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
