________________
3917 66/4, 31ra-
fa 2013
et Vigilia; De Insomnis; and De Divinatione Per Somnum. (On Sleep and Dreams - On Sleeping and Waking - On Divination through Sleep.)""2 It is what Freud called the hallucinatory property of dreams.
The teaching of the Stoics was along the same lines. They said, if the gods, love man and are omniscient as well as omnipotent, they certainly may disclose their purposes to man in sleep. Earlier Hippocrates, the 'Father of medicine discovered that dreams can reveal the onset of organic illness.14
Hippocrates was born on the island of Kos. On this island there was a famous temple dedicated to Aesculapiuss the god of medicine. There were about 300 such temples in Greece alone, dedicated to healing through the use of dreams. There are many attestations to the efficacy of this technique from patients. During the Hellenistic period, the main focus of dreams was centered on its ability to heal. Temples, called Asceleons, were built around the healing power of dreams. During the middle ages, dreams were seen as evil and its images were temptations from the devil. Up to the beginning of 20th century such notions were living notions.
In the early 19th century, dreams were dismissed as stemming from anxiety, a household noise or even indigestion. Hence there was really no meaning to it. Later on in the 19th century, Sigmund Freud revived the importance of dreams. He revolutionized the study of dreams. Freud understood "dreams (like jokes, slips of the tongue, and other symptoms) to be signs of concealed, conflicting desires. He considered powerful desires to be always in conflict, and his theories tried to account for how these conflicts give rise to unintentional expression. Dreams and other unconscious acts conceal even as they reveal wishes that we would rather not face more directly."'17
Ground of Dreams in Indian Perspective All Indian philosophical speculation have a common ultimate objectiveknowledge is for liberation. Liberation is the attainment of the pure self. Hence study of consciousness is undertaken in philosophy. While discussing the states of consciousness, dreaming (svapna) was also considered as a state of consciousness in almost all the philosophies.
Dreams, being purely an abstract phenomenon remained a mystic problem in India. Right from Vedas and Vedic literature, Upanisads, Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Vedanta, Mimansa, Jain and Buddhist-all the philosophies deal with the issue of dreams sharing similarity in some respects and differing radically in some other ideas. "Soul in itself has no role played in the occurrence of dreams. Although Buddhist mythology is contained of such symbolic and prophetic dreams in life histories, stories etc. but philosophically they have not been reflected upon."18
