Dream in Persian medicine perspective: A narrative review

Abstract

Sleep and dream are the inseparable parts of the human life, so their disturbance can affect the individuals’ quality of life. Sages of Persian medicine (PM) had valued dream as a part of history taking and physical examination for diagnosis of the diseases. Recently, psychologists and psychotherapists have focused on several aspects of dream. The aim of this review study was to explain the overviews of the sages of PM about dream and its aspects. The main sources of PM including The Canon of Medicine, Kholase Al-Hekmat, Firdous al-Hikmah, Mofareh Al-Gholub, Sharhe aghsaraei and also the NOOR software was reviewed by these keywords: “khab”, “roya”, “navm”, and “azqâth-e-ahlâm”. In addition, electronic data bases including PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Scopus, and Google Scholar were searched.   Finally, the gathered information was presented.  According to PM, the potential functionality of dream contents can be exploited to shed light on the temperamental diagnosis, and there are modalities whereby dream interpretation can be useful in diagnosis. PM considers the clues from one’s sleep/wakefulness ratio to discern one’s temperament: where abundance of wakeful hours indicates hotness and/or dryness of temperament, too much sleep signals an indication of coldness and/or wetness of temperament. Such discerning of temperaments itself acts as a suitable prelude to proper diagnosis. In conclusion, PM sages had recommended that the individuals’ dreams depend on their temperament. In this regard, it is suggested that experimental and clinical studies on dream should be designed with integration of conventional medicine and PM.