Why did the moth’s mother advice him to dream of a nice lamp?
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Abstract
A majority of humans spend their waking hours surrounded by insects, so it should be no surprise that insects also appear in humans’ dreams as we sleep. Dreaming about insects has a peculiar history, marked by our desire to explain a dream’s significance and by the tactic of evoking emotions by injecting insects in dream-related works of art, film, music, and literature. I surveyed a scattered literature for examples of insects in dreams, first from the practices of dream interpretation, psychiatry, and scientific study, then from fictional writings and popular culture, and finally in the etymology of entomology by highlighting insects with dream-inspired Latinate names. A wealth of insects in dreams, as documented clinically and culturally, attests to the perceived relevance of dreams and to the ubiquity of insects in our lives.
Keywords: cultural entomology, ethnoentomology, dreams, dream interpretation, Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Metamorphosis, psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, entomophobia
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1. Introduction
Insects are diverse, resourceful, and resilient, serving as symbols of everything from beauty [1] and rebirth [2], to pestilence and evil [3]. Insects pollinate or devour crops [4], contribute to [5,6,7] or wreak havoc on technology [8,9,10], inspire architecture [11,12,13,14] or obliterate it [15,16], and advance human health [4,17,18,19,20] or vector disease [21,22]. Insects inhabit nearly every earthly niche but in the deep marine [23], and can be found among, on, and even inside humans [22,24], and thus it is no surprise that insects have also made their way into our dreams.
Human dreams primarily occur during rapid eye movement sleep (REM), but can also occur during slow wave sleep, typically as non-narrative images [25]. To appreciate the significance of insects’ appearance in dreams, it may be important to understand the functional significance of dreaming. Scientists, by examining the behavior and physiology of dreaming, have attributed various functions to dreaming in humans. David Hartley suggested in the early 19th century that dreams might affect the strength of memories, and recent studies have since linked memory and REM sleep [26]. Crick and Mitchison [27] outlined a scenario of dreams as platforms for selective forgetting, or “reverse learning,” while Revonsuo [28] proposed that dreams simulate threats and allow for us to rehearse threat avoidance. Sigmund Freud claimed that dreams preserve sleep by protecting the sleeper from external stimulation and by allowing us to fulfill our secret wishes harmlessly [29]. Dreams may help to organize our thoughts, solve emotional or intellectual problems, or, acting as a “cinema of the mind,” keep the brain stimulated without having to wake the sleeper [30]. Alternatively, dreams may be meaningless, serving no special function [31]. The search for the function of dreaming and the meaning of dreams occupy traditional biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, as well as philosophers and artists. Dreams featuring insects have been of special interest to medical practitioners, psychotherapists, writers, and others, likely owing to the fact that invertebrates often elicit fear and avoidance responses in humans [32].
Interpreting dreams that include insects is a practice spanning millennia, from the ancient writings of Artemidorus to a spate of freshly posted websites. Writing about insects in dreams is also the stuff of great literature, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). The association between dreams and insects extends to insect names, some of which stem from dream-related root words. The following, necessarily incomplete survey reports examples of insect dream interpretations, insect dream analysis within psychiatry and science, and of insects in dreams in popular culture, as well as etymological hints of dreams found in insect names.
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2. Interpretation of Insect Dreams
“The dreams show something further, not suspected or predicted; the bugs have something to teach. They demonstrate the intentions of the natural mind, the undeviating faith of desire, and the urge to survive.”—James Hillman [33].
“Sometimes, it can be difficult to say who is fantasizing more, the dreamer or the dream ‘interpreter’.”—James Horne [30].
Dreams have been analyzed by shamans, soothsayers, and wise men the world over. The list of insects interpreted in dreams is a long one, and the internet is rife with sites claiming to have answers as to the meaning of our insect dreams. With websites like “dreamomania.com [34],” “dreammoods.com [35],” and “myIslamicDream.com [36],” the interpretations are too plentiful to list, but I include examples extracted from these websites in addition to three published books on dreams to illustrate the taxonomic and thematic range of what is available (Table 1).