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Scientific Dream Interpretation and Analysis |
SP r = √SSxSSy |
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Scientific Dream Interpretation and Analysis |
SP r = √SSxSSy |
Anachronistic Dream Theory
Throughout human history, dreams and their meaning have both fascinated and intrigued humanity. The earliest records of dreams come from Mesopotamia, where clay tablets included accounts of dreams and how to interpret their symbolic and metaphorical imagery. The tablets were found in the library of a king who ruled in the seventh century B.C., but oral versions are believed to have circulated hundreds of years earlier. The Judeo-Christian Bible, the Islamic Koran, and the sacred texts of Buddhism and Hinduism all contain stories of prophetic dreams. In both India and China by about 1000 B.C., texts had been written on how to decipher the meaning of dreams. Dream interpretation as an actual profession goes back at least as far as ancient Greek and Roman society, but informal dream interpretation is likely as old as dreaming itself. There is good reason to believe that people have been experiencing dreams as long as there have been people. Many of these early conceptions of dreams were thought to be messages from divine beings or ancestors that could provide guidance or foretell the future.
Many anthropologists believe that ancient peoples were unable to distinguish the difference between the real, or physical world, and the dream world. To many of these people, there was no distinction, and the dream world was simply an extension of the physical world. A Chinese poet expressed this aptly: “I dreamt last night that I was a butterfly and now I don’t know whether I am a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or perhaps a butterfly who dreams now that he is a man.”
Modern Dream Theory
In 1900, with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud developed the theory that has been one of the major formative influences in Western culture over the past century, and almost all modern thought about dreams derives something from it, even when in conflict with it. Freud proposed that dreams arise from unconscious wishes, mostly of a sexual or aggressive nature, that the conscious mind suppresses during the day. Dreams reveal, in disguised form, the deepest elements of an individual’s inner life. Freud insisted that dream content reflected, in symbolic or metaphorical form, repressed sexual wishes. Freud's interpretations of dream symbols were thus primarily sexual and were made in light of his theory of child sexuality. He interpreted most elongated pointed objects (such as pencils, sticks, knives and pillars) as representing the penis, and he saw containers such as caves, boxes and houses as symbols of the vagina. Symbols that were not sexual he saw as being related to childhood - as symbols of parents, for example.
Freud's theory of dreaming held that dreams acted as "guardians of sleep." Freud's referral to dreams as "the royal road to the unconscious" began by distinguishing between two kinds of dream content: the mainfest content being the dream story and the latent content being the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and wishes that give rise to the manifest content. Latent content is what causes a dream to take the form it takes.
The three sources of latent dream content are: sensory stimulation such as sounds and bodily functions, the second source is current concerns of waking life and third and most important source of latent dream content is unconscious primal impulses that the intellect blocks from direct gratification while the person is awake. Often these impulses relate to childhood conflicts. Freud believed that every dream incorporates some unconscious impulse or urge, though many dreams don't incorporate current concerns or current sensory experiences.
The first of two processes which allow forbidden impulses to be represented in the manifest content of dreams is symbolization. Unacceptable latent content is expressed in manifest content directly but symbolically whose form is less recognizable to the intellect and is thereby less threatening.
The second process in which latent content is translated into manifest content is called dream work. In dream work, unacceptable latent content is disguised and distorted to make it more acceptable to the intellect. This transformation involves several distinct mechanisms in which dream work follows the logic of primary-process thought - which is to say that it follows no logic whatsoever.
When Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, the physiology of sleep was unknown. Freud’s theory of the dreaming process must be revised in the light of modern research and despite its limitations it was a major breakthrough in bringing back the idea that dreams can be meaningful communications – not from the supernatural but from a person’s own inner being. Having presented the idea of interpreting dreams as clues to our hidden emotional problems and conflicts, Freud paved the way for others to explore the use of dreams for expanding human awareness in a whole variety of ways.
Freud Destroyed
J. Allan Hobson, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, published a neurophysiological explanation of dreaming in 1977. Though controversial, it effectively undermined Freudian theory and most other existing psychological approaches to interpreting dream content. Neurons in the brainstem, more specifically the pons, initiated REM sleep and changed the balance of neuromodulators in the brain.
The two most predominant neuromodulators when one is awake are: norepinephrine (directs and focuses one's attention) and serotonin (regulates mood, important in judgement, learning and memory). As one falls asleep and the brain's overall level of activity reduces, they are replaced by acetylcholine which excites the visual, motor and emotional centers of the brain and triggers REM and visual imagery in dreams.
Impulses are blocked, both outgoing motor and incoming sensory at the brainstem. Hobson argues that the brain develops a dream from brainstem signals that randomly stimulate the more highly evolved cognitive areas of the forebrain which passively responds to them. The dream process has "no primary ideational, volitional, or emotional content." Dreams are products of the forebrain "making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery" resulting from chaotic signals from the brainstem.
One forgets one's dreams, not because of some Freudian censor repressing one's primal wishes but because one lacks the neuromodulators (norepinephrine and serotonin) necessary during sleep to imprint them into memory.
The ebbing and flowing of neuromodulators, approximately every ninety minutes, led by the brainstem causes dreams. The psychological foundation of Freud's dream theory was not just undermined but completely obliterated by Hobson's insistence that dreams contain no hidden message but are simple biologcal functions such as respiration or digestion.
For Freud, the bizarre nature of dreams resulted from an elaborate effort of the mind to conceal, by symbolic disguises and censorship, the unacceptable instinctual wishes welling up from the unconscious when the ego relaxes its prohibition of the id in sleep. But most neurobiological evidence supports the alternative view that dream bizarreness stems from normal changes in brain state. Chemical mechanisms in the brain stem, which shift the activation of various regions of the cortex, generate these changes. Many studies have indicated that the chemical changes determine the quality and quantity of dream visions, emotions and thoughts.
Without disguise and censorship, what is left of Freud's dream theory? Not much - only that instinctual drives could impel dream formation. Evidence does indicate that activating the parts of the limbic system that produce anxiety, anger and elation shapes dreams. But these influences are not "wishes." Dream analyses show that the emotions in dreams are as often negative as they are positive, which would mean that half our "wishes" for ourselves are negative. And as all dreamers know, the emotions in dreams are hardly disguised. They enter into dream plots clearly, frequently bringing unpleasant effects such as nightmares. Freud was never able to account for why so many dream emotions are negative.
Hobson, however, doesn't believe dreams are completely meaningless but simply another form of consciousness. Scenes integrated into one's dream plots, perhaps from personal memories, may reflect one's emotional preoccupations, and reflection on those preoccupations may provide insight. Dreams are transparent and the plot fits the emotion making it unnecessary to find forbidden wishes or repressed memories.
Dreaming Evolves
Jonathan Winson, Emeritus Professor, Rockefeller Instirute, working in the 1990s, proposed that dreaming is a means for formation of strategies for survival and evaluate current experience in light of those strategies.
Winson has pieced together a broad set of evidence, ranging from studies of brain structures in humans, to studies comparing behavioral and brain properties of different species, to psychoanalytic studies of dream content.
A fundamental problem in biological adaptation is how to integrate new experiences with old ones in a coherent fashion. Winson suggests that the solution to this problem for mammals is REM sleep. He suggests that most of the integration is done while sleeping, not while actually behaving. The result is that a single set of neuronal structures can serve dual purposes: guiding behavior (when the person is awake) and consolidating and integrating knowledge, developing strategies, and so on (when the person is asleep). Thus we are able to get the most out of our nervous system, since it's being used round the clock, rather than just when we are actively doing things.
Monotremes were the first mammals to develop from reptiles with marsupials and placentals diverging from the monotreme line about 140 million years ago. Signals from the brainstem initiating REM sleep also initiate a sinusoidal wave wave in the hippocampus called theta rhythm. Monotremes experience slow-wave but not REM sleep nor theta waves. Monotremes do show theta rhythm when foraging for food.
Exploring the neuroscientific aspects of REM sleep and of memory processing seemed to hold the greatest potential for understanding the meaning and function of dreams. The key to this research was theta rhythm.
Theta rhythm was discovered in 1954 in awake animals by John D. Green and Arnaldo A. Arduini of the University of California at Los Angeles. The researchers observed a regular sinusoidal signal of six cycles per second in the hippocampus of rabbits when the animals were apprehensive of stimuli in their enviornment. They named the signal theta rhythm after a previously discovered EEG component of the same frequency.
In 1972 Winson published a commentary pointing out that the different occurrences of theta rhythm could be understood in terms of animal behavior. Awake animals seemed to show theta rhythm when they were behaving in ways most crucial to their survival.
Because the hippocampus is involved in memory processing, the presence of theta rhythm during REM sleep in that region of the brain might be related to that activity. Winson suggested that the theta rhythm reflected a neural process whereby information essential to the survival of a species - gathered during the day - was reprocessed into memory during REM sleep.
Studies of the cellular changes that bring about memory illustrated the role of theta rhythm. In particular, the discovery in 1973 of long-term potentiation (LTP) - a change in neural behavior that reflects previous activity - showed the means by which memory might be encoded. Timothy V. P. Bliss and A. R. Gardner-Medwin of the National Institute of Medical Research in London and Terje Lomo of the University of Oslo found changes in nerve cells that had been intensely stimulated with electrical pulses.
A coherent picture of memory processing was emerging. As a rat explores, for example, brain stem neurons activate theta rhythm. Olfactory input (which in the rat is synchronized with theta rhythm, as is the twitching of whiskers) and other sensory information converge on the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. There they are partitioned into 200-ms "bites" by theta rhythm. The NMDA (N-methyl-D-asparate) receptors, acting in conjunction with theta rhythm, allow for long-term storage of this information.
A similar process occurs during REM sleep. Although there is no incoming information or movement during REM sleep, the neocortical-hippocampal network is once again paced by theta rhythm. Theta rhythm might produce lin-lastin changes in memory.
REM sleep provides the mechanism that allows "off-line" memory processing to occur. With the advent of REM sleep in marsupial and placental mammals less prefrontal cortex was required to process information allowing development of advances perceptual abilities in higher species.
With the evolution of REM, recent information can be compared with and integrated with past information to provide an ongoing strategy for behavior.
Dreams may reflect a memory-processing mechanism inherited from lower species in which information important for survival is reprocessed during REM sleep. This information may constitute the core of the unconscious.
Winson has no doubt that, in humans, dreams clearly have a deep psychological core. Life's difficulties so engage one's psychological survival that they are selected for REM sleep processing. Depending on the individual's personality, the themes of drerams may be freewhwwling and when joined with the intricate associations that are an intrinisic part of REM sleep processing, the dream's statement may be rather obscure.
Winson argues that the processes of REM sleep are the unconscious that Freud studied in people's dreams. The paths of symbolic association found by Freud stem from the fact that consolidation is a process of following associations among mental events - even associations that are rare and tangential. In this view then, the brain is simply doing its homework in the dreaming state, sorting the experiences of the day (and the week) into all the categories to which they are potentially relevant.
Freud Redux
Mark Solms, Chairman of Neuropsychology Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, was a Freudian scholar and leader in the psychoanalytic field when he began his pursuit of the neurological basis of dreaming.
While working with patients with brain lesions, including strokes, tumors or traumatic injuries, he discovered a patient who had a lesion in the parietal lobe. This portion of the brain combines various forms of sensory information to create one's sense of spatial orientation and mental imagery. As Solms encountered more patients with lesions to this same region, they all reported a cessation of dreaming. Since REM sleep continued, it was assumed that the brainstem was still sending signals but the receiving area in the forebrain was damaged and unable to create dream imagery.
However, patients with brainstem injuries who retained sufficient consciousness but otherwise undamaged brains reported dreaming. Realizing that existing theory of dreaming as proposed by Hobson might be open to question, Solms began to review earlier works. David Foulkes and Gerald Vogel showed that subjects reported dreams during the hypnogogic state (sleep onset) before the first REM period. John Antrobus had also shown that subjects reported dreams during the hypnopompic state (awakening from sleep), after the last REM period. Although REM sleep was initiated by the brainstem, it appeared that dreaming was an entirely separate process initiated by higher brain functions.
Further evidence that the brainstem and the neuromodulator acetylcholine were not responsible for dreaming came with the discovery of a procedure that was performed during the 1950s and 1960s to treat schizophrenics. The prefrontal leukotomy, a modified version of the prefrontal lobotomy, involved cutting into an area of the brain known as the ventromesial forebrain which lies in the lower and middle portions of the brain's frontal lobes. Patients who underwent this treatment reported a cessation of dreaming. Their behavior changed to apathy, disinterest and lack of spontaneity. That area of the brain is identified as the pleasure seeking system and Solms was convinces that it was the crucial structure necessary to generate dreams and not the brainstem.
Although acetylcholine was necessary to initiate REM, another neuromodulator was responsible for initiating dreaming. When the brain's reward system is activated, dopamine levels surge. Increased dopamine levels resulted in longer, more bizarre, vivid and emotionally intense dreams.
Accumulated evidence suggested that, although most dreaming occured during REM sleep, it was more a coincidence than a necessity for dreaming. It seemed that dreaming required a certain level of arousal rather than a certain type. More complex structures needed to construct dream imagery and plot were activated by the heightened arousal state driven by dopamine.
When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaries rejected it as impossible. But today's findings are confirming the existence and pivotal role of unconscious mental processing. Cognitive neuroscientists are delineating different memory systems that process information "explicitly" (consciously) and "implicitly" (unconsciously). Freud split memory along just these lines.
Neuroscientists have also identified unconscious memory systems that mediate emotional learning. In 1996 at New York University, LeDoux demonstrated the existence under the conscious cortex of a neuronal pathway that connects perceptual information with the primitive brain structures responsible for generating fear responses. Because this pathway bypasses the hippocampus - which generates conscious memories - current events routinely trigger unconscious remembrances of emotionally important past events, causing conscious feelings that seem irrational, such as "Walking out on docks and piers make me uneasy."
Case studies supporting Freud's claim that we actively repress unpalatable information are beginning to accumulate. In 1994 behavioral neurologist Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego studied "anosognosic" patients who had damage to the right parietal region of their brain which made them unaware of gross physical defects, such as paralysis of a limb. After artificially activating the right hemisphere of one such patient, Ramachandran observed that she suddenly became aware that her left arm was paralyzed - and that it had been paralyzed continuously since she had suffered a stroke eight days before. This showed that she was capable of recognizing her deficits for the previous eight days, despite her conscious denials during that time that there was any problem.
Significantly, after the effects of the stimulation wore off, the woman not only reverted to the belief that her arm was normal, she also forgot the part of the interview in which she had acknowledged that the arm was paralyzed, even though she remembered every other detail about the interview. Ramachandran concluded: "The remarkable theoretical implication of these observations is that memories can indeed be selectively repressed.... Seeing [this patient] convinced me, for the first time, of the reality of the repression phenomena that form the cornerstone of classical psychoanalytical theory."
Like "split-brain" patients, whose hemispheres become unlinked - made famous in studies by the late Nobel Laureate Roger W. Sperry of th California Institute of Technology in the 1960s and 1970s - anosognosic patients typically rationalize away unwelcome facts, giving plausible but invented explanations of their unconsciously motivated actions. In this way, Ramachadran says, the left hemisphere manifestly employs Freudian "mechanisms of defense."
Analogous phenomena have now been demonstrated in people with intact brains, too. As neuropsychologist Martin A. Conway of Durham University in England pointed out in a 2001 commentary in Nature, if significant repression effects can be generated in average people in an innocuous laboratory setting, then far greater effects are likely in real-life traumatic situations.
To Solms, the exact area of the brain predicted by Freud's theory, was the same area of the brain which appeared to be crucial for initiating dreams.
Dream Scans
In 1997, a few months after the publication of Solm's new theory, Tom Balkin and Allen R. Braun published their findings of the dreaming brain in action using an emerging technology called PET (positron-emission tomography) scanning.
What they found was that as the brain moves into the deepest stages of non-REM sleep, activity in nearly all parts of the brain decreases with the prefrontal cortical regions being first and with the greatest decrease. This region is involved in planning, organizing, problem solving, selective attention, personality and a variety of "higher cognitive functions" including behavior and emotions. It is also the last region to activate when awakening.
Sharp drops in levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, involved in focus of attention and problem solving, accompany deactivation of the prefrontal cortex. Acetylcholine surges with the advent of REM. Areas that had become deactivated during non-REM sleep, become activated with the exception of the prefrontal cortex. Suppression of the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep may help explain several of the cardinal features of dreaming, such as bizarre imagery, loss of critical insight and logic, diminished self-reflection, inability to shift attention, morphing of time, place and identity and forgetting of dreams, says Braun.
Also found, was that the primary visual cortex -- the point of entry for visual information from the external world--was deactivated during REM, but regions of the brain that conduct higher-level visual processing remained activated, perhaps explaining why people continue to "see" while dreaming, even while the brain is cut off from the outside world.
Areas of the brain associated with long-term memory storage and retrieval are more active during REM sleep than while awake. This supports research which links REM sleep to memory consolidation and integration. The brain is comparing recent experience with long-term memory, attempting to make associations with past experience, reenforcing some while allowing others to remain dormant or possibly atrophy. The players have changed, in evolutionary terms, but the game remains the same - survival.
Working memory, however, remains inactive during REM sleep. This explains the difficulty in recalling dreams. Unless the dream is extremely emotional or one is highly motivated, the retrieval mechanism is absent.
An area of the brain that is highly activated during REM sleep is the limbic system. In fact, it is more active than while awake. The center of one's emotions, threats, joys, is the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system. This would explain why dreams experienced during REM sleep are so emotionally charged.
(Imaging the brain during sleep, Bill Wine, Image. vol. 19, no. 22 - May 29, 2006.)
Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that human REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity that can be linked to particular dream features. And it is the neuropsychological analysis of dream content that would seem to offer new ways of interpreting dreams.
The primary aim of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program is to identify function changes in different regions of the brain across the wake/sleep cycle in health vs. disease, in the hopes of discovering alterations in function related to different disease states, and thus providing clues to appropriate treatment for particular disorders.
Their approach to studying brain function during sleep is to combine several research methods in sleep analysis and functional brain imaging, such as polysomnography with spectral analysis of the EEG, PET studies of regional cerebral brain glucose metabolism and fMRI studies of the brain. These methods provide high temporal and spatial resolution for measuring brain function during sleep.
"We know that it's not just the random firing of neurons during REM sleep," Nofzinger, who has pioneered methods to define the brain mechanisms of human sleep disorders using functional neuroimaging, says. "There's some method to the madness of dreaming: We're still left with having to look at the psychological content of dreams."
Wine
Dreams Quantified
Calvin Hall, who was a psychologist and Director of the Institute of Dream Research at Santa Cruz, saw dreams as abstract thoughts converted in concrete and visible images. Thus, when one tells one's dream to another person, one is actually communicating one's thoughts. Hall pointed out that the purpose of dream interpretation is to translate the pictures back into ideas, thus providing a view of the dreamer's self-concept and of the dreamer's attitude toward life. In this way dreams reveal the individual's most personal and intimate conceptions.
Hall's early work on dreams was based on reports written anonymously by college students, who turned out to be ideal subjects because of their interest in subjective experience and willingness to answer questions. However, Hall soon was collecting reports from children, older adults, people in other parts of the world, and those who kept dream diaries. He had over 50,000 dream reports when he died. He began his work with thematic analyses of 15 to 25 dreams from each student, looking for obvious patterns, but soon developed a quantitative coding system that divided dream content into settings, objects, characters, interactions, emotions, misfortunes, and several other categories. The normative findings with a more complete and refined version of the coding system were published in The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966), co-authored with Robert Van de Castle.
On the basis of his empirical work, Hall developed a cognitive theory of dreams which states that dreams express "conceptions" of self, family members, friends, and social environment. They reveal such conceptions as "weak," "assertive," "unloved," "domineering," and "hostile." Hall also developed a metaphoric theory of dream symbolism, which he demonstrated through the similar metaphoric expressions appearing in slang and poetry. His work anticipated the cognitive turn in psychology and the emphasis on metaphor by George Lakoff and other cognitive linguists.
Hall's empirical work shows the dreams of groups of people from all over the world are more similar than they are different, although there are variations that make sense in terms of cultural differences. At the same time, he found large individual differences in the frequency of dream elements; these differences correspond with waking concerns, emotional preoccupations, and interests, suggesting what Hall called a "continuity" between dream content and waking thought. His work with dream diaries recorded over several years, or even decades by a few people, showed an astonishing consistency in dream content, although there were some changes consistent with changes in the dreamers' waking lives. In addition to his many scientific publications on dreams, Hall wrote two popular books, The Meaning of Dreams (1953) and The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Both sold widely and interested many people in keeping a record of their dreams.
William Domhoff, Calvin Hall's protege, has continued Hall's work and through his efforts, much of Hall's data on comparisons of dreams across cultures became available publicly for the first time in the mid-1990s. The results show that there are more similarities than differences in dream content among all people regardless of where or how they live.
Domhoff asserts that dreams do not have a psychological function. However, dreams do have psychological meaning in that they are coherent simulations of the real world and relate to many other psychological factors. They reveal our self-concepts and our conceptions of people who are significant in our lives. For many readers, it may seem like a contradiction to say that dreams could have no function and still have meaning, but such is not necessarily the case. The best evidence for the no-function-but-meaning idea is to be found in the work of David Foulkes: Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (1985) and Children's Dreaming and The Development of Consciousness (1999).
Furthermore, whether dreams have a psychological function or not, they do have "uses" that were created by people in many different cultures in the course of human history. In fancier terms, they have an "emergent" function within social groups. Most generally, they are considered to be a key link between human beings and the spiritual world by people in many different cultures, so they are used in healing, initiation, and religious ceremonies. There is a direct connection between shamans, who are the original psychoanalysts, and present-day psychoanalysts, who are modern-day shamans.
The Hall/Van de Castle system is an application of the general methodological strategy called "content analysis." Content analysis is an attempt to use carefully defined categories and quantitative methods to extract meaning from a "text," whether it be a newspaper article, transcribed conversation, short story, or dream report. One of the earliest proponents of content analysis stated that the "fundamental objective" of this method is to convert the "symbolic behavior" of people into "scientific data," by which he meant objective and reproducible; susceptible to measurement and quantification; significant for either pure or applied theory; and generalizable. Hall defined content analysis as "the categorization of units of qualitative material in order to obtain frequencies which can be subjected to statistical operations and tests of significance."
In a study of children 5 - 8 none of the findings on rate of recall, report length, or narrative complexity showed any gender differences. First, and most unexpected, the median rate of dream recall was only 20-30% from REM awakenings until ages 9-11, when the median recall rate of 79% from REM awakenings approached adult levels. Recall from NREM awakenings went from 6% at ages 5-7 to 39% at ages 11-13. For both REM and NREM awakenings, recall came first from awakenings late in the night, then from awakenings in the middle of the night, and finally from awakenings early in the sleep period.
The children's dream reports had very different content until ages 13-15 than what is reported by adults. For children under age 5, the REM reports consisted primarily of static and bland images in which they saw an animal, or were thinking about eating or sleeping. The dreams of children ages 5-8 showed a sequence of events in which characters moved about and interacted, but the dream narratives were not very well developed. Compared to the dream reports of adults, those of the young children were notable for their low levels of aggressions, misfortunes, and negative emotions. Gender differences in dream content did begin to appear in late childhood, but were more prevalent by adolescence.
Once children have the ability to dream, their linguistic and descriptive skills begin to correlate with the length and narrative complexity of their dream reports. Still, it is not until ages 11-13 that dream content shows any relationship to personality dimensions. For example, individualistic and assertive children portray themselves as more active in their dreams. Children with more violence in their waking fantasies have more aggressive interactions in their dreams, and those who display the most hostility before going to bed in the laboratory more often dream of themselves as angry. These findings on the continuity of dream content with waking mentation support findings in earlier studies of children in the laboratory. They suggest that dreams can reflect personality dimensions once there is an adequate level of cognitive development. In effect, this finding is what remains of the large claims by clinical dream theorists.
There are four general findings with the Hall/Van de Castle system that must be encompassed by a neurocognitive theory of dreams. First, several different studies reveal that the dream lives of college men and women in the United States remained the same throughout the second half of the 20th century despite major cultural changes. Second, there is little or no change in dream content with age once adulthood is reached. That is, older dreamers do not differ from college students, except perhaps for a decline in physical aggressions and negative emotions. Nor does dream content change much in longitudinal studies of dream journals provided by adults, a claim that holds true for periods as long as four or five decades and for people still keeping journals in their seventies.
The third relevant result with the Hall/Van de Castle system is that there is a stable pattern of cross-cultural similarities and differences. Everywhere in the world, for example, women and men have the same differences in the ratio of male to female characters in their dream reports, with women dreaming equally of men and women, and men dreaming about other men by a 2:1 ratio. For both men and women, there is usually more aggression than friendliness, more misfortune than good fortune, and more negative emotions than positive emotions. In addition to these similarities, there are also a few differences that make sense in terms of large-scale cultural differences. Small traditional societies have a higher percentage of animal characters, and there are variations from society to society in the percentage of all aggressive interactions that are physical in nature, although it is also the case that men in almost all societies have a higher physical aggression percent than women.
There is a large clinical literature on the repetitive nightmares of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that fits well with the idea of a repetition principle. Second, the repetition principle can encompass the recurrent dreams that 50-80% of people claim to have had at one time or another in their lives, often starting in late childhood or early adolescence, sometimes lasting for the rest of their lives, and usually highly negative in content and emotionally upsetting. Third, the idea of a repetition principle can incorporate the repeated themes found in most series of 20 or more dreams. In other words, it is not just Hall/Van de Castle indicators that are consistent over many years, but also more general themes like being lost, preparing meals, or being late for an examination. In one journal consisting of 904 dreams over a 50 year period, for example, just six themes accounted for at least part of the content in 76% of the dream reports.
The repetition principle suggests several potential linkages between dream content and the neural network for dreaming, particularly in terms of its possible relationship with the vigilance/fear system that seems to be centered in the amygdala. The best examples of this point, of course, are the repetitive nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder, which sometimes happen in Stage II of NREM and seem to have parallels with the nightmares suffered by epileptics due to seizures in NREM. Then, too, studies using stereotaxic electrodes to locate the sites causing seizures in epileptic patients show that the "dreamy state" sometimes experienced as part of the diagnostic process is related to the temporal-limbic region. In one large-scale study, the amygdala, anterior hippocampus, and temporal neocortex were involved in every spontaneous occurrence of this state during the procedure. Thus, future neuroimaging work on both post-traumatic stress disorder and epilepsy may hold promise for linkages between the repetition principle and the neural network for dreaming.
However, there need not be an exclusive focus on patients. The consistency of emotionally painful themes and of heightened scores on Hall/Van de Castle indicators in the dreams of many normal participants suggest that their dream life is often "stuck" in the past in a way that fits with the persistence of negative memories stored in the vigilance/fear system. Both dreams and the vigilance/fear system seem to provide a neurocognitive record of traumas, upsets, and tensions over a lifetime. Moreover, both may persist even when the person seems emotionally recovered and unhampered by the past during waking life.
Studies of dream content also might provide a link between waking cognition and dreaming to the degree it can be demonstrated that dreams use the same conceptual metaphors, metonymies, and conceptual blends that cognitive linguists and psycholinguists have shown to be pervasive in waking thought. Although strategies for locating metaphors in a dream series through the use of content analysis go back several decades (Hall, 1953a), very little progress has been made in this direction. Lakoff presents new ideas for studying metaphors in dreams that provide additional starting points.
Another new avenue into this possible linkage might be found in "typical" dreams, such as flying under one's own power or finding oneself inappropriately dressed in public. Content analyses of hundreds of dream reports in journals kept during college courses demonstrate that such dreams account for less than 2% of dream life, but several survey studies suggest that at least a significant minority of respondents claim to have had one or more of such dreams. These dreams may be examples of "primary" metaphors, which are based on repeated correlations between two dimensions of experience that are common in childhood development, such as tasting something sweet (a physiological process) and experiencing pleasure (an emotion), leading to the metaphor that "Pleasing is Tasty".
Consider dreams of flying under one's own power, which are experienced by a little over half of college students in two surveys, and said by them to be generally positive in feeling tone. Searching for a metaphor related to flying, the possibility arises that these dreams may be instances of the primary metaphor "Happiness is Up," as found in such expressions as "high as a kite," "walking on air," and "floating on cloud nine." This speculation also fits with the fact that people sometimes become apprehensive about falling during their positive flying dreams, just as people worry that they may "crash" or "have the air let out of their balloon" when they are too elated in waking life.
Similarly, it may be that dreams of appearing inappropriately dressed in public are instances of the metaphor "Embarrassment is Exposure," which is expressed through such well-known phrases as "caught red-handed," "caught with egg on your face," and "caught with your pants down". It might be evidence for this conjecture that people who are asked to write down the dream in which they experienced the greatest feeling of embarrassment most often report one in which they are inadequately attired in a public place.
These two hypothetical examples aside, the few attempts to undertake systematic studies of metaphor in dreams suggest that most dreams do not seem to relate very obviously to primary metaphors. Most dreams seem more like dramas or plays in which the dreamer acts out various scenarios that revolve around a few basic personal themes. They seem to be instances of the "thematic" point on the repetition dimension, that is, specific "episodes" or "examples" relating to more general emotional preoccupations, usually negative in nature. This means that less obvious forms of metaphor-- or other types of figurative thinking-- must be invoked if very many dreams are to be encompassed by the ideas of cognitive scientists.
These more complex dreams may rely on "resemblance" metaphors, which depend upon the perception of the common aspects in two representational schemas, or on conceptual blends that often start with basic conceptual metaphors and then are elaborated into highly novel thoughts. Hall has shown that blind analyses of a series of dreams can lead to very plausible and potentially verifiable inferences when figurative forms of thought relating to a major concern are utilized several times in the dream series. To take his best example, a young woman who provided a series of dreams had an especially striking one in which she was searching for her wedding gown because she and her husband were to be married again on their first wedding anniversary. However, she was very disappointed when she found the gown: it was dirty and torn. With tears in her eyes, she put the gown under her arm and arrived to the church, only to have her husband ask why she had brought the gown. She reports she was "confused and bewildered and felt strange and alone".
Looking at the dream from a figurative point of view, Hall hypothesized that the state of the dress might express her conception of her marriage. In today's terms, the dream may be a conceptual blend based upon a metonymy. To test this hypothesis, Hall looked to see if there were other dreams in the series that might suggest the marriage is in difficulty, and there were several: (1) the stone from her engagement ring is missing; (2) her husband has tuberculosis; (3) one of her women friends is going through a divorce; and (4) a friend who is about to be married receives a lot of useless bric-a-brac for wedding presents. If the Hall/Van de Castle system had been available when this analysis was made, the case could have been improved by comparing the dreamer's aggressions-per-character ratio with her husband to the same ratio with other adult males. If it was higher with her husband than with other adult males, and if there was a lower rate of friendly interactions as well, then the metaphoric hypothesis would have been supported by means of a non-metaphoric content analysis.
The possibility that some dreams are based on figurative thinking provides a way for a neurocognitive theory of dreams to incorporate the interesting idea that past experiences are sometimes used as personal metaphors to express current conflicts that have similar emotions and feelings at their core. This idea comes from a study of Vietnam veterans who had recovered from their post-traumatic stress disorder. However, they later came back to the Veterans Administration for help when war-related themes began to appear in their dreams in the face of new life stressors, such as marital conflict, conflicts with children, or work-related tensions. In effect, these new war-related dreams are conceptual blends that combine past experiences with aspects of the stressful situations the veterans are now enduring. The resemblance is in the similarity of the feelings in both the war and the new situation. "It's a war zone out there," they might be thinking, in relation to their current problems.
If dreaming is in part figurative, especially in terms of primary metaphors, resemblance metaphors, metonymies, and conceptual blends, then a neurocognitive theory of dreams could advance in parallel with new understandings in cognitive linguistics. However, it still would be necessary to do the same kind of thematic and Hall/Van de Castle content analyses of a dream series that have been carried out in the past in order to understand any given series of dreams. This is primarily because many resemblance metaphors and most conceptual blends are likely to be unique to the dreamer. In addition, several different primary metaphors use the same source domain, such as "vertical orientation," so contextual analysis would be necessary to decide among such possibilities as "Happy is Up," "More is Up," and "Control is Up".
Domhoff
Life Is The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
Whether dreams serve any biological function or not, most scientists acknowledge that one can glean meaning from them. More psychologically oriented researchers believe that dreams reflect emotional issues that are most active in one's mind at a given point in time. Psychologist Erich Fromm has written, "If it is true that the ability to be puzzled is the beginning of wisdom, then this truth is a sad commentary on the wisdom of modern man. Whatever the merits of our high degree of literary and universal education, we have lost the gift for being puzzled. Everything is supposed to be known - if not to ourselves then to some specialist whose business it is to know what we do not know. In fact, to be puzzled is embarrassing, a sign of intellectual inferiority. Even children are rarely surprised, or at least they try not to show that they are; and as we grow older we gradually lose the ability to be surprised. To have the right answers seems all-important; to ask the right questions is considered insignificant by comparison."
At the very least our dreams bear witness to the brain at work. The Talmud says "a dream which is not understood is like a letter which is not opened." Regardless of whether one chooses to understand one's dreams or not, the brain continues its nightly work weaving them. Knowledge is power.
Recap
References
The Mind at Night, Andrea Rock, Basic Books, 2004.
"The Meaning of Dreams", Jonathan Winson, Scientific American, 2002.
Dream Power, Ann Faraday, Berkley Books, 1980.
"Regional cerebral blood flow throughout the sleep-wake cycle (An H2150 PET study)", A. R. Braun, et al, Brain, 120, 1173-1197.
The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm, Grove Press, Inc., 1951.
"Dreaming and the Brain: Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Conscious States," J. Allan Hobson, World Wide Web.
"Dreaming and REM Sleep are Controlled by Different Brain Mechanisms," Mark Solms, World Wide Web.
"What Dreams May Come (Imaging the brain during sleep)", Bill Wine, Image, vol. 19, no. 22 - May 29, 2006, World Wide Web.
"The Repetition Principle in Dreams: Is It a Possible Clue to a Function of Dreams?," G. William Domhoff, World Wide Web, World Wide Web.