Dr. Matthew Walker

Although if you look back at very ancient cultures, so much of their artwork, so much of the sort of left imprint on the world suggests that they were fascinated by dreams and used dreams and gods of dreams.

So we've always been thinking about

what are these things called dreams and can we interpret them but it was really freud who put his seminal works together in 1899 and then published it in 1901 um called the interpretation of dreams and it's probably one of his if not his most famous text and you can unfairly sum it up as um you know if it's not one thing it's your mother when it comes to to freud but

In some ways, Freud, with his interpretation attempt, in my mind, was 50% right and 100% wrong.

Because until the moment that Freud came along, we left the interpretation and the instigation of our dreams to things outside of us.

Maybe there were comments that it was due to our soul or it was from the gods on high that they would descend down these dream manifestos to us.

But Freud, full credit, said,

was the first person to put dreams front and center into this thing called the brain, the mind.

So in some ways, Freud shifted dream science from really more of a sort of spiritual, philosophical perspective

you know, condition to very much a neuroscience.

It was of the mind and therefore of the brain.

And earlier he had, he would try to describe the neural patterns and he had these beautiful drawings of neuronal circuits that could try to explain what was going on.

But neuroscience was so anemic at the time in terms of its knowledge, he had no chance to do what we can do now.

So in some ways, it's very unfair of me to criticize him as his theory being non-scientific.

It is also non-scientific in the very strict sense of the word.

When we create a scientific theory, just as though he created his interpretation of dreams theory,

We allow that theory to be testable, which is to say that a scientific theory is only a scientific theory if it can be falsified or supported.

But Freud's theory was not a scientific theory.

It was not something that you could test, and therefore it was not able to be falsified or affirmed.

And in some ways, it was Freud's simultaneous downfall and his utter genius.