Dreams

As detailed in a paper I co-wrote with Dr. Nicholas Pesant, I believe that psychotherapists can be inspired by different, complementary ways of conceptualizing dreams and that working with dream material can be clinically helpful. There exist many approaches to working with dreams and, personally, I’ve never been a big fan of most psychoanalytically oriented approaches to dreamwork, including Freud's.  I’m a much bigger fan of Jung’s conceptualization of dreams and think there exist many excellent (and integrative) approaches to dream work. These include the Dream Interview Method (DIM), elaborated by Delaney (1991), the cognitive-experiential model of dream interpretation developed by Hill (1996; 2003), and Ullman’s (1996) highly popular dream appreciation approach developed for group sessions. It should be noted that many dream researchers interested in dream work are adepts of Ullman’s method.

Putting specific approaches to dream work aside, a considerable body of clinical research suggest that clinical work with dreams can a) help clients gain insights about themselves, b) increase their involvement in therapy, c) facilitate access to issues that are central to clients’ lives, d) contribute to establishing a safe and trusting environment, and e) enrich the clinician’s understanding of the client’s dynamics and clinical evolution.  That’s quite the list!  Thus, when used judiciously and at the right time, dream work can certainly be a highly useful clinical tool.

In sum, there is strong evidence that clinicians have much to gain by attending to their clients’ dreams and that effective dream work is accessible to most clinicians. So dream interpretation may not be the royal road to the unconscious (or to better self-understanding), but is nonetheless a useful and effective road among others.

Although I’m convinced that many dreams are psychologically meaningful, I’m not a believer in “dream dictionaries” that say that dreaming of X means this and dreaming of Y means that. Based on my work both as a clinician and researcher, I think that when present, symbols and metaphors in dreams reflect the dreamer’s unique personality, way of thinking, interests, current concerns, and life experiences. For this reason, I’m a firm believer that to properly understand a dream, it is necessary to know the dreamer and, in an ideal world, to involve him or her in the process. I’m therefore highly sceptical of so-called “dream experts” who interpret dreams with little to no knowledge of the dreamer.

Studies of large samples of dream content collected in the laboratory as well as outside the laboratory show that dreams mostly occur in commonplace settings, contain a large number of familiar characters, and revolve around family concerns, love interests, and activities engaged in during waking life. In fact, only a minority of dreams involves unknown characters and activities that are out of the ordinary. So for the most part, dreams can viewed as a reasonable simulation of waking life characters, social interactions, activities, and settings.

Perhaps due to the highly visual nature of dreaming, people always have wondered if blind people dream.  So what do we know?  Questionnaire and lab studies show that people who are born blind or become blind before age 4 or 5 do dream even though they do not see images in their dreams. However, the dreams of blind people tend to contain much greater mentions of touch, taste and smell.. They are also much more likley to report sensory detials like surface textures (e.g., the edge of table was rough, as if it was unfinished), ambient temperature (e.g., the air was damp and cold), or the slope of a terrain (e.g., "the sidewalk was angled downward"). It is noteworthy that people who become blind after age 5 or 6 often retain visual imagery in their dreams, which suggests that there is a window for the development of the capacity to have visual dreams. More recent studies also suggest that blind people may experience more nightmares than the average person, possibly due to the greater risks they face (e.g., missing a step, being hit by a car) while navigating their daytime environments.

Excellent question! Although many dream researchers believe that dreaming has a biological or adpative function, some argue that dreams are merely a by-product (a sort of epiphenomenon) of basic neurophysiological activity occuring during sleep. That said, theories about the possible function of dreams abound. Among the most scientifically interesting ones are that dreams a) play a role in emotional regulation; b) help consolidate memories; and c) have an evolutionarily-based threat or social simulation function. In our recent book, When Brains Dream, Robert Sickgold and I propose that dreaming allows the sleeping brain to enter an altered state of consciousness in which it can construct imagined narratives and respond emotionally to them. While dreaming, the brain identifies associations between recently formed memories (typically from the preceding day) and older, often only weakly related memories, and monitors whether the narrative it constructs from these memories induces an emotional response in the brain. So the dreaming brain takes these associated memories and concepts and weaves them into a story—a narrative that plays out over time—where you, the dreamer, have the lead role. And it watches the 'you' in the dream react emotionally to the ongoing plot. It's your feelings in the dream that are critical. The brain's rule seems to be that if the story woven with this new association evokes an emotional response in the dreaming 'you', then it's worth keeping. Put differenlty, we thing that for the sleeping brain to explore possible new ways to think about the events of your day—to understand the meaning of what happened in your day and how to use that new understanding—you have to dream.