221
T H E  L A S T  S A N C T U M  O F 
A R C H E T Y P E S :  R E T H I N K I N G 
D R E A M S  I N  T H E  L I G H T  O F 
A N C I E N T  K N O W L E D G E  A N D 
A R T I F I C I A L  I N T E L L I G E N C E
M a j a  G u t m a n  M u š i č
This is the secret of dreams – that we do not dream, but rather are dreamt. 
We are the object of the dream, not its maker.1
Introduction
In parallel with various disciplines within the humanities, the do-
main of dream studies has undergone significant transformation under 
the influence of the cultural information space, propelled by the rapid 
evolution of digital technology. As a result, many researchers have initi-
ated the examination of patterns embedded within extensive compen-
dia of dream reports – a quest that was impossible before the advent of 
computational processing. Projections indicate that this trajectory will 
continue as the large digital repositories of dreams continue to expand. 
Such a shift, however, requires novel or revised epistemological, ethical, 
and philosophical perspectives, transcending conventional dichotomies 
and fostering a collaborative approach and constructive dialogue within 
the realms of conceptual frameworks, data science and the (digital) hu-
manities. Thus, the aim of this paper is to offer a brief examination of 
ancient knowledge on dreams and dreaming and understand its deep 
1  Carl Gustav Jung, Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1940 (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 159.
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.411 Poligrafi, no. 109/110, vol. 28, 2023, pp. 221–239
P o l I G r A f I
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epistemological foundations that will build the digitally-driven future 
of dream research. 
Ancient Dreaming
It should be noted at the outset that dreams have not always been 
considered a peripheral activity of the human mind. for instance, 
Hughes2 observes that dreams in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt had 
a prominent role in private and public daily life. Moreover, the exist-
ence of professional dream interpreters, priests, and priestesses had far-
reaching effects on dream practices such as ritualistic cleansing after a 
malevolent dream. on some occasions, the bad dream could be dis-
solved with clay and water or transferred to a reed, only to be burned 
afterwards.3 Another vital practice included sleep incubation, which 
usually took place in a temple. The dreamers would visit temples to 
gain an insightful oracular or healing dream.4
As a large body of historical and anthropological evidence suggests, 
dreams were not abstracted from the waking consciousness but rather 
provided important insights that were otherwise unreachable through 
wakefulness. The ancient cultures considered both dreaming and wak-
ing minds mutually dependent and equal. Despite being ephemeral, 
elusive, and mysterious, dream content was not dismissed as a periph-
eral derivate of human consciousness, but quite the opposite: waking 
life decisions were often based on meticulous interpretations of noctur-
nal experiences.
The ancient Greek approach was no different in that perspective, as 
it honored previous civilizations’ knowledge and traditional practices. 
Hughes describes how dream interpreters (oneirokritai) of both genders 
were regularly consulted by people from all walks of life:
The Greeks respected their dreams, believing that they were messages from 
the gods, that they foretold the future, that they were means of curing ill-
2  J. Donald Hughes, “Dream Interpretation in Ancient Civilizations,” Dreaming 10, no. 1 
(2000): 7, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1023/A:1009447606158.
3  Hughes, “Dream Interpretation,” 9.
4  Hughes, “Dream Interpretation,” 10.
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nesses, and that they enabled one to speak with the dead and witness events 
at great distances. These beliefs were also typical of neighboring societies, but 
the Greeks, more consistently than others, tried to give a rational account of 
dreams and dream interpretation.5
Dream oracles were common in Ancient Greece, and the practice of 
co-sleeping with the healer was considered an integral part of physical 
and spiritual well-being:
A statue of oneiros, god of dreams, appropriately stood in the sanctuary 
of Asclepius, god of healing. Dreams were used to restore physical and mental 
health at centers such as Epidaurus. Each shrine had healer-seers who guided 
pilgrims and interpreted their dreams. They could check on the genuineness 
of a patient’s dream by watching their own, since an important dream would 
occur to both patient and priest on the same night, a coincidence called symp-
toma (root of English ‘symptom’).6 
The functions of dreaming in ancient civilizations, such as Mesopo-
tamian, Greek, and roman, were relatively straightforward: guiding, 
healing, encountering the divine, and—in the case of anticipatory or 
pre-cognitive dreams—forecasting the individual or collective future. 
Here, it is worth mentioning that Socrates had a dream predicting his 
death, while the notable example of Constantine’s dreams reminds 
us of their predictive nature with more far-reaching implications that 
marked the critical historical and collective moment in ancient Europe 
and Christianity.
Plane and Tuttle further illustrate that in 1500, a plethora of dream 
theories were available to European intellectuals, mostly spanning dis-
ciplines like theology, medicine, and the ars divinatoria.7 
Another profoundly mystical, if not genesic account of dreams and 
dreaming can be traced in the writings of Glaskin, who observes that 
Australian Aboriginal cosmologies draw from the idea of a creative pe-
riod,
5  Hughes, “Dream Interpretation,” 11.
6  Hughes, “Dream Interpretation,” 13.
7  Ann Marie Plane and leslie Tuttle, “Dreams and Dreaming in the Early Modern World,” 
Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 921, https://doi.org/10.1086/678778.
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[i]n which ancestral beings performed various deeds that shaped the coun-
try, imbuing the landscape with their presence, inscribing it with narratives of 
their activities, and giving humans laws to follow. This creative epoch is now 
widely known to English-speakers in and beyond Australia as ‘the Dreaming’ 
or ‘Dreamtime …8
The Aboriginal idea of dreaming may be seen as a paradigm that 
provides a contrasting perspective on reality compared to our contem-
porary understanding. In this framework, the logical and coherent or-
der that we often associate with wakefulness and storytelling is believed 
to have originated from a primordial realm characterized by dream-like 
states. further examination of the concepts surrounding dreaming will 
reveal that the fundamental principles of Western medicine were closely 
interconnected with rigorous observations and study of dreams. 
revisiting Hippocrates
To further understand the relevance of dreaming, it is worth ex-
amining the Hippocratic account of the body-soul principle. The di-
chotomy seems to be best encapsulated in the following observation: 
“But when the body is at rest, the soul, being set in motion and awake, 
administers her own household, and of herself performs all the acts of 
the body.”9 According to Hippocratic writings, the dynamic interplay 
between body and soul is at the core of the principal understanding of 
human diseases, in which dreams hold a perennial role. Moreover, the 
dream content can be ascribed to symptomatic indications that serve 
as a diagnostic tool. This is particularly evident in types of dreams that 
thematically diverge from everyday experiences, such as disturbing 
nightmares: “But when dreams are contrary to the acts of the day, and 
there occurs about them some struggle or triumph, a disturbance in the 
body is indicated, a violent struggle meaning a violent mischief, a feeble 
struggle a less serious mischief. As to whether the act should be averted 
8  Katie Glaskin, “Dreams, Memory, and the Ancestors: Creativity, Culture, and the Sci-
ence of Sleep,” Journal of the Royan Anthropological Institute 17, no. 1 (2011): 45, https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01668.x.
9  Hippocrates, On Dreams, trans. W. H. S. Jones, Vol. IV (Cambridge: Harvard University 
Press , 1934), 421.
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or not I do not decide, but I do advise treatment of the body.”10 More-
over, Hippocrates holds the view that the severity of dream content 
is directly proportional to illness, implying that extremely disturbing 
nightmares are indicative of more severe ailments, while gentle dreams 
may signify a state of good health.11 
In contrast to later psychoanalytical interpretations of dreams, 
which drew intensely on a metaphorical understanding of dreams and 
their latent meanings,12 the Hippocratic prognosis of disease is based 
on analogies between waking and dreaming elements or situations. To 
illustrate this further, we should consider the following example: “To 
see the earth flooded by water or sea signifies a disease, as there is much 
moisture in the body. What is necessary is to take emetics, to avoid 
luncheon, to exercise and to adopt a dry diet.”13 It is worth pointing 
out, however, that the interpretation of such analogies is contingent 
upon the patient’s health conditions. Hippocrates thus concludes: “If 
the dreamer thinks that he is diving in a lake, in the sea, or in a river, 
it is not a good sign, for it indicates excess of moisture. In this case also 
benefit comes from a drying regimen and increased exercises. But for 
a fever patient these dreams are a good sign, for the heat is being sup-
pressed by the moisture.”14
The spiritual component of dreams continued to play an essential 
role throughout history and cultures and, as many subsequent exam-
ples will demonstrate, served as a focal point between the earthly, the 
mundane, the corporeal, if willing, and the divine. In this context, the 
spiritual facet of dreaming can be compared to ficino’s philosophical 
concept of the soul, described as copula mundi, or “bond of the world”, 
because it connects the earth and the heaven, immanence and tran-
scendence, time and eternity.”15
10  Hippocrates, On Dreams, 425.
11  Hippocrates, On Dreams, 427.
12  Sigmund freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
13  Hippocrates, On Dreams, 441.
14  Hippocrates, On Dreams, 441.
15  Marko Uršič, “The Gaze of the Soul and of the Angel in the renaissance Philosophy of 
Marsilio ficino,” Ars & Humanitas 9, no. 1 (2015): 58, https://doi.org/10.4312/ah.9.1.58-75.
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Dreaming as a Spiritual and 
Knowledge-Transferring Experience
Multiple cross-cultural findings suggest that dreams frequently con-
tain spiritual, mythical, and religious elements.16 These components 
span a range of elements, including supernatural and fantasy entities, 
as well as the dreamer’s capacity to wield metaphysical abilities. one 
prevalent set of instances is the ability to fly and levitate, to breathe un-
derwater, or to manipulate items or the four fundamental elements. A 
close-reading examination of spiritual and religious dreams reveals that 
the fantastical entities not only exhibit a wide range of appearances, but 
more significantly, there is a prevalent recognition of these supernatural 
creatures as cognizant, sentient, and intentional. Therefore, it is not un-
expected that the heightened intensity experienced in spiritual dreams 
leads the dreamer to infer the existence of a reality beyond ordinary 
wakefulness. Dreams continuously function as a passage between im-
mediate and infinite reality. According to McNamara and Bulkeley, it is 
observed that: “Dreams were considered proof of the gods and a spirit 
realm since dreams were involuntary and emotionally vivid experiences 
that involved the dreamer’s soul encountering other beings includ-
ing long deceased relatives and so on. Dreams have therefore played a 
major role in the historical evolution of religions.”17 After presenting 
many cross-cultural examples, the authors conclude that “dreams act as 
a source for religious cognitions. first, for many people dreams present 
direct evidence of a spirit realm and of disembodied spirits.”18
An additional observation should be included in this context. The 
engagement with spiritual entities and divine beings can occur beyond 
16  Amira Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley, 
CA: University of California Press, 2010); Barbara Tedlock, ed., Dreaming: Anthropological and 
Psychological Interpretations (New Mexico: School of America research Press,1992); Charles 
D. laughlin and Adam J. rock, “What Can We learn from Shamans’ Dreaming? A Cross-
Cultural Exploration;” Dreaming 24, no. 4 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038437; Barbara 
Tedlock, “The Poetics and Spirituality of Dreaming: A Native American Enactive Theory,” 
Dreaming 14, no. 2–3 (2004), https://doi.org/10.1037/1053-0797.14.2-3.183.
17  Patrick McNamara and Kelly Bulkeley, “Dreams as a Source of Supernatural Agent Con-
cepts,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 3, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00283. 
18  McNamara and Bulkeley, “Dreams as a Source,” 4.
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transitory encounters. A wealth of historical evidence suggests that such 
encounters have consistently offered humans deep insights, guidance, 
and wisdom. referring back to Glaskin’s work, it becomes apparent 
that Aboriginal dreamers rely on spiritual beings and ancestral figures 
in their dream encounters as a mechanism to protect and transmit their 
artistic expressions through ceremonial traditions. In essence, the act of 
knowledge transfer extends beyond the limitations of waking human 
existence, while the creative aspects of rituals have their origins in the 
realm of dreams. As Glaskin describes: “Another Bardi man said that 
‘you dream about ingarda [a spirit being] or an ancestor that had passed 
away that comes to you and brings you this ilma and show(s) you the 
song and dances, how to dance and sing.”19 
Similarly, Getsinger observes that: “We also know that American In-
dians of the plains and the Southwest believed that dreams gave special 
knowledge and power leading to growth and maturity on the part of 
the dreamer.”20
Another example can be drawn from Cunningham, who observes 
that: “The Navajo placed great importance on dreams. It is possible that 
the entire understanding of divinity (spirits) as well as their methods of 
contacting them (religious ritual) were originally culled from dreams.”21
Even a preliminary examination of diverse anthropological literature 
pertaining to dreaming suggests that dreams had a significant role in 
the realm of spirituality. This observation prompts an inquiry into the 
specific juncture at which a notable departure from the spiritual aspects 
of dreaming became evident. Such a major conceptual transformation 
can be primarily traced to the Cartesian paradigm and the rise of secu-
larization throughout the 17th century. In addition, it is important to 
acknowledge that this profound division has shown long-lasting and 
extensive ramifications that are just now being comprehended. for 
instance, Getsinger extends his observations to the primarily illogi-
cal (post)modern conception of dreams. The interpretation of such a 
stance, he contends, originates from a broader lack of awe and mystery 
19  Glaskin, “Dreams, Memory,” 47. 
20  Getsinger, “Dreaming, religion, and Health,” Journal of Religion and Health 17, no. 3 
(1978): 199, https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01597272.
21  Cunningham, Dreaming the Divine (los Angeles, CA: llewellyn Pubblications, 2016), 280.
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– traits typically closely associated with fundamental human curios-
ity – suggesting that our dream life, similar to religious experience, has 
lost its longstanding meaning. He concludes that: “Although there is a 
tendency in contemporary religion and psychology to move away from 
the mystical and the illogical, it is my belief that unless we meet the 
mysterious and move through it, we will remain fragmented at the very 
core of our being.”22 In this view, Getsinger acknowledges the existence 
of the permeable boundary within the waking-dreaming continuum, 
where the exchange of knowledge and creativity is in a constant state 
of flux. 
Nevertheless, Getisnger is not the only scholar to share this perspec-
tive. The sense of wonder was closely associated with spirituality and 
intellectual pursuits. for example, lee Irwin asserts in his examination 
of Native American Plains dreams that dreaming holds significant im-
portance within Native American cultural settings since it functions as 
a means of acquiring knowledge.23 He further asserts that the transmis-
sion of knowledge occurs through modes that diverge from those com-
monly employed in Western knowledge-sharing practices. The explana-
tion, as Irwin suggests, can be found in neuroscience. The author shares 
valuable insights into the significance and distinctions between the left 
and right brain hemispheres and their respective roles in the process of 
dreaming. In the case of the Plain, it has been observed that the right 
hemisphere has a crucial role in facilitating imagistic dreaming:
[t]he actual developmental pattern of a majority of Euroamericans appears 
to be emphatically left-hemisphere dominant. If we consider the centrality of 
dreaming imagistic experience within the Plains religious world view, it seems 
that Native American cultures have a strong right-hemispheric emphasis their 
epistemic base. Cultures outside the mainstream of Western intellectual tradi-
tion have been recognized as placing more emphasis on visual-spatial orien-
tation and to be more emphatically imagistic and mythic in an interpretive 
context.24 
22  Cunningham, Dreaming the Divine, 200.
23  lee Irwin, “Dreams, Theory, and Culture: The Plains Vision Quest Paradigm,” American 
Indian Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1994): 238, https://doi.org/10.2307/1185248. 
24  Irwin, “Dreams, Theory, and Culture,” 234–235.
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The observations above, which draw upon anthropological research 
and cognitive neuroscience, as well as Getsinger’s comparative ap-
proach, not only serve as a demonstration of the academic inclination to 
reevaluate dreams as copula mundi but also to acknowledge the presence 
of both spiritual and intellectual aspects inside the realm of dreaming. 
This reassessment involves integrating philosophical perspectives on 
dreaming with contemporary findings in neuroscience.
The willingness to incorporate a multidisciplinary approach to 
dream research and science is even more critical in the digital age. It 
seems that the future trajectory toward achieving a comprehensive and 
systematic understanding of dreams is contingent upon the rapid ex-
pansion of cultural digital repositories, such as extensive online collec-
tions of dream reports and the advancement of computational power, 
particularly natural language processing tools.
Contemporary Approaches to Dreams and Dreaming – 
What has Changed?
With the advent of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, dream 
research shifted its focus from the content of dreams to the neurophysi-
ological process of dreaming. one factor contributing to this significant 
transformation can be ascribed to the remarkable discovery of rEM 
sleep,25 which led to a significant transition from philosophical, reli-
gious, and spiritual discourse to the scientific study of sleep and its neu-
rological mechanisms.
Dreaming and dream interpretation, it seems, descended from im-
mortal and divine realms to the physiological stratum of existence. 
In the line of such carnal and immediate reasoning, the approach to 
dreams became redefined and, consequently, confined to neural fir-
ings across various parts of the human brain. With the newly acquired 
ability to map the occurrence of neural activities during different sleep 
phases, the scientific validity of dreams has been further called into 
25  Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, “regularly occurring Periods of Eye Motil-
ity, and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep,” Science 118 (Sep 1953): 273, https://doi.
org/10.1126/science.118.3062.273.
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question. The leading neurophysiologists argued that such firings are 
merely random hallucinations,26 further reducing dream content to a 
series of irrelevant and elusive fragments with no or, at best, speculative 
scientific value. While such a relocated interest added a much-needed 
empirical validation to the cognitive and emotional processes during 
dreaming, it also repositioned dream research away from traditional 
theological, philosophical, and psychological complexity toward scien-
tific reductionism. 
This shift is perhaps most eloquently described by Haskell as “[a] 
reductionism of the methodological kind, which abstracts out of data 
only those characteristics that are amenable to the parameters of the 
method, resulting in a skewed set of findings which may be factual 
enough, but unfortunately artifactual.”27
It is worth pondering both approaches to gain a more precise over-
view of the field and its underlying paradigms. At first glance, the stark 
chasm between a phenomenological and empirical understanding of 
dreams most likely stems from the prevalent tacit assumption among 
scientific communities that prioritizes the study of waking conscious-
ness over its altered states, including dreams. This gap also implies 
that waking and dreaming are distinct, diametrically opposed states 
of consciousness. While such a clear dividing line provides unambigu-
ous starting points for two conceptually distinct lines of research, it 
also deviates from the collaborative interdisciplinary approach and its 
capacity to effectively address dreaming as a complex phenomenon. 
Numerous studies conducted in the fields of anthropology, philosophy, 
religious studies, and cognitive science, for instance, suggest that despite 
the inherent qualitative differences between waking consciousness and 
altered states such as dreaming, these two states exhibit a complementary 
26  J. Allan Hobson and robert W. McCarley, “The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An 
Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 
134, no. 12 (1977): 1335–48, https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.134.12.1335; David Kahn and J. 
Allan Hobson, “Self-organization Theory of Dreaming,” Dreaming 3 (1993): 151, https://doi.
org/10.1037/h0094378.
27  robert E. Haskell, “Cognitive Psychology and Dream research: Historical, Conceptual, 
and Epistemological Considerations,” The Journal of Mind and Behavior 7, no. 2/3 (1986): 133, 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43853212. 
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relationship, ultimately giving rise to the notion of a dreaming-waking 
continuum.28 
Similarly, Irwin observes that the “[p]opular notion is to regard 
dreaming and waking as two distinct types of awareness, the former be-
ing largely ignored or having its import reduced to that of a primarily 
pathological index.”29 Moreover, according to Irwin’s observation of tra-
ditional Plains people, “[d]reaming (…), is given a strong ontological 
priority and is regarded as a primary source of knowledge and power.”30
from the opposing viewpoint, the neuroscientific approach can also 
be considered a serious scientific effort to expand our understanding 
of dreaming, a phenomenon that we knew relatively little about prior 
to the invention of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional 
magnetic resonance imaging (fMrI). Both techniques implicitly argue 
against the view that dream reports could serve as a dependable primary 
source of scientific data. As verbal or written exhibits from the noctur-
nal realm, dream reports are nevertheless purely subjective experiences 
that have been further scrutinized under stringent scientific criteria due 
to their unreliability (low recall rate) and unpredictability (dreams are 
unverifiable and cannot be replicated under identical or similar condi-
tions). The fact that the dreams can only be experienced by the dreamer 
and are thus directly unobservable by a third person has earned them 
the derogatory designation of secondary expressions. Hence, it is un-
surprising that empirical science has largely disregarded dream reports 
or, at most, incorporated them as supplementary evidence. Conversely, 
dream research focused on dream content has introduced novel statisti-
cal methodologies to examine dream reports on a larger scale, such as 
Hall van de Castle’s quantitative coding system of dream elements.31 
With the emergence of online cultural data (the Sleep and Dream Da-
tabase, Dreamjournal and DreamBank) and state-of-the-art natural 
28  Irwin, “Dreams, Theory, and Culture”; Ernest Hartmann, “The Waking-to-Dreaming 
Continuum and the Effects of Emotion,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, no. 6 (2000), 
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00474029”; Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being 
(Columbia University Press, 2015). 
29  Irwin, “Dreams, Theory, and Culture,” 236.
30  Irwin, “Dreams, Theory, and Culture,” 236.
31  Calvin S. Hall and robert l.Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (New York: 
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966).
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language processing tools, the statistical examination of recurring pat-
terns in dreams has become significantly more advanced and feasible. 
It could be argued, of course, that the divergences observed in an-
thropological, philosophical, and empirical approaches to dreams and 
dreaming outlined above contribute to the intricacy of the field. How-
ever, they also speak of immense human curiosity and a rather dynamic 
history of research into the fundamental nature of dreams, which has 
continued to be pertinent to the present day. What we dream about and 
why are among the twenty most profound scientific questions that have 
perplexed philosophers, scholars, scientists, spiritual practitioners, and 
religious figures for generations. As an essentially universal experience, 
dreaming is fundamental to our individual and collective experience. 
The latter creates an additional captivating dichotomy, wherein dreams 
are perceived as personal and intimately connected to our unique wak-
ing experiences in the present and past, as well as archetypal and linked 
to universal motifs, such as flying, falling, and being pursued, among 
others.32 Again, the field appears to be at a crossroads; a large corpus 
of anthropological research indicates that dreams cannot be separated 
from their cultural domain: dreams are as much a part of the cultural 
and collective fiber of life as they are of the individual’s. The act of for-
cibly segregating these domains will ultimately lead to the development 
of simpler and potentially distorted conceptual models that are most 
applicable within a single discipline but always at the cost of excluding 
others.
In light of the considerations mentioned above, the epistemologi-
cal inquiry into dreaming should stretch beyond the current scientific 
reasoning and pursue a more inclusive, non-pathological, and integra-
tive model of dream analysis. 
To cite Irwin once more: “[t]o epitomize reason as expressive of the 
highest or best in human functioning is a culturally defined bias—one 
that demonstrates a loss of the instinctive vitality and relatedness that 
are necessary for crossing over into the visionary realm through empa-
thy and human-heartedness. reason, in both its synthetic and its ana-
lytic sense, represents only one epistemic ground and is limited by its 
32  Patricia Garfield, The Universal Dream Key (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). 
T H E  L A S T  S A N C T U M  O F  A R C H E T Y P E S
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frequent usurpation of other vital epistemic means, such as aesthetics, 
dreaming, myth-making, and visionary experience.”33
It also seems pertinent to position dream research in the broader 
context of the philosophy of science, which would shed light on the 
field’s many interdisciplinary challenges. It could be argued that the dif-
ficulty in comprehending patterned or archetypical dreams in accord-
ance with the fundamental principles of scientific inquiry is indicative 
of limitations within the current scientific paradigm, rather than inher-
ent shortcomings in dream data. In a similar vein, Haskell posits that 
the underlying issues stem from the methods employed rather than the 
data itself: “[i]f dreams are “irrational” they still exist as a valid cognitive 
experience that theoretically could be studied, just as the “irrational” 
quantum phenomena are in physics. on this basis, the impossible lim-
its of dream data are not reached, but rather it is the limits of an inad-
equate framework in cognitive psychology which are reached.”34
The Ancient knowledge and Artificial Intelligence: 
a Spatiotemporal Approach to Dreaming
Putting aside the more extravagant claims that have been made on behalf 
of the dream, it is now possible within the language and models of main-
stream cognitive psychology to suggest that dream data may hold the poten-
tial for initiating an epistemological paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense of a 
scientific revolution.35
Despite being written nearly four decades ago, Haskell’s insight re-
mains highly pertinent in today’s context. This is particularly evident 
due to the rapid advancement of disruptive technologies like Artificial 
Intelligence, the proliferation of extensive dream report repositories 
from individuals worldwide, as well as the increasing cultural phenom-
enon of dream journaling that has already densely populated the digital 
space. How can dream research benefit from newly emergent cultural 
33  Irwin, “Dreams, Theory, and Culture,” 237.
34  Haskell, “Cognitive Psychology and Dream research,” 134.
35  Haskell, “Cognitive Psychology and Dream research,” 143.
P o l I G r A f I
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data and automated tools specifically designed to detect and categorize 
patterns in large quantities of cultural expressions, such as dreams? 
In light of these epochal cultural and technological shifts, it is rea-
sonable to formulate a new approach that integrates established theo-
retical frameworks derived from cultural, religious, spiritual, mytho-
logical, anthropological, and psychological perspectives on dreaming 
with contemporary advancements in data analysis, ultimately resulting 
in new insights on global dream patterns.
Such an approach is by no means straightforward, and the abun-
dance of multidisciplinary components renders it resistant to methodo-
logical consistency. However, it considers the many perennial dimen-
sions of human dreaming necessary for a comprehensive and systematic 
understanding of dreams, especially their archetypal structures, which, 
by definition, already transcend spatiotemporal boundaries. 
from a data science perspective, dreams may be seen as a form of 
psychological data that encapsulates the most introspective, private, 
and unfiltered contents of the human mind. As stated previously, it is 
not surprising that dream studies have drawn significant interest from 
various academic disciplines. furthermore, with the rise of the Internet, 
new digitally-driven approaches to cultural data have emerged and the 
empirical approach to dreams has gained momentum. Dreams have 
become digitized, accessible, and abundant. Suddenly, these noctur-
nal inner workings of individual and collective sensations, emotions, 
thoughts, and concerns, along with other types of psychological data 
that we leave through our daily pursuits in the digital spheres, have 
also become externalized, thus becoming an integral part of the current 
global digital ecosystem. Such behavioral exposure, coupled with sub-
stantial privacy concerns, suggests that dream reports are amenable to 
empirical examination through the algorithmic lenses of data science. 
for the first time in the history of dream research, scholars and scien-
tists have the opportunity to examine dream patterns longitudinally, 
cross-culturally, and on a population-wide scale.
It is important to note, however, that the concept of examining a 
vast compilation of dreams to identify archetypal patterns is not a re-
cent development. Jung’s close-reading experience, which draws from 
the patient’s background knowledge and a plethora of humanistic dis-
T H E  L A S T  S A N C T U M  O F  A R C H E T Y P E S
235
ciplines, demonstrates that dream reports can be thoroughly examined 
through the complex multidisciplinary prism. After personally investi-
gating some 1500-2000 dream reports per year, the founder of analyti-
cal psychology observed discernable structures in his patients’ dreams, 
thus concluding that he “[c]an assert that typical dreams do exist”36, 
and that “[t]he dream uses collective figures because it has to express an 
eternal human problem that repeats itself endlessly and not just distur-
bance of personal balance.”37
Various archetypical elements can be identified in dreams, and the 
example of Spiritual Agents serves as one of many archetypical features 
of dreaming. Using state-of-the-art natural language processing (NlP) 
tools, researchers can already use algorithmic frameworks to search ex-
tensive collections of dreams for spiritual and religious references that 
extend beyond the traditional conception of religious figures. It can be 
hypothesized that spiritual entities have not entirely disappeared from 
our dreams; instead, they have probably undergone transformations 
that correspond with present-day cultural references. for instance, 
modern supernatural entities can be observed in nightmares about con-
scious, purposeful AI machines with metaphysical powers, according to 
the following dream from the Sleep and Dream Database:
[…] Then the dream shifts. I’m observing and a bit disembodied. I see 
an AI - a robot. He’s on a planet and his spaceship has crashed. His AI pet 
is going to run off and has gotten really wild. This AI pet can morph like a 
transformer. It can be really huge or really tiny. It can be all kinds of things. 
He’s trying to retain his AI pet, but also trying to fix his spaceship which has 
crashed on the side of a mountain. The topography is all sand and sand dunes 
and rocks. There is one episode where he is trying to talk to his AI pet and 
it’s huge - it has transformed into a huge transformer size. I’m somehow part-
nered with him and he’s fighting his pet. […] 38
The sample of dreams suggests that the presence of supernatural 
entities is culturally dependent and highly contextual. furthermore, 
36  Jung, Dreams, 33.
37  Jung, Dreams, 78.
38  “rose journal 2020,” Sleep and Dream Database, December 21, 2019, https://sleepand-
dreamdatabase.org/response_sets/754e5dfe-73b6-4d1a-a1c8-ca40ed047b43/7be91eea-466d-
40e2-93e9-999124f1656b.
P o l I G r A f I
236
it may be inferred that, in order to analyze spatiotemporal constants 
and variables in typical (archetypal) dreams, AI-driven analysis must 
incorporate various historical, mythological, religious, and cultural ele-
ments. This implies that the integration of extensive historical archives 
of dreams, including Ancient Egyptian dream books, dreams recorded 
by Aristotle and Plato, and the medieval dream diary of Swiss physician 
and alchemist Paracelsus, as well as ethnographic collections from vari-
ous Indigenous cultures in North and South America, African dream 
traditions, Aboriginal Australian cultures, and Asian cultures, alongside 
extensive contemporary digital repositories, has the potential to provide 
a novel opportunity to obtain a structured, patterned, and systematic 
understanding of collective dreaming across cultures and time. The 
proposed methodological approach, which is unavoidably dependent 
on high computer processing power, aims to evaluate the existence of 
cross-cultural dream patterns empirically. Such a goal would be achieved 
by augmenting the archetypal model with additional layers, where the 
core of the typical dream (such as typical fight or flight dreams) and its 
culture-dependent variables would be more discernible.39
The potential for dream research to go beyond the pathological 
treatment of dreamed material is a further and equally important point 
that should be included here. Even a cursory examination of dream 
reports frequently implies that dreaming extends beyond the rehearsal 
of threatening situations. Dreams, as many researchers compellingly 
demonstrate,40 often introduce us to creative and adaptive methods of 
problem-solving. Consequently, dreams may be examined within the 
framework of positive psychology. 
39  Maja Gutman Music, Pavan Holur, and Kelly Bulkeley, “Mapping Dreams in a Computa-
tional Space: A Phrase-level Model for Analyzing fight/flight and other Typical Situations in 
Dream reports,” Consciousness and Cognition 106 (2022): 103428, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
concog.2022.103428. 
40  Deirdre Barrett, “Dreams and Creative Problem-Solving,” Annals of the New York Academy 
of Sciences 1406, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13412; Katie Glaskin, “Dreams, Per-
ception, and Creative realization,” Topics in Cognitive Science 7, no. 4 (2015): 664–76. https://doi.
org/10.1111/tops.12157; Mihael Schredl, “Creativity and Dream recall,” Journal of Creative Be-
havior 29, no. 1 (1995), https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1995.tb01420.x; Michael Schredl 
and Daniel Erlacher, “Self-reported Effects of Dreams on Waking-life Creativity: An Empirical 
Study,” The Journal of Psychology 141, no. 1 (2007), https://doi.org/10.3200/jrlp.141.1.35-46.
T H E  L A S T  S A N C T U M  O F  A R C H E T Y P E S
237
Conclusion
The ancient perspectives on dreams, spanning Mesopotamian divi-
nation practices to Greek oracles, emphasize the integral role of dream-
ing in guiding, healing, and connecting with the divine, but also with 
the inner self. These ancient frameworks, rooted in a holistic under-
standing of consciousness, challenge the contemporary tendency to 
compartmentalize dreaming as a mere neuro-physiological phenom-
enon.
The transition from ancient to modern interpretations of dreams, 
particularly with the advent of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, 
has witnessed a notable shift away from spiritual and symbolic analyses 
to a focus on neurophysiological processes. While this shift has contrib-
uted empirical rigor to dream research, it has also obscured the broader 
cultural and archetypal dimensions inherent in dreaming.
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced data 
analysis tools presents a transformative opportunity for dream research. 
The digitization of dream reports and the computational capacity to 
analyze large datasets from various sources offer unprecedented insights 
into cross-cultural and longitudinal patterns. However, the challenge 
lies in reconciling the multidisciplinary nature of dreams with the 
methodological consistency required for scientific inquiry. The pro-
posed spatiotemporal approach, leveraging AI to assess cross-cultural 
dream patterns, seeks to bridge this gap by integrating historical ar-
chives, ethnographic collections, and contemporary digital repositories.
The aim of this paper was to highlight an inclusive and non-patho-
logical epistemological model for dream research, transcending the lim-
itations imposed by traditional scientific paradigms. By embracing the 
interplay of ancient wisdom, contemporary scientific methodologies, 
and state-of-the-art technologies, it is possible to unlock the profound 
potential of the most elusive phenomenon that has captivated human 
inquiry for millennia, contributing not only to scientific knowledge but 
also to the enhancement of individual and collective mental well-being 
and self-awareness.
P o l I G r A f I
238
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