The Last Sanctum of Archetypes
Rethinking Dreams in the Light of Ancient Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.411Keywords:
ancient dreaming, archetypes, artificial intelligence, dream data, cross-cultural dream analysisAbstract
Despite numerous attempts to integrate dream research into a vast array of scientific disciplines, there appears to be no consensus on why and how we dream. This millennia-old universal human phenomenon appears to be too elusive to be thoroughly understood by a single scientific discipline and too complex and data-rich to be studied only theoretically. However, another dimension to dreams and dreaming could promise an integrative approach: the culture-historical component that merges with recent advances in Artificial Intelligence. This paper briefly examines conceptual understandings of dreams before the dawn of modern science – specifically, the Native American, Mesopotamian, ancient Greek, and Hippocratic principles of dream practices and knowledge – in an attempt to understand the contemporary dream research field better and to outline future avenues for a data-driven approach while remaining grounded in its epistemological foundation.
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