In the ancient world the belief was that dreams were messages from gods and demons. People believed that dreams predicted the future and revealed cures for the ill. When humans developed a written language, they began recording interpretations of their dreams. The earliest records of dream study have been preserved from ancient Egypt. Other examples of this are shown in the Bible, in which the dreams of Joseph and Pharaoh are reported and interpreted (MacKenzie 26). Usually the recorded dreams were of god or important people such as priests and kings. They fall into three main groups.

The first are dreams in which gods appear to demand some pious act. "In Egypt a large stone inscription that is placed bef

"The dream reveals what we have been and what we have wanted to be. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless, the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future,

In the late 19th century people were seeking answers to many questions concerning the cause of dreams. Some of experiments conducted by Alfred Maury would give reasonable explanations. Maury was convinced that dreams were caused by external stimulation, and his tests were designed to show that the senses can convey messages to the brain, and that the brain responds with appropriate imagery (108). In his tests he used burning matches, speech, drops of water, and bright lights before the eyes. A burning match, for example, when held beneath the nose led Maury to dream that he was at sea, and that the powder magazine of the ship had blown up. A pair of tweezers that is struck to make a slight ringing noise, caused him to dream of the sound of bells ringing out an alarm that recalled the Paris revolution of June 1848.

In the second group, the dreams are in forms of warnings or revelations from god, like the dream of the Ethiopian conqueror of Egypt Tanutamon, who saw two serpents on his left

While most Greeks thought that dreams had a predictive power, Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, discussed dreams in a scientific manner. However, it was not until the 19th century that widespread belief in the divine source of dreams began to disappear. Plato states "In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep." Aristotle suggests that sleep reduces the activity of the senses, but residual activity continues even after the body has lapsed into torpor (47).

The third type is dreams in which the dream content repeats some mythological theme. "The wife of an Egyptian magician, Setme Khamuas, was barren. In a dream she was told to go to her husbands privy and make a potion from one plant to give to her husband. The r

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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)