Dreams
Dreams
Experimental studies of dreams
Dreaming is a unique form of behavior. It ordinarily occurs only during sleep and may be the only psychological activity that does occur during sleep. It is involuntary and unintentional in the usual meaning of these words. Customarily, it is not accompanied by, and does not eventuate in, appropriate, relevant, or purposeful overt activity. Dreaming is expressed in the form of hallucinatory imagery that is predominantly visual and is often very vivid and lifelike in nature. It is this hallucinatory experience that constitutes the dream. No other human experience seems to have excited so much interest or so much speculation regarding its cause.
Until recently, the process of dreaming was not directly accessible to scientific investigation; no one knew how to tell when a person was dreaming. Nevertheless, one could study the product of dreaming—the dream—when it was reported or described by the dreamer upon his awakening. Today, we can tell with almost complete certainty when a person is dreaming. The dream itself, however, still remains virtually inaccessible to direct investigation and will remain inaccessible until the invention of some means of transcribing the dream as it is taking place. Until that time, investigators must depend upon the dreamer to communicate his dream verbally or through some other medium. Studies of dreams, therefore, are actually studies of reported dreams. How much correspondence there is between the dream as reported and the dream as dreamed cannot, as yet, be determined. We know now that failure to recall a dream does not mean that the person has had a dreamless sleep. In fact, except under certain abnormal conditions, everyone dreams every night, having from four to six separate dreams.
The process of dreaming
Objective study of eye movements
The process of dreaming, as distinguished from the product, was made available for scientific study by the discovery of objective indicators of dreaming. The first of these was reported in 1953 by E. Aserinsky and N. Kleitman, who noted while observing sleeping subjects that bursts of rapid eye movements (REMs) occurred periodically during sleep. Kleitman later described this fruitful discovery:
In our laboratory at the University of Chicago we literally stumbled on an objective method of studying dreaming while exploring eye motility in adults, after we found that in infants eye movements persisted for a time when all discernible body motility ceased. Instead of direct inspection, as was done for infant eye movements, those of adult sleepers were recorded indirectly, to insure undisturbed sleep in the dark. By leads from two skin spots straddling the eye to an EEG machine, located in an adjacent room, it was possible to register potential differences whenever the eye moved in its socket. … By this method … slow eye movements were found to be related to general body motility. In addition, jerky rapid eye movements …, executed in only a fraction of a second and binocularly symmetrical, tended to occur in clusters for 5 to 60 minutes several times during a single night’s sleep. In order to correlate the REMs with other concomitants, simultaneous recordings were made of changes in the sleepers’ EEG, pulse, and respiration. It was soon apparent that the REMs were associated with a typical low-voltage EEG pattern and statistically significant increases in the heart and respiratory rates … though occasionally the pulse was slowed. These changes suggested some sort of emotional disturbance, such as might be caused by dreaming. To test this supposition, sleepers were aroused and interrogated during, or shortly after the termination of, REMs and they almost invariably reported having dreamed. If awakened in the absence of REMs, … they seldom recalled dreaming. (Kleitman 1963, pp. 93–94)
Like most discoveries, the correlation of eye movements with dreaming was not unanticipated. In 1892, G. T. Ladd tentatively concluded on the basis of introspective studies that the eyes move during dreaming, and many years later, E. Jacobson (1938) corroborated Ladd’s introspections by actually observing that the eyes do move during dreaming. Despite these historical antecedents, it was the findings of Aserinsky and Kleitman that launched the modern era of dream research, just as half a century earlier it had been Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that established the dream as the main vehicle for studying the operations and products of unconscious processes.
Why do the eyes move during dreaming? The best answer seems to be that the eyes are scanning the dream scene, just as the eyes of a person who is awake scan the visual field. There is some evidence to support this scanning hypothesis. Dreams that involve much action are reported after a REM period in which there are many large eye movements, whereas more passive dreams are correlated with smaller eye movements (Berger & Oswald 1962). In some instances, the direction of the eye movement has been shown to correspond with the direction of the movements in the reported dream (Dement & Wolpert 1958). For example, following a REM period in which only vertical eye movements were recorded, the subject reported a dream of looking alternately down at the sidewalk and up toward the top of a flight of stairs.
Dreaming and sleep cycles
Not only is dreaming a unique form of behavior, but it also occurs during a unique stage of sleep. Unlike any of the other stages, the one during which dreaming occurs is characterized not only by bursts of rapid, conjugate movements of both eyes and by a low-voltage EEC pattern but also by other physiological and behavioral concomitants. Breathing and heart rate tend to be irregular, and the muscles of the throat adjacent to the larynx become flaccid, although, interestingly, the penis becomes more erect. The electrical resistance of the skin, which is ordinarily high during sleep, is reported to be even higher during so-called dreaming sleep. All of this evidence suggests that the stage during which dreaming occurs may be, as one authority has stated, “a separate organismic state, different from both ‘nondreaming’ sleeping and from waking” (Snyder 1963).
Dreaming is cyclical throughout the sleep period, with from four to six such cycles occurring during the night. The first cycle appears approximately an hour after a person falls asleep, and succeeding ones occur about every 90 minutes. The length of successive REM periods increases from 5 to 10 minutes for the first one to 30 minutes or longer for the last one. This finding revokes the common belief that a dream lasts for only a few seconds. In fact, some recent evidence suggests that what transpires in a dream occupies approximately the same length of time as it would were the same events to occur in waking life.
Although a hallucinatory dream experience is rarely reported if a person is awakened when eye movements are lacking, some investigators have obtained thoughtlike reports from persons who were awakened during non-REM periods. In one such study the subjects compared their reports of non-REM periods with those obtained from dreaming sleep. They found that their reports of non-REM periods were more difficult to recall, were more plausible and less emotional, were more concerned with contemporary events, and, generally speaking, resembled thinking more than dreaming (Rechtschaffen et al. 1963.) It has been suggested that the thinking the subject reports on being awakened from a non-REM period occurs while the sleeper is being awakened and does not reflect mental activity during sleep itself.
Universality
By employing the objective indicators of dreaming in studies involving numerous subjects, investigators in the United States and abroad have established that everyone dreams every night. Exceptions to this have been noted when the subject is in an abnormal state, such as during a high fever or when certain drugs have been administered. Even people who say they have never dreamed or who rarely remember a dream will report dreams when they are awakened during a rapid-eye-movement period (Goodenough et al. 1959).
A young adult spends about one-fifth of the sleep period dreaming, babies considerably more, and older people less. Rapid eye movements have been observed in blind people whose blindness is not of long standing. In those who have been blind for several years, low-voltage EEG waves still occur and a nonvisual type of dream is reported when the blind person is awakened (Berger et al. 1962). Other animals besides man show cyclical periods of rapid eye movements during sleep.
Biological necessity? One of the most interesting findings resulting from the use of objective indicators of dreaming is that when a person’s dreaming is reduced by awakening him every time his eyes begin to move, there is a significant increase in REM time when he is finally permitted to sleep undisturbed (Dement 1960). Moreover, if a person is deprived of dreaming for a number of nights, his waking behavior appears to be adversely affected. He manifests various aberrant “symptoms” that border on being pathological, and it has been conjectured that if he were deprived of dreams long enough, he might become psychotic. These results seem to indicate a “need to dream,” comparable in its psychobiological insistence to any of the other basic needs of the individual.
One authority believes, however, it may be the kind of sleep and not the dreaming itself that is the biological necessity (Snyder 1963). Support for this hypothesis is found in the work of the French investigator Jouvet, who has observed periods of eye movements and low-voltage waves in decorticate cats (Jouvet 1961) and in decorticate humans (Jouvet et al. 1961). It is considered unlikely that either a decorticate cat or a decorticate person is capable of having dreams, yet the physiological concomitants of dreaming persist in the decorticate state. It is these physiological processes and not the dreaming that Snyder considers to be the biological necessity.
External events
The availability of indicators of dreaming will enable investigators to observe the effects of certain stimuli upon dreaming. Studies made prior to the discovery of objective indicators showed that experimentally introduced discrete stimuli had, for the most part, very little influence upon the dream (Ramsey 1953). They may appear either directly or in distorted form in the dream, but they do not instigate, control, or shape the substance of the dream. Preliminary studies using the objective indicators have produced similar results, namely, that such external stimuli as sounds, pressures, and temperature changes have little influence on the dream. It is believed, however, that more complex forms of stimulation, such as movies shown to a person before he retires, will influence dreams. It is an established fact that the experimental situation for monitoring sleep becomes represented in dreams, especially during the subject’s initial nights in the laboratory. It will now be possible also to determine whether the sleeping person is more sensitive to telepathic or clairvoyant influences, as some authorities believe, by noting the appearance of subliminal stimuli in his dreams.
One question that is being investigated is whether the dreams obtained from persons whose sleep is monitored can be compared with dreams remembered by them upon awakening from non-monitored sleep. Preliminary findings indicate that the two samples are not comparable. A related question is whether the dreams of a person throughout the night show any consistent pattern of thematic material. Again preliminary findings suggest that there are minimal correspondences among a person’s dreams of the same night.
Dream interpretation
Interpretation before Freud
Although Freud was not the first person to assume that the dream has a “deeper” meaning—such an assumption seems always to have existed—he was the first to develop an empirical method for “interpreting” a dream. Dream interpreters before Freud—men like Artemidorus, who is Credited with being the first compiler of a dream book, and Joseph, whose exploits are recounted in the Bible—depended upon intuition, wisdom, and a scholarly knowledge of dream lore for deriving significance from the dream. Elements in a dream were assumed by these ancient dream interpreters to have a fixed meaning. It is this assumption that underlies dream books. Although dream books, with their prophecies of good and bad fortune, have fallen into disrepute among educated people, they are still published and purchased in large quantities and influence the decisions of many people (Weiss 1944). Among societies lacking books, dream interpreters still flourish and enjoy great prestige for their knowledge of a phenomenon deemed to be steeped in personal and even social relevance. There are societies like the Senoi in which people tell each other their dreams for the express purpose of reducing interpersonal tensions (Steward 1951).
That the dream among all the cognitive activities of man should be singled out as possessing special and mysterious properties, and requiring as a consequence special and often supernatural explanations, is not surprising when one considers how unique the dream is. For example, the ancient theory that the dream is a record of the experiences of a soul that leaves the body during sleep is based upon the fact that many dreams are so vivid and lifelike that they are mistaken for real perceptions.
Also, in view of the fact that the dream appears as an alien visitation without warning and without intention during the dead of sleep, a condition that is itself charged with mystery, it is not difficult to comprehend why many people construe the dream as a prophetic message from supernatural beings, from the sleeping person’s ancestors, or, in the present age of science fiction, from people living on other planets. Other prescientific theories that purport to explain dreaming are based upon other equally singular features of the dream.
Freud’s theory
Freud’s empirical method for interpreting a dream involves free association. After a person reports a dream to his analyst, he is instructed to say everything that comes into his mind when each successive element of the dream is presented back to him. By using the method of free association with his patients’ dreams, Freud (1900) was able to formulate a comprehensive theory of the dream. The dream has two kinds of content: the manifest (conscious) content, which is the dream as experienced and remembered by the dreamer, and the latent (unconscious) content, which is discovered through free association. Dream interpretation involves replacing the manifest with the latent content. The nucleus of the latent content is an unconscious infantile wish with which later experiences have become implicated. The ultimate task of interpretation is to unearth the nuclear infantile wish through free association. Much of the latent content consists, however, of “day residue,” that is, memories of experiences and thoughts that the dreamer has had on the day previous to the dream. Day residue alone is not sufficient to create a dream; it must be charged by an infantile wish in order to transform it into the conscious imagery of a dream.
When the dream thoughts (latent content) are transformed into the manifest content of the recalled dream, they are altered in certain ways. They are subject to condensation; an element in the manifest dream may be a compression of several dream thoughts. They are subject to displacement; feeling associated with a particular dream thought is transferred to an otherwise neutral element in the manifest dream. Latent thoughts may also be represented in the experienced dream by symbols. The interpretation of a dream requires, then, that all of the condensed manifest elements be expanded into their constituent dream thoughts, that all displaced affects be traced to their proper sources in the latent content, and that referents be found for all symbols. This is a formidable undertaking, the result of which is an interpreted version that is many times longer than the text of the manifest dream. The practicability of this method of interpreting dreams appears to be restricted to long-term psychotherapy.
Freud hypothesized that the dream work, which consists of the operations for transforming latent into manifest content is governed by two aims: regard for representability and disguise. Regard for representability refers to the transformation of abstract dream thoughts into concrete dream imagery. The aim of disguise is protection, based on the assumption that the undisguised latent thoughts would evoke so much anxiety that the dreamer would awaken. Many dreams do, in fact, awaken the sleeper because they are not sufficiently disguised. The sleep-protection hypothesis is a biological one, for it explains not what we dream but why we dream.
Dreams, then, according to Freud’s theory, are useful in establishing the contents of the unconscious. Since the foundation of the unconscious is laid down early in life, before the age of five or six, and contains repressed material from the psycho-sexual stages, the analysis of dreams constitutes one of the few methods for studying early psychological development. That the unconscious may also contain material from the racial past was discussed by Freud, but he neither strongly affirmed nor denied the notion, although he seems to have been sympathetic to it.
Jung’s theory
It remained for one of Freud’s early associates (later an apostate), Carl Jung, to examine dreams for evidence of a racial uncon scious that all men share (Jung 1960). Jung was convinced that there was sufficient evidence in dreams and other types of material, e.g., myths and religion, to validate the concept of a collective unconscious. He called the contents of this unconscious “archetypes” and identified a number of them: the anima, the shadow, the earth mother, the wise old man, and, most important of all, the archetype of personal unity symbolically represented in dreams and elsewhere by the form of the mandala. Whereas Freud used dreams to explore the formative years of a person’s life, Jung used them to explore the psychological development of the race.
Jung also thought, in contradistinction to Freud, that dreams are oriented to the future as well as to the past. They mark out for the individual the proper path to a more complete actualization of personality and help reveal poorly developed parts of the personality.
Other theories
In addition to the theories of Freud and Jung, there are a number of other theories, for example, those of Hall (1953), French (1954), Hadfield (1954), Boss (1953), Ullman (1955; 1958; 1959), and Jones (1962). These have several features in common. They deal more with the manifest than with the latent content, and they are more concerned with the dream as an expression having adaptive significance for the dreamer than as a disguise for infantile wishes. Hall, for example, regards the dream as a concrete representation of the dreamer’s conception of himself, of others, and of his world. The dream reveals more than it conceals. French stresses the integrative role played by the dream. The dreamer is attempting to solve his emotional problems. Hadfield also sees the dream as problem-solving activity, and Ullman emphasizes the dream’s adaptive function. For Boss, an existential–phenomenological therapist, the dream is a confrontation experience in which the dreamer faces directly his own questions of existence as a unique experiencing self. In the most recent of these theoretical formulations, Jones describes the synthesizing function of the dream within the context of a developmental sequence of critical phases through which a person passes in growing up.
It would seem from these theories that the dream was a complex, multidimensional, multileveled phenomenon capable of supporting diverse theoretical superstructures. The dream may, in fact, be just such a complex phenomenon, although the ratio of research to speculation is still so small that it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions regarding the validity of these speculations. Although research is scanty, the usefulness of dream analysis in psycho-analytic and other forms of psychotherapy seems to be generally acknowledged by psychotherapists (Bonime 1962).
Experimental studies of dreams
The dream as a projective device
It is not possible to say just how much research on dreams has been deterred by Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content and by the complex set of operations that must be carried out under a very special type of relationship between the observer and the subject before the operations can be successful. There are indications that these methodological obstacles are being bypassed by treating the manifest dream as significant material in its own right (Hall 1947; Eggan 1952; Jones 1962). This approach regards the dream, or preferably a series of dreams, as a projective device similar to those of the Rorschach and story-telling techniques. It may be argued that the dream is almost a pure form of projection, since external stimuli seem to have so little to do with its formation or its content.
The projective approach may be illustrated by a study made by Hall and Van de Castle (1965). Following Freud’s theory of sex differences in psycho-sexual development, they hypothesized that there would be a greater frequency of castration anxiety in dreams reported by males and that there would be a greater incidence of castration wish and penis envy in dreams reported by females. Scales for identifying castration anxiety, castration wish, and penis envy in dream reports were developed, and a large number of male and female dream series were scored using these scales. The hypotheses were confirmed at a high level of significance.
Another study employing the same methodology was conducted by Beck and Hurvich (1959). They predicted that depressed patients would show a greater incidence of manifest dreams with masochistic content than would nondepressed patients. A collection of dreams secured from depressed and nondepressed patients was scored, and the hypothesis was confirmed at an appropriate level of significance.
This method of dream analysis has much to recommend it. Dream reports can easily be collected in large numbers from groups of people living under different cultural, economic, social, educational, and geographical conditions. They can be subjected to quantification, and the same set of dreams can be analyzed in many ways to serve different empirical and theoretical purposes. Norms for different populations can be established so that an individual’s deviation from the norms for the group may be accurately described. The influence of experimental manipulation of variables can be assessed by comparing a treated group with a control one.
Of particular significance for the social sciences is the comparison of dreams obtained from people living in different cultures. Dorothy Eggan’s pioneering efforts in studying the dreams of Hopi Indians show what can be done by correlating the themes of reported dreams with culturally relevant material (1961).
The objective method of analyzing dreams
It is to be expected that the availability of objective indicators of dreaming will prove a stimulant to research and increase our knowledge of dreams and dreaming in the future. The physiological emphasis so far in research probably reflects the fact that rapid eye movements and brain waves were discovered by physiologists and that their measurement employs apparatus that is more familiar to physiologists than to social and behavioral scientists.
Calvin Hall
[Other relevant material may be found inAnalytical psychology; Nervous system, article onelectroencephalography; Projective methods; Psychoanalysis; Sleep; and in the biography ofJung.]
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