thirteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the future was solely in the hands of God and that dreams could neither be prophetic, nor communicate divine revelation. People, who claimed that their dreams were divinely inspired, were condemned as blasphemous. Joan of Arc, a dreamer whose visions changed the course of French history, were burned alive at the stake in 1431 as a heretical witch, partly because the Church denied that her dreams or visions could be divinely inspired.
Nevertheless, interest in dream interpretation never really declined. With the arrival of printing in the Renaissance, the book of Artemidorus was printed in 1518, and went through twenty editions in the next 200 years. Despite this popular interest, ascetic Protestants gave no credence to their dreams. Yet the great reformer Martin Luther taught his followers that dreams revealed their sinful nature.
The German Romantic Movement of the late eighteen century developed various theories on dreaming. The German physicist, GC Lichtenberg (1742-99) was the first scholar to link dreams with the unconscious. By the end of the nineteenth century, dreams were recognized as products of the unconscious and linked to the source of creative and imaginative ideas.
In England, Henry Maudsley became well known as a physician of “nervous disorders.” He noticed that “dreams are sometimes found to go before severe illness.” However, despite his observations, none of his peers seemed interested in the possible power of dreams.
Freud and Jung
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalyses, began the first comprehensive scientific study of dreams in the 1890’s. The result of these efforts was the publication of his book,