Dr. Sharon Packer's Dreams

The English word "dream" has the same Germanic root as "delusion" and "deception." The French word for dream, reve, comes from the Latin revelare?to reveal, literally to draw back a veil. Do these opposing etymologies suggest completely different attitudes toward dreams? Do English speakers think of dreams as basically delusions and deceptions, while French culture looks to them more as revelations?

That's one of the intriguing cross-cultural questions Dr. Sharon Packer, MD, PhD, raises in her academic but engaging text Dreams in Myths, Medicine, and Movies (Praeger, 235 pages, $64.95). I first encountered Packer's lively and interdisciplinary mind through innovative online courses she's been teaching since the early 90s as part of the New School's distance learning program. Her courses roam exuberantly among her many areas of interest and scholarship, from psychiatry and medicine to anthropology, Judaica, ancient and modern religions, mysticism, hallucinogens and psychedelics, the arts and film. She's my kind of free-range intellectual, scholarly but not stuffy or confined to one cramped area.

Dreams is her first book, though she's contributed to others and to scholarly journals. It's culled from some of those courses of hers and is presented as a highly readable survey of how dreams are interpreted and analyzed by different cultures throughout the ages. It travels with great?one might almost say dreamlike?ease from Sumerian mythology to Spielberg's movies, from overviews of Freud and Jung to comparisons of dream divination in ancient Egypt and aboriginal Australia, from theories about how psychedelics or schizophrenia may have influenced the visions of mystics to contemporary concerns about how many commonly prescribed drugs can have disastrous side effects on sleep and dreaming.

Packer was born and raised in Chicago and got her MD there, then came here to get her PhD in psychiatry at St. Vincent's Hospital. "Nothing could beat being in the emergency room on a Saturday night, especially in the Village," she remarks with a light laugh. "It's a unique cast of characters." Meanwhile, she was also taking art classes at SVA?she's exhibited in the city?and, at the New School, graduate courses in medical anthropology.

"There's almost no programs in it. There's such small demand for it. Most people go into medicine as a profession, a way of making a living. It's tough to make a living sitting around contemplating...

"It's a way of looking at how cultures look at particular issues in medicine, rather than looking at medical science as an absolute. I think you see a lot of that in my book. I'm trying to look at psychiatry and psychoanalysis and medicine as particular aspects of 20th-century Western culture, and comparing that to, say, ancient Near Eastern cultures or Amerindian cultures?or even art cultures. You know, you can look at the surrealists as a particular culture. Their artistic camaraderie creates a particular culture, a particular kind of wisdom that's passed on through those people. It may not be as permanent as, say, 3000 years of civilization in the plains of America, but it's a culture nonetheless."

She's also certified in Orthodox Jewish education from her studies at the yeshiva. That background spurred her interest in other cultures, she believes. "When you come from a very specific background that tells you there's only one way to do things, eventually you start to wonder what other people do. It makes the world more fascinating, especially if you find that other people have equally demonstrative views about things you were told [your culture's views] were the only views."

Her first paper was on cabalistic influences on Freud's interpretation of dreams. She's also done a lot of work on medieval mystical movements that may have been produced or influenced by ergot psychosis?ergot being the psychotropic fungus that infects grains like those peasants would've used in making their bread. Besides her private psychiatric practice, she once worked at the Dept. of Corrections, "eventually doing research on the use of excessive force by correctional officers."

The confluence of her interests in cultures, religions, psychiatry and art is reflected in her New School courses. She started out teaching the psychology of religion and history of psychiatry, but since the mid-90s her interest in dreams has been reflected more and more, in courses with titles like "Dreams, Drawing, Drugs and Ideas."

"The dream courses actually evolved out of a couple of others," including a Foucaultian one on how different cultures deal with psychiatric issues. "Dreams are dealt with so differently by different cultures." Since that first one, her dream courses have "really metastasized," she laughs. She's taught "much more than a dozen... It started out as different approaches to dreams, just an overview," then went on to dreams and drugs, dreams and film, various other permutations.

Who's attracted to these courses on dreams? Packer says the biggest group is "drama people. Which makes sense, because they're living in alternate worlds. They like to create their own existence in drama on a waking basis the same way other people create, though not volitionally, another existence through dreams. This is very compatible to their worldview."

The next largest group is "people with very serious or chronic illnesses. Which also makes sense. When you think about a dream, it reifies the existence of another world. It doesn't prove it, but for people who want to believe there's something after what happens here, dreams are as good as you get." So the courses also appeal to "the recently bereaved." Then, she adds, "You have your generic artsy-fartsy types, of which in New York there's no shortage."

But what about psych majors? "Not so much. The courses are more academically and culturally based. People who just want to learn how to interpret dreams wouldn't necessarily like this stuff." Interestingly, in her own practice Packer's not much of a strict Freudian and doesn't dwell so much on interpreting people's dreams; she says it's more effective to try to understand and help the whole individual, not obsess only on their dream content. "The other thing is I think looking at the medical basis for anything is the first step. If you start with anything else you're headed for disaster."

Some of the most interesting material in her book is on dreams and film. Dreams have, of course, been a primary source for literature, art and theater since the earliest civilizations, and whole literary and art movements, like the French symbolist painters and the opium-smoking decadents of the 19th century or the surrealists in the 20th, have been obsessed with the imagery, logic and meaning of dreams.

But somehow it seems that with the invention of the moving picture the exploitation of dreams came to full fruition. Filmmakers have always turned to dreams and dreamlike imagery, from Melies and the Lumieres to a zillion dream-based movies like Vanilla Sky. If nothing else, reproducing dream imagery has always been a great way to show off special effects. But it goes deeper. Filmmakers have often said that they were trying to recreate their dreams on the screen; Spielberg didn't call his company DreamWorks for nothing. Whether or not they were making movies specifically about dreams, filmmakers have intuited all along that there's something compellingly similar about lying in the dark watching dreams unfold in our heads and sitting in a darkened theater watching films unfold on the screen. Films "make use of primarily visual imagery and symbolic language, and they do what the mind does" when we're dreaming, Packer says. The association even predates the birth of the moving picture. When still photography became popular in the 1830s, the photograph was described as a "waking dream," and photographers instantly exploited the "special effects" of the new medium to try to recreate dream imagery or to demonstrate the presence of the spirit world.

Packer draws nice distinctions between the facility of movies to convey dreamlike states and what she considers the far lesser ability of tv to do the same.

"The bottom line is that films are artistic adventures... A film isn't just a plot, it's a viewing experience?and not just a viewing experience, it's a multi-sensory experience. A film can transport a person to another world, and can play on all the different senses as well as on cognition." Television, on the other hand, "is entertainment, but it also has to keep people awake enough to watch the commercials. It has to put us in a kind of half-sleep, so we'll be susceptible... If someone is relaxed, and they're not thinking that much, they'll probably be more suggestible." Television plays the line between being a soporific and an entertainment, she argues; it may bore you to sleep, "but it won't take you out of your basic sense of consciousness" or absorb you the way a film does. And film "is really meant to be much more free-interpretive. If you simply look at the narrative of a film," the way we mostly pay attention to the plotlines of tv shows (think of the way everyone mostly discusses the plot permutations of The Sopranos), "I'd say you're watching a not very good film."

It's probably no accident that Freud's psychoanalytic theories about dreams were being created at about the same time as the first movies were being made. Although Freud was no fan of the new medium and reportedly only went to the movies once in his life?and didn't like it?filmmakers, especially in America, were highly influenced by him. (Meanwhile, showing those cultural differences again, early French filmmakers whose work predates Freud's published works were influenced by Freud's predecessor Jean-Martin Charcot, and by the late-19th-century French fascination with opium dreams, mesmerism, the occult and symbolism.) Freud was never so influential or widely discussed in Europe as he was in America?and not just in clinical circles, but in the broader mainstream. By the mid-20th century he had attained a pop-cult status here he never enjoyed elsewhere, and nowhere was that status more obvious than in Hollywood, which churned out dozens of movies proudly trumpeting what were often half-baked misinterpretations of his theories.

Today, Freud's popularity has long since crested; we live in a post-Freudian age, not just in psychiatry, which has turned from Freudian talk therapy to an almost completely pharmacological approach to treatment, but in mass culture as well. Although there are still echoes of the stereotyped pointy-bearded shrink and his couch used as strong plot devices in the occasional show like The Sopranos, it's nowhere near as prevalent or pervasive as it was half a century ago. And even Melfi has always augmented Tony's jaw sessions by deploying a full battery of mood-altering pills.

To a certain degree, Freud's popularity was supplanted in the late 20th century by the more occultist Jung, who retains his cult-hero status in new-age circles today. "Jung is so fascinatingly occult it isn't funny," Packer quips. Much of what Jung and Jungians have written "is taken straight out of religion. His writings on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching. His whole theory of synchronicity comes right out of Oriental occultism." She cites Richard Noll's The Jung Cult, wherein he "hypothesizes that Jungianism will become a [religious] cult, sort of like Swedenborgianism. You have these really fervent believers."

Indeed, she notes, if Freudian dream theory has lost its hold on the American imagination, "It seems that there's the makings of a kind of dream cult in the underground. People have dream-sharing groups that sound very much like church meetings. There's a big online community. There are literally thousands of these groups. You know, if there can be prayer meetings everywhere, why shouldn't there be dream meetings?"