The Shanghai Changning District Mental Health Center set up the city's first ever clinic for psychoanalysis of dreams over the weekend, but doctors there have a lot of work to do to convince local residents their service is more than superstition or fortune telling.

Dream analysis first won medical acceptance in the West in 1900 when Sigmund Freud published his breakthrough work "The Interpretation of Dreams." But the science has yet to be taken seriously in China.

Doctors at the clinic are hoping that the concept will catch on in Shanghai, where local residents tend to be open to foreign ideas.

"Under increasing competition and a quickening pace of life in the city, people are under increasing stress. We receive 3,000-odd patients every month, more than 80 percent of whom have sleeping difficulties," said Ye Shanlong, president of the mental health clinic.

"Many people, especially office workers, entrepreneurs and students, require doctors to give them a reasonable and professional explanation of their dreams," said Ye, arguing that bad dreams can sometimes lead to insomnia or other metal disorders.

Ye says the concept of dream analysis really caught on in the West, especially America and Germany, in the 1980s, but China didn't start researching the idea until the late 1990s due to many people's misunderstanding of the practice.

Doctors at the clinic say dream analysis, unlike superstition, allows them to find the cause of people's anxieties.

Ye says there are three types of dreams -- normal dreams, pathological dreams and abnormal dreams.

Ye says pathological dreams are often an indication something is wrong physically with a patient. Many kidney and cardiac diseases can cause such dreams, he said.

The clinic is mainly interested in abnormal dreams, which are repetitive, unpleasant and can have a serious effect on people's mood, interpersonal relationships and sleep.

(eastday.com December 24, 2003)