The Significance of Dreaming

Alexander the Great dreamt of a dancing satyr before conquering Tyre. An interpreter said his dream meant, “thine is Tyre”, which fortified Alexander before the battle (Boxer 1). President Lincoln dreamt about his own death before it actually occurred several days later, but ignored the dream (Cartwright 3). Is it possible that if he had taken his dream more seriously he could have taken precautions that would have spared his life on that fateful evening at the theater? The course of U.S. history could have been altered just as history was altered when Alexander the Great dreamt of a dancing satyr that led to the courage to conquer Tyre.

Understanding dreams and why we have them is important, but shouldn’t influence how we react to our daily lives. Many diverse hypotheses have been made on how and why we dream and there is a wide-spread disagreement by psychologists and scientists to explain these strange happenings.

One of the foremost authorities on dreaming was Sigmund Freud, who attributed dreaming to psychological causes. Freud said,