What are dreams?

Introduction

Humans spend roughly one-third of their lives sleeping, and laboratory research indicates that about a quarter of the sleep period is filled with dreaming. Thus, if a person lives seventy-five years, he or she will spend more than eight of those years dreaming. People throughout the millennia have pondered the meaning of those years of dreaming, and their answers have ranged from useless fictions to psychological insights to the mark of God.

Some of the earliest known writings were about dreams. The Epic of Gilgameš, written around 3500 BCE, contains the first recorded dream interpretation. An Egyptian document dating to the Twelfth Dynasty (1991–1786 BCE) called the Chester Beatty Papyrus, after its discoverer, presented a system for interpreting dreams. The biblical book of Genesis, attributed to Moses, who is said to have lived between 1446 and 1406 BCE, records a dream of Abimelech (a contemporary of Abraham and Sarah) from a period that appears to antedate the Twelfth Dynasty. Artemidorus Daldianus (ca. second century CE) provided a comprehensive summary of ancient thinking on dreams in his famous book, Oneirocritica (The interpretation of dreams).

To better understand dreaming, it must be distinguished from other altered states of consciousness. If the person is fully awake and perceives episodes departing from natural reality, the person is said to have experienced a vision. Experiencing an unintended perceptual distortion is more properly called a hallucination. A daydream is a purposeful distortion of reality. In the twilight realm of dreamlike imagery occurring just before falling asleep or just before becoming fully awake, hypnagogic or hypnopompic reverie, respectively, are said to occur. Dreams occur only in the third state of consciousness—being fully asleep. Another distinction is needed to differentiate between the two types of psychological phenomena that occur when a person is in this third realm of consciousness. Dreams have the attributes of imagery, temporality (time sequence), confusion with reality, and plot (an episode played out). Those subjective experiences that occur during sleep and are lacking in these attributes can be labeled as "sleep mentation."

Types of Dreams

Just as there are different types of dreamlike experiences, there are different kinds of dreams. Although there will be shortcomings in any effort toward classifying dreams, some approximate distinctions can be made in regard to sleep stage, affect (feelings and emotions), reality orientation, and dream origin.

When people fall asleep, brain activity changes throughout the night in cycles of approximately 90 to 110 minutes. Research with the electroencephalograph (which records electrical activity) has demonstrated a sequence of four stages of sleep occurring in these cycles. The first two stages are called D-sleep (desynchronized EEG), which constitutes essential psychological rest—consolidation of memories and processing of thoughts and emotions. The other two stages, which constitute S-sleep (synchronized EEG), are necessary for recuperation from the day’s physical activity—physical rest. S-sleep usually disappears during the second half of a night’s sleep. Dreaming occurs in both S-sleep and D-sleep but is much more likely to occur in D-sleep.

A further distinction in the physiology of sleep is pertinent to the type of dreaming activity likely to occur. During stage-one sleep, there are often accompanying rapid eye movements (REM) that are not found in other stages of sleep. Researchers often distinguish between REM sleep, where these ocular movements occur, and non-REM (NREM) sleep, in which there is an absence of these eye movements. When people are aroused from REM sleep, they report dreams a majority of the time—roughly 80 percent—as opposed to a minority of the time—perhaps 20 percent—with NREM sleep. Furthermore, REM dreams tend to have more emotion, greater vividness, more of a plot, a greater fantastical quality, and episodes that are more likely to be recalled and with greater clarity. According to the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, greater wakefulness during the night and higher frequency of dreaming are linked with more frequent dream recall.

The prevalence of affect in dreams is linked with people’s styles of daydreaming. Those whose daydreams are of a positive, uplifting quality tend to experience the greatest amount of pleasant emotionality in their dreams. People whose daydreams reflect a lot of anxiety, guilt, and negative themes experience more unpleasant dreams. While most dreams are generally unemotional in content, when there are affective overtones, negative emotions predominate about two-thirds of the time. Unpleasant dreams can be categorized into three types. Common nightmares
occur in REM sleep and are caused by many factors, such as unpleasant circumstances in life, daily stresses, or traumatic experiences. Common themes are being chased, falling, or reliving an aversive event. Night terrors are most likely to occur in stage-four sleep and are characterized by sudden wakening, terror-stricken reactions, and disorientation that can last several minutes. Night terrors are rarely recollected. A 2014 study by researchers at the University of Warwick, England, finds that frequent nightmares and night terrors in children may be associated with psychotic experiences in adolescence. An extreme life-threatening event can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Recurring PTSD nightmares, unlike other nightmares and night terrors, are repetitive nightmares in which the sufferer continues to relive the traumatic event. Furthermore, PTSD nightmares can occur in any stage of sleep. Dreams are also involved in REM sleep behavior disorder, in which a sleeping person acts out what he or she is experiencing in REM sleep. Some research suggests this condition may be linked to the development of dementia with Lewy bodies in older men.

Dreams and Reality

The reality level of dreams varies in terms of time orientation and level of consciousness. Regarding time orientation, dreams earlier in the night contain more themes dealing with the distant past—such as childhood for an adult—while dreams closer toward waking up tend to be richer in content and have more present themes—such as a current concern. The future is emphasized in oneiromancy, the belief that dreams are prophetic and can warn the dreamer of events to come. A famous biblical story exemplifies this: Joseph foretold seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine after hearing about Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows devoured by seven lean cows.

The unconscious mind contains material that is rarely accessible or completely inaccessible to awareness. The personal unconscious may resurrect dream images of experiences that a person normally cannot voluntarily recall. For example, a woman may dream about kindergarten classmates about whom she could not remember anything while awake. The psychologist Carl Jung proposed that dreams could sometimes include material from the collective unconscious—a repository of shared human memories. Thus, a dream in which evil is represented by a snake may reflect a common human inclination to regard snakes as dangerous.

When waking reality rather than unconscious thoughts intrude on dreaming, lucid dreams occur. Lucid dreams are characterized by the dreamer’s awareness in the dream that he or she is dreaming. Stephen LaBerge’s research has revealed that lucid dreams occur only in REM sleep and that people can be trained to experience lucidity, whereby they can exercise some degree of control over the content of their dreams. Such explorers of dreams have been called "oneironauts."

Origins and Significance

Theories about the origins of dreams can be divided into two main categories: naturalistic and supernaturalistic. Proponents of naturalistic theories of dreaming believe that dreams result from either physiological activities or psychological processes. Aristotle was one of the first people to offer a physiological explanation for dreams. His basic thesis was that dreams are the afterimages of sensory experiences. A modern physiological approach to dreaming was put forth in the 1970s by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley. According to their activation-synthesis theory, emotional and visual areas of the brain are activated during REM sleep, and the newly alerted frontal lobe tries to make sense of this information plus any other sensory or physiological activity that may be occurring at that time. The result is that ongoing activity is synthesized (combined) into a dream plot. For example, a man enters REM sleep and pleasant memories of playing in band during school are evoked. Meanwhile, the steam pipes in his bedroom are banging. The result is a dream in which he is watching a band parade by with the booming of bass drums ringing in his ears. Hobson does not believe that, apart from fostering recent memories, dreams have any psychological significance.

Plato believed that dreams do have psychological significance and can reveal something about the character of people. More recent ideas about the psychological origins of dreams can be divided into symbolic approaches that emphasize the hidden meanings of dreams and cognitive perspectives that stress that dreaming is simply another type of thinking and that no deep, hidden motives are contained in that thinking. The most famous symbolic approach to dreaming was presented by Sigmund Freud in his book Die Traumdeutung (1900;
The Interpretation of Dreams
, 1913). For Freud, the actual dream content is meaningless. It hides the true meaning of the dream, which must be interpreted. David Foulkes, in Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analysis (1985), proposed a contrary perspective. His cognitive approach to dreaming states that dreams are as they are remembered and that it is meaningless to search for deep meanings. Foulkes proposes that randomly activated memories during sleep are organized into a comprehensible dream by a “dream-production system.”

The final category of dreams represents the most ancient explanation—dreams may have a supernatural origin. Often connected with the supernatural approach is the belief that deities or supernatural beings can visit a person in a dream and heal that person of physical illnesses. This belief is called "dream incubation" and was widely practiced by the ancient Greeks beginning around the sixth century BCE. Several hundred temples were dedicated to helping believers practice this art. Spiritual healing, not physical healing, is the theme presented in the numerous references to dreaming in the Bible: more than one hundred verses in nearly twenty chapters. The Bible presents a balanced picture of the origins of dreams. God speaks through dreams to Abimelech in the first book of the Old Testament (Genesis 20:6) and to Joseph in the first book of the New Testament (Matthew 1:20). However, Solomon (Ecclesiastes 5:7) and Jeremiah (23:25–32) warn that many dreams do not have a divine origin.

Dream Content

Dream content varies depending on the stage of sleep and time of night. Research has also revealed that characteristics of the dreamer and environmental factors can influence the nature of dreams.

Three human characteristics that influence dreams are age, gender, and personality. It has been found that children are more likely to report dreams (probably because they experience more REM sleep) and their dreams are reported to have more emotional content, particularly nightmarish themes. Elderly people report more death themes in their dreams. Male dreams have more sexual and aggressive content than female dreams, which have more themes dealing with home and family. Women report that they dream of their mothers and babies more when they are pregnant. Introverts report more dreams and with greater detail than extroverts. Psychotic individuals (those with severe mental disorders), depressed people, and those whose occupations are in the creative arts (such as musicians, painters, and novelists) report more nightmares. Schizophrenics and severely depressed people provide shorter dream reports than those of better mental health. It is also reported that depressed people dream of the past more than those who are not depressed.

Environmental factors occurring before and during sleep can shape the content of dreams. What people experience prior to falling asleep can show up in dreams in blatant, subtle, or symbolic forms. People watching movies that evoke strong emotions tend to have highly emotional dreams. In fact, the greater the emotionality of a daily event, the greater the probability that the event will occur in a dream during the subsequent sleep period. Those who are wrestling mentally with a problem often dream about that problem. Some have even reported that the solutions to their problems occurred during the course of dreaming. The German physiologist Otto Loewi’s Nobel Prize–winning research with a frog’s nerve was inspired by a dream he had. Sometimes events during the day show up in a compensatory form in dreams. Thus, those deprived of food, shelter, friends, or other desirables report an increased likelihood of dreaming about those deprivations at night.

Events occurring during sleep can be integrated into the dream plot as well. External stimuli such as temperature changes, light flashes, and various sounds can be detected by the sleeping person’s senses and then become part of the dream. However, research indicates that sensory information is only infrequently assimilated into dreams. Internal stimulation from physiological activities occurring during sleep may have a greater chance of influencing the nature of dreams. Dreams about needing to find a bathroom may be caused in part by a full bladder. Similarly, nighttime activation of the vestibular system (which controls the sense of balance), the premotor cortex (which initiates movements), and the locus coeruleus (which plays a role in inhibiting muscles during sleep so that dreams are not acted out) perhaps can stimulate the production of dreams about falling, chasing, or being unable to move, respectively.

Dream Interpretation

There is a profusion of books about dream interpretation offering many different, and often contradictory, approaches to the subject. With so many different ideas about what dreams mean, it is difficult to know which approach is more likely to be successful.

A few principles increase the probability that a dream interpretation approach will be valid. First, the more dream content recalled, the better the opportunity to understand its meaning. Most people remember only bits and pieces of their dreams, and serious efforts to interpret dreams require serious efforts by people to remember their dreams. Second, the more a theme recurs in a series of dreams, the greater the likelihood that the theme is significant. Dream repetition also helps in interpretation: Content from one dream may be a clue to the meaning of other dreams. Finally, the focus of dream interpretation should be the dreamer, not the dream. To understand the dream, one must spend time and effort in knowing the dreamer.

There are many scholarly approaches to dream interpretation. Three theories are particularly noteworthy due to their influence on the thinking of other scholars and their utility for clinical application. Each perspective emphasizes a different side of the meaning of dreams.

Freud proposed that dreams are complementary to waking life. His basic thesis was that many wishes, thoughts, and feelings are censored in waking consciousness due to their unsuitability for public expression and are subsequently pushed down into the unconscious. This unconscious material bypasses censorship in dreaming by a process in which the hidden, “true” meaning of the dream, the latent content, is presented in a disguised form, the manifest content. The manifest content is the actual content of the dream that is recalled. To interpret a dream requires working through the symbolism and various disguises of the manifest content to get to the true meaning of the dream residing in the latent content. For example, Jane’s manifest content is a dream in which she blows out candles that surround a gray-headed man. The candles might symbolize knowledge and the gray-headed man may represent her father. The latent content is that Jane resents her father’s frequent and interfering advice. Thus, blowing out the candles represents Jane’s desire to put an end to her father’s meddling.

Jung proposed that dreams could be understood at different levels of analysis and that the essential purpose of dreams was compensatory. By compensatory, Jung meant that dreams balance the mind by compensating for what is lacking in the way a person is living life. For example, the timid Christian who is afraid to speak up for his or her beliefs with atheistic colleagues dreams of being a bold and eloquent evangelist. Jung believed that four levels of analysis could be used to help dreamers gain insight into their dreams. His general rule guiding the use of these levels is that recourse to analysis at deeper levels of consciousness is only warranted if the dream cannot be adequately understood from a more surface level of examination. To illustrate, a man has a dream in which he steps into a pile of manure. At the conscious level of analysis, it may be that he is dreaming about a recent experience—no need to posit symbolic interpretations. Looking into his personal unconscious, an image from his childhood may be evoked. Recourse to the cultural level of consciousness would examine what manure symbolizes in his culture. It could be a good sign for a farmer in an agrarian world, but a bad sign for a politician in an industrialized society. In some cases, it may be necessary to look at the dream from the perspective of the collective unconscious. Manure might be an ancient, universal image that symbolizes fertility. Could the man be questioning whether or not he wants to be a father?

Zygmunt Piotrowski developed a theory of dream interpretation based on psychological projection. For Piotrowski, in a dream about another person, that person may actually represent a facet of the dreamer’s own mind. The more the dream figure is like the dreamer and the closer the proximity between the figure and the dreamer in the dream, the greater the likelihood the dreamer is projecting himself or herself (seeing in others what is really in the self) into that dream figure. For instance, a woman may dream she is walking with her closest friend but that friend is ignoring everything she is saying to her. An interpretation according to Piotrowski’s system could be that the dreamer is actually dealing with the fact that she is not a good listener.

Dreams may be complementary, compensatory, or projective, useless fictions or avenues of insight, products of the brain or a touch from God. Many credible answers have been proposed, but it is hard to believe that there is a single explanation for every instance of dreaming. Perhaps the best answer is that dreams reveal many different things about many different dreamers—biologically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually.

Bibliography

"Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep." National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. National Institutes of Health, US Dept. of Health and Human Services, 5 Dec. 2013. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.

Dement, William C. The Promise of Sleep. New York: Dell, 2000. Print.

Farthing, G. W. The Psychology of Consciousness. New York: Penguin, 1996. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. Ed. Ritchie Robertson. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Hall, James A. Patterns of Dreaming. Boston: Shambhala, 1991. Print.

Hobson, J. Allan. Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Kallmyer, J. D. Dreams: Hearing the Voice of God through Dreams, Visions, and the Prophetic Word. Harre de Grace: Moriah, 1998. Print.

Lusty, Natalya, and Helen Groth. Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Pagel, James F. Dream Science: Exploring the Forms of Consciousness.Oxford: Academic, 2014. Print.

Rock, Andrea. The Mind at Night: The New Science of How and Why We Dream. New York: Basic, 2009. Digital file.

Rosen, Marvin. Sleep and Dreaming. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006.

Schenk, Carlos H. "Sleep and Parasomnias." National Sleep Foundation. National Sleep Foundation, 2013. Web. 27 Mar. 2014.

West, Marcus. Understanding Dreams in Clinical Practice. London: Karnac, 2011. Print.