Le miroir intemporel Les rêves de Somniale Danielis du Moyen Âge à nos jours

Abstract

Over the course of more than 3200 years, the interpretation of dreams has remained surprisingly coherent, showing that at night, when rationality is deactivated, human beings prove to be one and the same. The deciphering of dreams has affected every society that has endeavored to understand their divinatory potential and to benefit from them by understanding that particular symbolic event. In ancient times, in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, dreams served to interpret the surrounding reality, the one external to the individual, while since the twentieth century, with the advent of psychoanalysis, they have been used to investigate the individual’s unconscious and to diagnose neuroses. These are two opposite strands of investigation, external and internal, which, however, have the same purpose: that of rationalizing the irrational.