Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Can Dreams be Interpreted?
Robert Stonjek
Saturday, 28 February 2009 12:16 UTC
We all have them and most of us can remember them, but what, if anything, do they mean?
Dream interpretation only has very vague indications in, for instance, psychiatry. If a patient is plagued by nightmares, dreams of their own death and the like then this may be, when considered with other symptoms, indicators of their underlying mental state.
But what of particular dreams? They appear to be crazy, mixed up collages of nothing in particular. Is it just a peak at the nocturnal neural noise that occurs as a function of basic brain maintenance, or is there something to them. And what, if anything, do they tell us of consciousness?
A significant component of the dream appears to occur in the process of waking and remembering the dream. For instance we always remember the ends of dreams but rarely the beginning and it is the end of the dream that we are aware of first upon waking.
Sometimes we can’t even establish if the dreams were in colour or not, but this may be less of a mystery than it appears to be. You can run a simple test right now. Focus on some object, preferably surrounded by a colourful scene of some kind. Without moving your focus from the object selected, move your attention around the scene (and into peripheral vision areas). Do this and then return to read the next paragraph.
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Now, were the peripherals that you viewed in colour or not? I can answer this for you – you have no colour receptors in your peripheral vision. But you don’t see black and white. Instead you see a neutral colour or an ‘as if’ colour ie the subconscious handles the uncoloured item as a known coloured item but with indeterminate colour. The subconscious trick is hard to characterise exactly but you feel that you saw colour even though this is actually physically impossible.
The same for dreams. The ‘as if’ coloured status is there unless colour is a feature of the dream. The same is true of other senses but to a lesser degree eg sound and smell. For instance if you dreamed of being in a kitchen whilst cooking was occurring and smell was not a feature of that part of the dream then you will neither remember the presence NOR the absence of smell, only that you can’t remember what the actual odours were. This may be how the ‘as if’ mechanism works – the assumption of failure to recall is inserted where the colour or other absent sense should be.
So there is a lot of detail missing from dreams, but they still appear to have meaning of some kind, but what? And is it a good idea to bother trying?
I’d like to hear what others think about dreams and their place in cognitive science. Do they tell us how the brain works, how the mind works, how consciousness functions?
Robert
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Replies
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Robert, we cannot or do no dream during REM sleep. Males have erections during REM, so its no wonder the dreams do not form, or at least not recallable during REM sleep. Males obivously have more pressing things in mind during REM sleep.
I’m always amazed at the number of people i’ve met who have never had perception of color in their dreams, as it happens so vividly to me 10 percent of the time and less vividly 50 percent of the time.
We remmber more of the end of the dream and likewise, we tend( more likely ) to dream more of the latter things we observed during conscious state.
Sleep, and I belive dreams definitely serve a purpose for proper brain function.
I associate dreaming with the function of Nortons Disk Doctor for Macintosh optimizing( defragmenting ) the computers hard drive.
For those not familar with the visuals of that Disk Doctor operation it appeared like this.
The screen window would have 5 differrent varing widths/bands of color.
There would be blank( white ) spots/blocks randomly here and there and everywhere.
A background cursor would travel from left to right, line by line, the length of whole screen, and over several passes, filling in the blank spots, until finally, the whole window would have this nice set of closely packed colored bands with no blank spots anywhere within the colored bands.
I loved to sit and watch this operation take place. In some ways it almost seemed like my brain was becoming organized, just by watching Disk Doctor organize the computers hard drive.
To me this is what dreaming, or at least sleeping, is about. The dream, Disk Doctor, puts in order the data of the days events. The dreaming appears random mish mash to us but that is only because it is dealing with a mish mash of events from conscious awake period.
Ok, thats my two sense.
Rybo
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At the risk of being controversial, I would say that the impression of “meaning” that we all have when awaking from a particularly vivid dream is an example of cognitive bias. Like the “as if” coloring our mind fills in for us in our peripheral vision, there is probably a physical basis for it.
Is it a good idea to bother trying? That depends on how philosophical you would like to be. I don’t see that dream interpretation is any less worthy than any other explorations of faith and meaning. It certainly follows a long, world-wide tradition.
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Dear Heather,
of course waking up from a particular vivid dream is a remarkable experience.
If that would be the only way to consciously experience dreams, it would be much less remarkable. Many people, some only after training are capable of being conscious WHILE many actual dreams happen. A smaller group and mostly with training are even capable of knowing that they dream while dreaming and also to actively change contents of the dream, e.g. moving this way or that way (various forms of lucid dreaming).
Also there are many traditions, some ancient ones too, that try to make sense of dreams. Interpretation is not the only way to approach this issue. Gestalt dream work for instance emphasises NOT to interpret by the therapist but to relive and experience the dream by the client.
Thus an experiential clue is found of great therapeutic relevance.Yours friendly
Hans -
Dear Robert,
you wrote:“Dream interpretation only has very vague indications in, for instance, psychiatry.”
As far as German speaking countries are concerned, dream interpretation does not play a significant role (a rough estimate for the last 100 years) in psychiatry. It plays a great role in various forms of psychotherapy that are influenced by Freud and his legacy. (the Freudians were basically the only therapists in Germany who did get paid for this kind of work by the federal insurance institutions (gesetzliche Krankenkassen), until about 1980).
As I indicated in my reply to Heather: the Gestalt approach is significantly different as far as interpretation is concerned from both the Freudian and the Jungian work.
Yours friendly
Hans -
Hans,
in psychiatry dreams are still interpreted broadly eg if a person is having persistent repetitive nightmares; if a person’s dreams or nightmares are so vivid that they are afraid to go back to sleep after having such an experience, if dreams affect waking life and, in particular, if the individual has trouble differentiating between dream content and actual experience.A type of dream that has been studied with the view to psychiatric management is the type generally characterised as ‘sleep paralysis’. This is when the individual becomes conscious but is unable to move. They may feel pinching and poking on their bodies. This form of dream has been understood in terms of various mechanisms that support wakefulness (eg the reticular formation). It is thought that reports of alien abduction episodes may actually be episodes of sleep paralysis.
The interpretation of specific dream content is a different thing entirely. I have managed to interpret several of my own dreams by relating them back to the original sequence of events that was actually lived. These type of dreams are those that are recalled upon waking (are unadulterated).
What I take away from those interpreted dreams is that one aspect alone of the waking life is dreamed. For instance a string of emotional responses. Imagine that you walk into a room full of people you don’t know and have to mingle, then clap your hands to draw people’s attention and make a speech. This is an emotional rollercoaster (if I include subtle emotions or ‘feelings’ in with the mix and not just the grosser forms of happy, angry, sad and so on).
Now a dream may well recall only the train of emotion. All of the circumstances (eg the visuals) are then appended to the emotional train. Thus the feeling you had when you walked into the room may be dreamt as waking up in a sleeping bag at a railway station and then realising that you are naked inside the bag ie you felt exposed and vulnerable in front of many people whom you didn’t know.
In other words the emotions you had were much stronger than the actual circumstance required (in reality) and were correctly matched in the dream.
The important thing to note here is that emotions experienced in the real circumstance were a result of the environment you were in ~ clapping your hands and calling people’s attention resulted in an emotion (fear, trepidation leading up to it, relief after the event). But in the dream the normal sequence is reversed – the emotion comes first and then the circumstances are appended to it.
Now when we come to interpret the dream we instinctively try to understand it in the normal sequence – what do the circumstances mean ie the visual imagery. In fact, in this example, the emotion is the logical sequence and the visual conditions are disjointed.
If one had a dream of entering a room, smelling something disgusting and then looking at the hostess who goes bright red (did she fart?) can be interpreted by asking what the strong emotion or reaction was, or what aspect of the dream had continuity. The dream may actually have been of entering a train and seeing a small child in nappies being smelly and the mother being embarrassed.
The utility of this type of dream is in the cross-referencing that is going on at the time. If we follow the normal sequence a step further we have:
Clap hands and draw people’s attention;
Experience an emotion resulting from the anticipation of the above, the above condition, the result of the above condition;
Emotion matched to other similar conditions for which a similar emotion occurred.You now have a toolbox of responses that you used on other similar occasions. Perhaps the outcome was always good, so after the first flash of fear leading up to the event you relax. The dream will now add this to the mix and next time you may be even more relaxed.
This may apply only to one kind of dream or more generally, or may apply only to my dreams. I note that some of the experiences I had and the interpretation of those experiences are similar to Jungian dream interpretation in some aspects, but I have only encountered this form of interpretation in the past week whereas my ideas here are several decades in my past.
Robert
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