A question that feels heavy on a cold, rainy Monday. In 2018 Greece, the answer is often expressed with indignation, sadness, even anger. What are dreams good for when you have neither the time nor the money nor anything? What are they good for when the person you love doesn’t love you back? It’s as if these dreams hurt us more than they help us. They sweeten us - and then reality comes along and turns everything bitter.
I should clarify that when I talk about dreams here, I mean desires. Even the fact that we ended up calling them “dreams” is interesting in itself. From an evolutionary perspective, sleep and dreaming are among the last tools we acquired. Precisely because they came later, our knowledge of the psychological function of sleep is relatively limited compared to other functions. Their development coincided with the organization of human society into a safer form. In modern society, we have solved basic survival problems, and we now need to be dreamers. And I say “need,” because nothing in our evolutionary history appears and remains without a reason, as a luxury. Everything has a decisive purpose, whether we understand it or not.
The link between the idea of deep desire and the function of sleep within the term “dream” is best understood through the psychological theories of Freud, Jung, and Perls. These theories distinguish between deeper and more surface-level desires. Dreams are a brief glimpse into the deeper psychological desires that reside in the subconscious.
Without wanting to diminish the value of a beautiful home, a car, clothes, and so on, these desires are surface-level in the sense that they offer quick but temporary pleasure. In modern society, all of these goods are for sale and come with a monetary value. That monetary value translates into hours of work and personal effort. Alongside essential goods (food, water, and shelter), we also have the option of other, non-essential goods, often costing more than what we actually need to survive. But because time is money, we have to make a conscious decision every day about where we will invest our time. We have bills to pay - and then we also have these “dreams” to chase.
At this point, we might pause and consider whether we need to make changes in our lives. Often, a dream - good or bad - that visits us repeatedly can help by reminding us of that need. The deeper desires communicated through such dreams offer guidance toward the inner peace of self-actualization, but they also require psychological effort. The reward is strictly personal and difficult for others to recognize, unlike a luxury car or an expensive phone. In other words, they lead us into unexplored and frightening possibilities that we need to face in order to understand and love ourselves. But first we must wake up from the dream of material need to see the true value of things - like in Plato’s allegory of the cave.
My advice, then, would be to listen to our dreams more carefully and give them the respect they deserve, because only they know how to lead us down the path of what we call “happiness.” Having a sense of a deeper goal within us and seeing ourselves, day by day, moving closer to it - is essential if we are to withstand the difficulties of everyday life and the frustration we experience from time to time. We’ll realise that, no matter how hard the road may be, we know we are heading somewhere - we are approaching where we want to be - and that is why we can keep moving forward even when it feels painful and sometimes impossible, like a modern-day Odysseus.
By Thanos Kanellopoulos, psychologist | 24/10/2020
