Dreams: Scientists Begin to Wake Up

Beginning of article

DO YOU DREAM of swimming? You must have been a bedwetter. Dreaming of falling? If you're a woman, that means you're surrendering to erotic temptation. If you dream of a person dying, that means you secretly wish - or have wished - for that person to die. A woman who dreams of having a tooth pulled is going to have a baby.

If this symbolism seems farfetched to those who dream every night - and that is all of us, whether we remember it or not - that's because, according to modern-day dream doctors, those theories are utterly false.

But to the psychologists and philosophers of the late 1800s and early 1900s, those explanations, by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, …