More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a milestone work that would inspire generations of scientists to examine the connection between the nebulous, hard-to-define mind and the grey, wrinkled organ that sits between our temples. Freud called our dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". His seductive idea was that their content is shaped by experiences early in life, creating the hope that psychoanalysis could use our dreams to reveal our childhood miseries, and thereby cure our inner torment. Today, however, a study of dreams conducted for The Daily Telegraph by Harvard University has come to the inescapable conclusion that Freud put too much emphasis on our formative years. Although dreams are bizarre and otherworldly, they are as likely to be moulded by mundane, humdrum and everyday activities as by life-changing events. The project began when I approached Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School’s Centre for Sleep and Cognition. He is fascinated by the question of whether dreaming enables us to link together memories, extract the meaning of events, and so learn from them. advertisement Some scientists have taken completely the opposite view to Freud, dismissing dreams as little more than mental fireworks, a nonsensical by-product of memory consolidation. But Stickgold believes they give profound insights into the mind’s workings. He has spent years searching for some accommodation between writing dreams off, as his peers did, and the irresistible human urge to scour all dreams for a deeper meaning. As part of this quest, we invited visitors to our website, telegraph.co.uk, to provide details of dreams that were fresh in their mind, so that they could be analysed by Dr Erin Wamsley, a colleague of Dr Stickgold. Almost 300 people were prepared to fill in a detailed online questionnaire and the responses were described as "of good quality" she says. The overa…
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