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Urge: Naked World
Condoms for sale
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Urge: Naked World
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[05/09/00]

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Films used to erotically seduce us; now they tend to sedate instead. Part 1 of two parts.
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[05/09/00]

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In turn, he encouraged my brother, my mother and me to disclose our dream lives. I worked hard at remembering mine, embellishing and even, on occasion, inventing dreams outright. But none of us could keep up with my father. He was an auteur on a par with Stanley Kubrick or Charlie Chaplin; next to his, my dreams seemed like late-night TV reruns.

What strikes me in retrospect was my father's absolute conviction that dreams have meaning. The skeptics aside, for much of this century my father has been in good company. The man he had to thank, of course, was Sigmund Freud.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of Freud's epoch-making "The Interpretation of Dreams." (The actual date of publication was November 1899, but Freudian myth has postdated it to 1900.) In commemoration, scholarly works and a new translation of Freud's magnum opus have been published. Universities, institutes and museums have held conferences to probe Freud's legacy. These events have reignited the debate around dreaming that has burbled among science, psychology and popular opinion for the past century.

The arrival of Freud's dream book in central European bookstores launched psychoanalysis upon an unsuspecting world and turned most of us, even the deniers among us, into dream interpreters. "In a sense Freud has himself programmed the way we dream or, at least, the way we remember our dreams and infuse them with meaning," says Avital Ronell, a professor of German literature at New York University.

But will we continue to be hung up on dreams in the next century? Or will we simply tire of the hard work of dream analysis? With all the sleep-suppressing pharmaceuticals we ingest nowadays -- both legal and illegal -- will there even be dreams left to interpret in the future?

At the forefront of the so-called Freud wars of recent decades is the question of whether dreams have meaning. Neuroscientist Allan Hobson of Harvard first leveled the charge that dreams are simply random neuronal events in the 1970s. He has continued arguing this point ever since, though his position has undergone modifications.

"Most psychoanalytic dream theory is obsolete," Hobson tells me in the hearty voice of someone who enjoys a good scientific quarrel. "The idea that Freud's dream theory is alive and well and only needs a little jiggering is absurd."

It's not that he believes dreams are meaningless. Hobson records his own dreams and discusses his patients' dreams with them. But where Freud dethroned the conscious self, Hobson would like to restore it to its rightful place.

"Dreams are loaded with meaning," he says. "It's just obvious meaning, not repressed or censored. You don't need to go around decoding them; the deep motives are right on the surface."

Other researchers have launched a counterattack. While their findings are not conclusive, they point to a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that dreams are meaningful in ways not accounted for by Hobson.

"If you show a man a circumcision film before he goes to sleep, he will dream about it," says Steven Ellman, a professor of psychology at the City University of New York, a psychoanalyst and a sleep and dream researcher. "That," he adds dryly, "is not random neuronal firing."

Next page | Is it less horrifying than it was 100 years ago to dream about killing one's father or making love to one's mother?