed to understand the message of the dream. It de-
scribes the patient’s frantic haste to advance himself still further. But since the
engine-driver in front steams relentlessly ahead, the neurosis happens at the back:
the coaches rock and the train is derailed.52

Jung says that this dream gave him not only the aetiology of his patient’s neuro-
sis but a prognosis as well. Jung furthermore believes it tells him exactly where the
treatment of his patient should begin. He proclaims, “We must prevent the patient
from going full steam ahead” because this is what the patient’s dream (and his
unconscious) has told the patient himself. But the man does not agree with Jung’s
approach and he does not remain Jung’s patient for very long.53 Jung writes, “The
upshot was that the fate depicted in the dream ran its course. He tried to exploit the
professional openings that tempted his ambition, and ran so violently off the rails
that the catastrophe was realized in actual life.”54 So, based on this eventual unfor-
tunate outcome, Jung reaches the conclusion that the dream was a kind of premo-
nition of doom, a warning to the man from deep in his unconscious that he should
not forget his peasant beginnings, and that he should stop his upward striving. But
is this in fact what the dream was trying to ‘tell’ Jung’s patient?
In light of Hartmann’s empirical research into dreams, Jung’s reading of the
dream should be troubling to any philosophical counselor. His interpretation
and suggested treatment not only recommends a paternalistic interference in the
course of a patient’s career but it advocates bringing into actuality the patient’s own
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 55

‘neurotic’ dreams of failure as, paradoxically, the best way to counteract his fear of
failure. In other words, first, while Jung would paternalistically prevent his patient
from striving for more success in his career, the philosophical counselor would
never take such an authoritarian position. And, second, while Jung considers the
dream to be a sure sign of impending doom, and while he would therefore inten-
tionally ‘derail’ his patient’s career by preventing him from going ‘full steam ahead’
(making the man’s nightmare of failure come true), the philosophical counselor
would consider the dream to be only a metaphorical indicator of the fear of the
possibility of failure that is worrying her client. She would not presume to know as
categorically as Jung did that the best thing she can do for her client is to stop him
in his tracks. She would instead empathetically offer to discuss with her client why
his success is causing him such anxiety and insecurity, find out if he still wants to
continue his efforts to advance his career, and if so help him to examine what op-
tions are available to him to keep his extraordinarily successful career ‘on track.’ Put
in another way, rather than force him to stop his career because of a dream based
on his fear of the possibility of failure, the philosophical counselor would under-
stand his dream as an insight into his worries, help him resolve those worries, and
then help him come to terms with the possibility of even greater success.
Furthermore, when Jung’s assumptive diagnosis of the man’s supposed endoge-
nous pathology is viewed from a feminist perspective it is clear that Jung’s approach
to the dream amounts to Jung’s (unconscious?) attempt to maintain the status quo
by having the man with the peasant background stop advancing in his career into
the realm of the upper class of which he is not a member. The philosophical coun-
selor’s approach, on the other hand, would be to help the man overcome the ex-
ogenous social barriers put up by both his peasant friends and members of the
upper class (including Jung), which barriers are exacerbating the man’s anxiety and
insecurity.
So the fact that the man’s career did eventually crash was not at all due to his
having reached the highest point of his career and having exhausted his strength,
as Jung contends. It was in fact due to Jung’s erroneous assumptions about the pre-
monitory meaning of his patient’s dreams, his attempts to paternalistically dissuade
his patient from pursuing his life goals, and the man’s subsequent disillusionment
with, and abandoning of, Jung’s misguided directive therapy.
56 Peter B. Raabe

But, obviously, a dream can only be made use of by a philosophical counselor

if and when the client remembers it. What is to be done if the dreamer can’t recall
the dream? Hartmann recommends that five general facts about sleep and dreams
be kept in mind when attempting to mitigate this problem: (1) developing a con-
scious interest in dreams will usually increase dream recall; (2) recording a dream
immediately after having it, and in only a few words, will help recall it later; (3)
reviewing a major problem or emotional concern at bedtime will stimulate dream-
ing in that area and will prompt those dreams to be more vivid; (4) getting a good
night’s sleep is essential to dream recall; less than six hours of sleep substantially
reduces the likelihood of dream recall. And if all else fails he suggests (5) working
with daydreams since they function somewhat similarly to dreams although in a
more limited capacity.55
In summary, the function of dreams is best understood as analogous to the
diffusion of a storm, and to the physical body’s adaptive self-restorative system.
It is in sleep that the body engages most actively in its physical healing, growth,
and repairs, and it is in dreams that the mind carries out its own ‘healing,’ ‘growth,’
and ‘repairs.’ In dreams mental connections are made which help to diffuse the
dominant emotional concerns of the dreamer. This restorative process takes place
regardless of whether or not the dreamer understands or remembers the dream’s
connective metaphors. Understanding dreams as this sort of restorative mecha-
nism explains why an individual can suffer from sleep/dream deprivation if not
enough hours have been spent sleeping, and why it is not possible to ‘store up’
sleep/dream hours ahead of time. Just as the body is not always able to deal ad-
equately with severe physical trauma in just one night’s sleep, serious emotional
trauma may require more than a single night’s dreams to ease the pain of that sort
of injury. And just as physical pains often benefit from being attended to by a caring
individual skilled in the practice of medical therapy, mental and emotional pains
can likewise benefit from the attention of a caring individual skilled in the practice
of philosophical counseling. It is not uncommon for a recurring nightmare to dis-
appear after the dreamer has discussed its meaning with a philosophical counselor
simply because the issues and concerns which generated the nightmare have been
brought to light and dealt with.
Dreams need not be treated as meaningful symbols which need to be interpret-
ed as the exhibition of malevolent or forbidden desires which the mind has some-
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 57

how inexplicably hidden from itself in its own inaccessible unconscious; neither
does the dream state need to be feared as some sort of competing illusory reality
meant to confound the human condition. Dreams are most often simply an attempt
of the mind to resolve one or several troubling issues stored among the complex
interconnections of daytime memories. Although psychoanalysts may hold dreams
to represent repressed desires and fears, the interpretation of dreams within a phil-
osophical counseling setting will be most profitable if dream events are seen as
metaphorical road signs pointing the way among the complexities of the client’s
daily life.

Peter B. Raabe received his doctorate for research and writing in the field of philosophical
counselling. He teaches philosophy at the University College of the Fraser Valley and has a
private philosophical counselling practice in North Vancouver, Canada. His essays have been
published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, and he is the author of two books on the sub-
ject: Philosophical Counseling: Theory and Practice and Issues in Philosophical Counseling
(both published by Greenwood Press/Praeger).

Notes
1. Descartes, René. Meditations. (1641). The Philosophy Source CD. Daniel Kolak
ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000.

2. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Letter to Foucher” (1675). Philosophical Essays.

Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber ed. and trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
1989. 4.

3. Russell, Bertrand. Our Knowledge of the External World (1914). London: Rout-
ledge, 1993. 101.

4. The only account I’m aware of in which a philosophical counselor discusses a

client’s dream is chapter 11 of Shlomit Schuster’s book Philosophy Practice. West-
port, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.

5. Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). The Basic Writings of

Freud. A. A. Brill, trans. and ed. New York: The Modern Library, 1995. 192.

6. Squires, Roger. “dreams.” Colin Howson. “snow is white.” The Oxford Compan-
ion to Philosophy. Ted Honderich, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 206,
829, 496–511.

7. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Paul Edwards, ed. New York: Collier Macmil-
lan Publishers, 1967. Volumes 4 and 5.
58 Peter B. Raabe

8. Plato. Timaeus. 46a.

9. Aristotle. De Somniis (On Dreams). J. I. Beare trans. Works of Aristotle. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1931. 462a.

10. Plato. Republic. Book 9, 572b.

11. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae (1274), A Concise Translation. Timothy

McDermott ed. London: Methuen, 1989. 412

12. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1975. 113.

13. For a discussion of these approaches see Ernest Hartmann’s Dreams and Night-
mares. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1998. 144–146.

14. See the Bible verses at Genesis chapter 40 and Daniel chapter 2.

15. Freud, 176–184.

16. Quoted in Ernest Hartmann’s Dreams and Nightmares. Cambridge, Mass.: Per-
seus, 1998. 173.

17. Ibid., 161.

18. Freud, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis” (1916). Quoted in Psychoanalytic

Practice. Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994.
141.

19. Freud. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” 339.

20. Ibid., 396–7.

21. Rand, Nicholas and Maria Torok. Questions for Freud: The Secret History of
Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1997. 215–16. Italics
are in the original.

22. The term ‘backward masking’ has been used in litigation to describe the sup-
posedly insidious hidden messages in popular music. The theory was that some
musicians were recording backward messages into their music in order to ‘sublimi-
nally’ manipulate the unwary public. It has never been proven that such ‘backward
masking’ in fact exists.

23. Freud, 206.

24. Logically, if there is ‘censorship’ of thoughts it would require some sort of ‘ho-
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 59

munculus’ (little man) in the brain who decides what thoughts need to be cen-
sored. In order to make such a decision the homunculus would have to have a brain
which would then require another homunculus to censor its thoughts, and so on ad
infinitum. The only way to avoid this infinite regress of homunculi is to argue that
the brain just does this and that the use of the word ‘censor’ is metaphorical, which
is no explanation at all.

25. See Hartmann, 169–193. See also Helmut Thomä and Horst Kächele’s book
Psychoanalytic Practice. Especially Chapter 5, “Interpretation of Dreams.” North-
vale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994. 139–167.

26. Jung, Carl. “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia” (1939). The Basic Writings
of C. G. Jung. Violet Staub De Laszlo ed. New York: Modern Library, 1959. 389.

27. Jung. “On the Nature of Dreams” (1945) Ibid., 373.

28. Ibid., “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1953). 143–44.

29. Ibid., “On the Nature of Dreams.” 370–71, 378.

30. Ibid., Dreams. R. F. C. Hull, trans. New York: MJF Books, 1974. 87.

31. Hartmann draws on 5,000 of his own dreams, over 10,000 dreams in long
dream series (“dream logs”) supplied to him by various dreamers, several thousand
patients’ dreams, and dreams from numerous research studies conducted by him-
self and others. Ibid., 3.

32. Ibid., 57, 147.

33. Ibid., 92–3.

34. See, for example, Jung’s Dreams. R. F. C. Hull, trans. New York: MJF Books,
1974. 4.

35. Jung. “Symbols of Transformation” (1912). Ibid., 25.

36. It should be noted that not all dreams are experienced as pictures. Chapter 3 of
this book came to me while I was asleep, not as a picture but in statements without
any imagery whatsoever. But this is in line with Hartmann’s contention that dreams
are concerned with what is important to the dreamer and what the dreamer feels
strongly about. For two days previous to the occurrence of this dream I had been
wondering what, if anything, could be said about experimental philosophy. Inter-
estingly, I had been considering writing a completely independent essay about it; I
had not been considering writing about it in relation to philosophical counseling
or as a chapter in this book. This demonstrates how dreams connect various, and
60 Peter B. Raabe

often unrelated, items from waking life, thereby contributing to the waking creativ-
ity of the dreamer.

37. Hartmann, 3–4.

38. This theory of dreams is also a reasonable hypothesis concerning the function
of ‘flashbacks’ experienced by victims of severe trauma (such as those who have
been diagnosed as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]). A flashback is
like a waking dream or nightmare, and is the victim’s attempt to make sense of a
seemingly senseless violentact.

39. Greenberg, Ramon and Chester Pearlman. “ An integrated approach to dream

theory: Contributions from sleep research and clinical practice.” The Functions of
Dreaming. Moffit, A. Kramer, M., and Hoffman, R., eds. Albany, NY: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 1993. See also Lüders, W. “Traum und Selbst” (The Dream
and the Self). Psyche 36. 1982. 813-29.

40. Boss, Medard. The Analysis of Dreams. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958.
113–177, 262.

41. Hartmann, 64, 55.

42. Ibid., 136.

43. Ibid., 99.

44. Ibid., 101.

45. Freud often writes as though the unconscious has a mind of its own. For exam-
ple he states that the unconscious “is certain” about some things. See Freud, 516.

46. Freud, 442.

47. Raabe, Peter B. Philosophical Counseling: Theory and Practice. Westport, Conn.:
2001.

48. Aristotle. “On Prophesying by Dreams.” The Basic Works of Aristotle. McKeon,
R. ed. New York: Random House, 1941.

49. Hartmann, 154.

50. Ibid., 21, 23.

51. Jung. Dreams. 89.

52. Ibid.
Philosophical Counseling and the Interpretation of Dreams 61

53. Jung writes “Circumstances prevented me from treating the patient further,
nor did my view of the case satisfy him.” Ibid., 90.

54. Ibid., 89–90.

55. Hartmann, 141–44.