Dreams in Peter's culture

In Australia I don't think that dreams are very important, at least not to me. But in Western culture there are some very famous dreams. An obvious source is the Christian religion: in the Bible, people often have dreams. For example, Joseph went to Egypt after his brothers sent him away from home instead of killing him. In Egypt he became famous as an interpreter of dreams. One day, the Egyptian pharaoh had strange dream. He dreamed of seven fat cows being eaten be seven skinny cows. Joseph interpreted this dream to mean that Egypt would have seven years of excellent harvests and then seven years of very bad harvests. Pharaoh acted on this dream and saved his country from disaster. This led to Joseph bringing his people, the ancient Jews, to Egypt, where the Bible tells us that they were later enslaved until they used terrorist tactics, in fact their god Yahweh, used terrorism, to escape from Egypt.

Another important use of dreams is in Freud's version of psychotherapy. Freud also taught that dreams should be interpreted, although not to tell the future. 

I think both uses of dreams are pretty silly: there is no good evidence I know of to think that dreams can predict the future, nor that they tell us much about deep psychological drives. But dreams can be inspiring. For example, Kekule had a very famous dream that led him to the discovery of the benzene ring, and other scientific or technological advances had been made in dreams. It appears that while we are sleeping, the brain is still hard at work, and sometimes it produces something amazing for us without us knowing what it has been working on.

I think that there probably are many people in Australia who do think dreams tell them about the future or themselves, but I think they are wrong. However, people in Australia also speak of having dreams as in plans, hopes, high aspirations, and these are very real. In the US, for example, Martin Luther King is famous for his "I have a dream" speech in which he describes a United States where people are not racist - sadly, that dream has not yet come true, and for many African Americans, daily life remains a night mare.