On Dreams

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives” –William C. Dement

After about an hour of trying to fall asleep tonight, I rolled over frustrated and searched around my nightstand for my iPhone. I needed something to entertain me until I got tired. I made some moves on Words with Friends, creeped on Facebook, watched some things on YouTube...

I tapped on my Netflix app and browsed the same, familiar movies that never seem to get updated until I got to the documentaries section.

A few caught my eye, but when I saw a documentary about dreams I stopped cycling through and stared at the screen, remembering a couple of conversations I had about my friend's dreams. A few weeks ago a friend told me about a violent dream he had and how the dream disturbed him. The night before last, another person told me about a vivid dream, which she believed to be symbolic and a sign from God for her to do something.

I rarely dream. Or at least, I rarely remember my dreams. And I never have nightmares. Or maybe I just never remember my nightmares... whatever, point is, I thought about both these conversations and I let my finger hover over the the "play" button. I looked below the title at the description... it didn't sound all that interesting. In fact, it sounded cheesy and fictitious. Pseudosciencey. I suspected if I did watch it, I'd get bored within 10 minutes...

But I decided to watch it anyway. And to my surprise, I watched it all the way through.

It was about a woman who, through a series of dreams, becomes terrified of her own death. It had a paranormal style to it, often running through disturbing images to convey dream-like sequences. I got the vibe that the woman was trying to convey something supernatural about dreams...

And given the events that happened in the documentary, there was something otherworldly about the dreams...

I won't ruined it for you (the doc was called Edge of Dreaming) but it brought to light some interesting questions about dreams that I've heard before. And that, for the most part, people are not familiar with the nature of dreams. The film wasn't exactly scientific, but it did present some reliable information and it showed how powerful a dream can be in the sense that a simple dream, simple but disturbing, can affect peoples beliefs in the waking world.

I would argue that dreams are just another way thinking that occurs when people sleep, that they most importantly reflect emotional concerns, and that certain aspects of dreams can have symbolic meaning in regards to emotional concerns. But the gist of my argument is that I believe we can find a purpose for our dreams without speculation of paranormal activity or invoking the supernatural.

I think what interests most people is the content of dreams. There is often a strangeness to dreams.

There are those dreams, like the ones in the documentary, that seem supernatural. And there is deja-vu. Those moments that feel like we have already experienced or seen a current situation...
These experiences are the strongest reinforcer of the mysticism of dreams. I would argue that we know more about dreams to suggest an explanation for all these phenomena.

Let me get the boring stuff outta the way. Using brain-imaging we can actually see that dreams are products of activity in the lower brain stem. We can study the mind by studying the brain. The mind is what the brain does. When we are awake, signals from the lower brain stem are sent to an area of your brain that interprets them as the sensations you need to experience reality-- seeing, feeling, hearing, etc.

So because these signals come from the real world, you experience reality. When asleep, our frontal lobe goes offline and the brain is tasked with interpreting these signals from the lower brain stem without the help of higher mental processes. These signals from our lower brain stem cannot perceive reality because we are asleep and so the brain has to make sense of these signals that you have when your are awake when you are asleep. We can infer then that the brain puts together an explanation of these signals from other parts of the brain which are not shut down, from memories and other stored information.

This is how I have come to understand it anyway. Again, as always, this is not original-- it is the basis for something called the activation-synthesis hypothesis. Because we can see and observe these things going on in the brain, it is a much better explanation in my opinion as to why we dream. We dream because we have perpetual minds. Even when we are sleep, we still cannot entirely escape our private realities.

BUT if this were all that dreams were (firings of signals from the lower brain stem) they would be random and meaningless-- and consistently bizarre. Yet, when someone we love passes away, they can haunt our dreams for weeks. When someone hurts us emotionally, we can dream of our pain in similar, and even symbolic, ways. There are also reoccurring dreams-- which are too consistent to be random signals from the brain.

Much of our dream content is meaningful and consistent. They reflect past or present emotional concerns. There is a cognitive explanation for this but I don't think it's necessary to explain. All that matters for my argument is the fact that dreams reflect emotional concerns (Domhoff 1996).

If dreams reflect emotional concerns, then they can reveal information about ourselves (like what we are feeling). This would also explain why religious people have religious dreams because that can be an emotional concern. Whatever is on that person's mind is probably what they're gonna dream about. It is all about what the dreamer's feeling. And we are very presumptuous in thinking, at all times, we are aware of what we are feeling. I can attest to this from my training and experience at Helpline (a crisis hotline for A&M). People can become so confused in their feelings that all they need is someone to point those feelings out to them. Or to validate them. I think we tend to think these people crazy but "crazy" isn't a very good way to describe someone. That word can mean many things and isn't very useful. Dreams, specifically those which display emotional concerns, can serve a purpose to better understand ourselves in moments of distress or to come to terms with repressed feelings. We can interpret our own dreams and use them to better understand ourselves.

Some can argue that the answer to what is the purpose of dreaming is the same answer as to why we dream: it is a way for our brains to make sense of random information used from our memory and past experiences. Dreams don't need a purpose. But they can serve a purpose.

I know putting sources in a blog is overkill, and in my defense, I just believe that when talking about research findings it is best to state them if possible. So with that said, there is evidence to suggest that dreams feature repressed thoughts (Wegner, Wenzlaff & Kozak 2004)-- which is why they can be purposeful in discovering information about ourselves that may otherwise be consciously inaccessible .

So having a disturbing dream or an emotionally powerful dream can serve as a great insight into some very real feelings. By looking at all aspects of the dream, people can engage in a kind of therapy when times are tough. People tend to shake off dreams or discard them if disturbing-- but they can be purposeful with but a few moments of reflection. And it's possible dreams can even reveal emotional content that the dreamer is completely unaware of.

But... In reality, what I'm suggesting is dream interpretation. There is a huge danger in speaking about dream interpretation.

I'll use Freud as an example of this danger. Freud would say that all your dreams are a statement of wish fulfillment that stem from childhood. That is, the whole purpose of dreaming is because your unconscious mind is stating what you desire. But because we have defense mechanisms, are dreams are coded in symbols. This way, our minds can hide the true nature of our dreams so as to not disturb the dreamer. Freud would say that the particularly bizarre aspects of dreams are unconscious wishes or desires. Research does NOT support this (Breger, Hunter, & Lane, 1971; Dement & Wolpert, 1958). All dreams are not wish fulfillment, desires, or repressed conflicts from the unconscious. Dreams can be much simpler than that.

The problem with Freud’s view and dream interpretation is that there are an infinite number of interpretations for any one dream. Finding the correct one is a matter of guessing. This is where people who practice dream interpretation can make a living. If anyone can interpret your dreams it is you and you alone. No one else shares your exact experiences or knows precisely what you feel and why you feel it. People also attribute different meanings to symbols. For examples, lets say two people have a dream where a man gives them an apple. One of them interprets the dream as Satan tempting them with sin (a biblical allusion) and the other sees it as being given a snack because they went to bed hungry (and they love apples). For one person the apple holds symbolic meaning and for the other it is just an apple, or maybe the apple symbolizes hunger.

So when do we interpret dreams? What makes a dream meaningful? I dunno. That's for you to decide. I would caution excessively attributing meaning to dreams, as Freud did. Dreaming can reveal our deepest fears, hidden feelings, or what we truly desire. Or they can just be situational abstractions. In my experience, it is pretty easy to know which dreams reflect emotional concerns. Usually because... you feel emotionally concerned. Pretty straightforward. Finding meaning in dreams can give them a useful purpose: another path to self-actualization and knowing yourself.

Oh-- and a possible explanation as to what happened with the woman in the documentary who had a dream that later came to be true? I think the psychiatrist at the very end gives some good possible explanations. I guess you'll just have to watch it to find out!

"The waking life, with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, is never repeated; on the contrary, the dream aims at relieving us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when our hearts are rent by bitter grief, or when some task has been taxing our mental capacity to the utmost, the dream either gives us something entirely alien, or it selects for its combinations only a few elements of reality; or it merely enters into the key of our mood, and symbolizes reality." --J. H. Fichte