introduction to dreams Flashcards
theories of dreams
· Psychanalysis and neuropsychoanalysis
· Evolutional theory of dreaming
· Cognitive and neuroscientific dream theories
· Psychological theories of dreaming
The relationship between dreaming and sleep
ancient dream practices
As a skill:
Ancient practices:
→ Dream incubation (delphi’s oracle)
→ Dream yogas (tibetan practice)
→ Shamanic dream practices
Dreaming/dreamtime in australia
contemporary dream practices
→ Lucid dreaming - cool things (conjure up lover, enter dream, leave dream, etc)
→ Dream incubation (for problem solving/therapy) - finding answer on the ‘tip of your tongue’
→ Traditional and mixed practices
Clinical practices
how do we study dreams
…self reports
….experimental awakenings in lab
….expert participants
….sleep science (using REM sleep as a “proxy” for dreaming
dream etymologies
Most languages have a negative/deceptive edge to the word ‘dream’
Dream, traum, droom (germanic)
○ Proto-germanic draugmaz…“deception, illusion, hallucination, ghost, festivisty”
○ Ancient saxon drom (“music, joy)
Rêve
○ Old french desver “lose the sense”
○ Late latin exvagus/gallo-roman esvo …wanderer
Mèng, mandarin
○ Bad vision + evening, twilight
To have a dream, to do a dream, to have a dream happen
sleep mentation vs ‘classic’ dreaming
Sleep mentation = any form of internal subjective experience (sensations, percepts, emotions, etc) that occurs during sleep and that dreamer remembers upon awakening —- not necessarily the classic dream, could just be vague feelings remembered, not a full on dream
The ‘classic’ dream is a more precise subset of mental activity and refers to a form of complex mental activity, narrative, including a spatio-temporal organization and a multimodal sensory content (visual, auditory, etc.)
what are dreams made of
→ Emotions
→ Thoughts
→ Sensations
○ Images, kinesthetic/tactile (common)
○ Smells, taste (rare) - maybe just have bad language for describing
○ Interoception, pain, other
→ Narrative structure/scenarios
→ Characters - practicing for social situations
→ Memory sources
Other?
ascepios
- One of oldest classic european representations of dreams
- Delphi, temple dedicated to ascelpios, god of medicine
- Healing associated with dreaming
Incubation (during sleep)
- Sleeping in the temple
- Snakes
- Dreaming: hoping for a visit from a god in the dream, ideally from asclepios himself (healing or prescription)
After sleep:
- If ascelepiods did not visit the dream to give a treatment, interpretation of the dream by a temple priest to determine the type of treatment needed
Ex. Taking mud baths of baths in icy rivers, running barefoot in winter, taking hot baths for 5 years, etc.
tibetan dream yogas
· The view of consciousness - not in terms of states, but in terms of qualities
· Coarse and subtle consciousness (subtle only accessible through meditation or dreaming, because otherwise you are too distracted)
· Dreams as a possibility of full awareness (without distraction from physical reality)
· Relationship with death practices and intermediate states
Dreams - discovery of the nature of consciousness and reality (illusion)
bardo thodol and dream yoga
Bardo thodol: tibetan book of the dead…
→ 14th century text on intermediate states between life and death - bardos
→ The intermediate bardo : waking, life, meditation, dream state, death
→ Dream yoga as a practice towards enlightenment
○ Gaining lucidity
○ Being able to recognize the illusory nature of perception
Ultimately a practice for dying
ZHUANGZI (TCHOUANG-TSEU)
- Philospher, taosit poet IV c. BC
Butterfly dream - dreamed he was a butterfly, woke up wondering if maybe that wasn’t a dream, maybe he is really a butterfly dreaming that he was a man
FREUD: TRAUMDEUTUNG
· 1900, the text was meant for the new century - decentering of the self and demystification of dream experiences
· Dream interpretation: royal road to the unconscious
· Study of dreams is like archeological work
· Dream is a symptom
· Importance of self observation….
what are the two types of dream content according to freud
- LATENT CONTENT:
→ The actual thought of the dream
→ The unconscious dream material needs to be transformed (law of thermodynamics - energy doesn’t disappear, needs to be transformed - same things for desire)
→ Main driving force behind these thoughts (repressed affect, emotion) will remain- MANIFEST DREAM CONTENT
→ Observable content, experience
→ Permits catharsis(release)/cathexis (holding on to something, giving something emotion) living through the energetic charge of the dream, experiencing the underlying emotion
→ Protects us from the real stuff of our latent content by masking it in the content of a dream
Linked in an associative manner to latent content
- MANIFEST DREAM CONTENT
what are the two functions of dreams according to freud
○ Protecting the sleeper against awakening
○ Wish fulfilment
§ Some dreams are commodity - clear and simple desires like food, sex, going to the bathroom
However, other dreams contain disguised wishes
repression
· A psychic process in response to and defending against intolerable wishes, desires, drives, and impulses
· One of the main consequences of civilization
· The energy of repressed drives, however, needs to be expressed (notion of cathexis)
Expressed as anxiety or transformed in other pursuits
which of freuds ideas do we still use for dream content
We still use a lot of freuds ideas:
○ Memory sources
○ Childhood experiences
○ Somatic/bodily sources
Some dreams are typical/shared by cultural group
day residue
· Elements from the day prior that make their way into a dream
· Disguise other symptoms/latent thoughts
Banal elements, cheap material
dreamwork mechanisms
○ Similar to defense mechanisms that transform an intolerable thought into something tolerable
○ Work in associative manner, and thus are potentially legible through dream analysis and can lead to the core of the dream
▪ Condensation
▪ Displacement
▪ Symbolization
▪ Secondary revision
▪ Other distortions: absurdities, lapses, unexpected elements, bizarreness of dream content, etc
Safe space to express something unsafe to ego
