The Temple of Aesculapius on the Isle of Cos
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The Temple of Aesculapius on the Isle of Cos |
The transition from the religious-transcendental concept of dreams to attempts at scientific explanation takes place in Ancient Greece. For Homer dreams are still "messengers of the Gods", and for Hesiod "children of the night living in the world beyond". Similar ideas are found in Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. But new ideas can be sensed: the priests who interpret the dreams of sick people, who have come for treatment by dreams in the temples of Aesculapius, coordinate the alleged predicitions of the Gods with whatever seems best for the patient from a rational point of view. In this way the priests use religious ritual as a means of applying their medical knowledge. |
| The transition from myth to logic is best seen in Pythagoras:
on the one hand he believes that nightmares are caused by spoiled food,
and on the other he still does not exclude the possibility that dreams
have a heavenly origin.
The views of Aristotle are the culmination of dream hypotheses in Greece. To this day some of them remain subject to discussion, in the absence of more convincing hypotheses. He considers dreams to be the life of the soul during sleep and interprets them as a psychological phenomenon. Also, he maintains that a person dreams every night, but cannot always remember his dreams. Aristotle is also the first to observe the fast movement of the eyes during dreams. Today this phenomenon is called "Rapid Eye Movement" (REM) and is the basis of physiological sleep research. Unlike the Ancient East, the differential approach of the Greeks to the problem of "dreams" is a result of the high level of philosophy, for which the mind-body problem occupies an important place and which becomes a premise for a theoretical treatment of phenomena through the discovery of "general ideas" by Socrates. |
Aristotle |