The Wisdom of Dreams | Greg Mahr | TEDxMSU
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfwEyzfR-8c Video ID: pfwEyzfR-8c ============================================================ I'm excited about the opportunity to talk to you this afternoon about dreams I'm a psychiatrist in Detroit and I've been studying dreams for a lot of my career [Music] um I published a book about dreams this fall and even though my father was excited about my book he he also thinks dreams don't matter just like our our culture kind of thinks dreams don't matter so when I told my father about my my book he said that's nice congratulations but aren't Dreams Just nonsense and then my dad did what everybody does when they tell me dreams are nonsense they give me an example so my dad said for instance um there's my dad and my son so he's he said for instance last night I dreamed I was mowing the lawn and your mother was watching from the porch and she was criticizing me because the rose were crooked um isn't isn't that nonsense now we can decide later if my dad's dream was nonsense or not now I've never felt the dreams were nonsense I've been thinking about dreams most of my life I started recording dreams when I was a kid I have a collection of about 5 000 dreams which is one of the largest collections in the country I think one of the reasons I studied Psychiatry was hoping to find some answers to what dreams meant and what they were all about unfortunately Psychiatry like our culture has decided that dreams don't matter [Music] these are that's Freud and Jung but sometime in the 80s or 90s when psychiatric medicines became populous Psychiatry kind of forgot about these guys and forgot about dreams also so why are dreams ignored one reason is a philosophical belief called scientism now scientism is the belief that the only acceptable form of knowledge is that which comes through the scientific method now I'm a scientist probably many of you in this room Are Scientists um scientism isn't science scientism is about excluding anything from discords that is not scientific now much about dreams is very scientific but there are the aspect of interpretation and meaning is not scientific so that cultural belief sort of excludes dreams from the academic discourse dreams are also ignored because our culture tends to be directed outwardly rather than inwardly so we like to focus some of the speakers have mentioned earlier we like to focus on things like money and status and power and thinking about dreams doesn't get you any of those things dreams lead us Inward and an inward journey is an important one it can help us find peace and satisfaction and recapture the Wonder in our lives um but also we we do fear the inward Journey as well when my father shared his dream with me he was 101 and I was grateful just be able to just to be able to have that conversation with him so he's entitled not to start an inner Journey at this point in his life but because the inward journey is sometimes scary and we discover things about ourselves that we don't necessarily want to know now our culture is unusual in neglecting dreams in the there's 27 dreams described in the Bible in the temple in Jesus's time they were said to be 50 freelance dream interpreters in the temple area in Islamic culture there are Proctor practice of ishtakara are seeking Divine wisdom for life decisions it can is you can utilize either prayer or dream incubation and in tibetan culture um dreaming is an important part of spiritual practice especially lucid dreaming which we will discuss later in Chinese culture the dream interpretation book ascribed to the Duke of Zhao has been popular for about three thousand years so we are the outliers we we sometimes we wonder why our why our other cultures so strange that they're thinking about their dreams and value them or really it's the opposite question is what's happened to us that we ignore dreams now so let's revisit my dad's dream and explore why dreams are important one reason they're important is they can show us what's inside ourselves now when my my dad first told me his dream um my thought which I did not share was dude that's been your life I I remember my mother I remember how critical she was I remember how much of his life my dad spent trying to please her and the dream was actually a beautiful symbolic depiction of that and also at 101 the idea of mowing captures something of harvest and end of life issues that are also captured in that dream image now my my dad chose not to look at that dream and decide it was it was nonsense which he's entitled to a different way of handling his dream is a by Bill DeMent now Bill DeMent was one of the pioneers of dream research he discovered REM sleep he was also a chain smoker and one night he dreamed that he developed a cough and he got a chest x-ray and he was looking at his chest Rex x-ray in one of those old-time Hospital light boxes and he saw the multiple white spots that showed metastatic lung cancer in the dream he was full of Despair that he had wasted his life he woke up and never smoked another cigarette now DeMent was a physician he knew that cigarette smoking caused cancer but the dream helped him connect that conscious knowledge with his feelings and behavior in in a different kind of way another reason dreams are important is they can guide us towards creativity and sometimes offer us creative ideas so what do these three people have in common Paul McCartney Mary Shelley and Stephanie Meyer you guessed it they all got important dream ideas um Paul McCartney's song Yesterday one of the most popular Beatles songs came to Madrid came to him in a dream Mary Shelley had a long nightmare out of which developed her great novel Frankenstein which has become a million movies and Stephanie Meyer one night dreamed of a sunlit field with a sparkly boy in the field who was a vampire and and and the vampire was talking to a girl and saying um I love you but I want to kill you and and and that dream became the the heart of the Twilight books and novels um lucid dreams are a special kind of issue uh to have a lucid dream is to be aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming and sometimes even to have control of the dream is some people consider it a special State of Consciousness and it can be studied physiologically um Harriet Tubman LED about 300 enslaved persons to Freedom someone asked her once how do you how do you lead people through unfamiliar Terrain in in the dark and she explained that she dreamed every night and in her dreams she would fly over the landscape and see what Roots look safe and that's how she chose safe pathways through those lucid dreams now the the dreams I've described are fairly transparent ones um when we think about our own Dreams they're not usually like that they're often kind of mysterious and strange partially because dreams speak to us in symbols and images that's like the language of the unconscious rather than words and those images can be beautiful and images automatically say more than the words can look like my dad's dream was such a beautiful depiction of of his life story um in in dreams also can be confusing because they don't tell you something you already know my I don't think my dad had really thought of that aspect of his life so it was kind of giving in new information um this symbol is the oroborus an ancient symbol of regeneration and eternal life the German chemist kecule struggled for many years to figure out the how organic molecules were constructed he knew the formulas that is the ratio of carbon and oxygen hydrogen molecules but he couldn't figure out how those were set up so he then one night he dreamed of an Ouroboros and he realized right away that's how the organic molecules are set up the carbon molecules are in a ring just as the Ouroboros is in a ring but his dream didn't just answer his chemistry problem it was as if his mind was telling him yes yes that's that's how the carbon molecules are arranged but remember the deeper message of what you you're you're doing that those organic molecules are all about eternity and regeneration and that's the deeper message of what you're doing um so how do we work with dreams it's important to try to record them right away because they're very easily forgotten I always think about exploring dreams rather than interpreting dreams to interpret a dream suggests that there's one single right answer that you have to find where I would treat a dream more like an artwork where there's one appreciates it and one studies it and appreciates Beauty in the multiple levels of meaning it contains it's said that of those dream interpreters in the temple and Jesus Jesus's time that if you brought if if you brought a dream to all 50 of them you would get 50 different interpretations but that they would all be all be correct um dreams are kind of a gateway to an inner world now we've Psychiatry and other branches of medicine have become more interested in that inner World especially using psychedelic drugs psychedelic drugs have become popular in Psychiatry for a variety as a subject of research for a variety of illnesses but we forget that we we have uh uh we trip every night it it's free it's not against the law and and this this final image is a painting by William Blake and it's of the Old Testament Prophet Jacob's dream of a ladder he he dreamed of a ladder going from Heaven to Earth with angels ascending and descending dreams are like that maybe not a ladder to heaven but a ladder to an inner world and in that inner world we have a friend inside that's willing to guide us and help us if if we only listen thank you [Applause]