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Throughout history dreams have been documented, studied, and interpreted by researchers, therapists, even the Bible, proving that despite doubts and disbelievers, dreams can reveal issues in relationships, causes of stress, a childhood trauma, etc; things helping people to heal mentally, who otherwise may not have. Looking back thousands of years people have been trying to explain them and what they represent. The ideas that have seemed to stick are the ones that deal with dreams as the subconscious, trying to tell your conscious something, rather than some of the earlier ideas that dreams are messages from God, or that they will tell you the future. For such philosophies to come about, it is necessary for dreams and all their details to be documented. While specific objects do not always represent the same thing, the idea of what is being dreamt can be very revealing. The earliest records of dreams are the Assyrian and Babylonian dream books from Egypt, around 626 BC (Stevens, 14). During this time period, the primary interest in dreams was in warnings they were believed to provide about the future. For example, if one were to dream of drinking water, it meant long life, while drinking wine meant a short life (Stevens 15). There was an Egyptian god of dreams know as Serapis. He had numerous temples throughout Egypt that were worshiped regularly, just as other gods were. Dreams were not taken at all lightly. The first dream analysis to come from Egypt was Chester Beatty. His papyrus is now in the British Museum. It contains some 200 records of dreams. While Beatty supported some ideas of dreams telling bits of the future, he also used the same principles in interpreting dreams as Sigmund Freud did many years later: the elucidation of visual or verbal puns, the detection of hidden associations, and the use of contraries (when a dream’s meaning is the opposite of what it represents) (Stevens, 15). The Greeks also had a set of beliefs and rituals for dealing with dreams. Their god of healing, Asklepia, played a large role in this. There were a number of sanctuaries for him situated all throughout Greece in places of beauty with hills, woods, and sacred streams near the sea. This is where healing and the incubation of dreams took place. Incubation was a ritual commonly preformed. A sick or deeply troubled person would undergo a long hard journey to a temple. Here he would remove his clothes and drink sacred water. Then he would be dressed in clean robes before entering the abaton (the sacred abode of the gods), which was filled with snakes.
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