Where is the science?

The argument

The systems and structures interpreters use to find meaning in dreams are not based on science. This is not merely a complaint that the field is under-studied: even those who study dreams in an academic and scientific capacity have been unable to find any scientific relationship between a dream and its meaning. Where a real relationship exists, sustained investigation tends to find some trace of it — a pattern that holds across people, a correspondence that repeats. Here the investigation has been done and nothing of the kind has turned up. What is left in place of evidence is assertion. The interpretations are based on conjecture, and amount to nothing more than the idiosyncratic readings of an individual interpreter. That is why two interpreters can assign entirely different meanings to the same dream without either being shown to be wrong: there is no standard against which either reading could be tested, and so no way for the practice to correct itself. A method that cannot be checked is not producing knowledge about the dream; it is producing statements about the person doing the interpreting. The most likely explanation for the absence of scientific evidence behind dream interpretation is the simplest one — that dreams have no meaning to find. Dreams occur when impulses from the brainstem are detected by the cortex, and these produce a series of random images and feelings. If the raw material is generated randomly, then there is no message encoded in it, and the search for a deeper meaning, pattern or correlation with real-world events is not difficult but impossible. Interpretation would be reading significance into noise, which is exactly what the failure to find any consistent relationship would lead one to expect.

Context

There has never been a dream interpretation system that has been supported by scientific findings.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Science is getting closer to cracking the code. We are on the cusp of having a scientifically-endorsed dream interpretation method. Developments in neurology and neuro-imaging capacities are allowing scientists a more intimate look at the brain patterns presented during sleep. This will allow scientists to eventually bridge the gap between our waking life and our dreams and offer an explanation of the correlation between common dreams and shared experiences.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Just because no scientific method of dream interpretation has been developed does not mean there will never be one. New technological developments mean we are closer to identifying patterns in brain activity that could unlock meanings in our dreams.