The Nature and Uses of DREAMING - dreams may be a way to gauge emotions

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1999 by Ernest Hartmann

"The connections made in dreaming are not random. They are guided by the dominant emotions of the dreamer."

A 20-year-old college student barely escaped with his life from a fire that killed several members of his family. A few nights later, he had a vivid dream: "I was on a beach when a huge tidal wave came along and engulfed me. I was flipped over and over; there was nothing I could do. I was just about to drown when I woke up." On another night, he also dreamt: "I was swept away in a whirlwind. I was helpless, just blown away." These dreams clearly do not picture the details of what happened to him--the fire. Rather, they picture his emotional state--his feeling of fear, terror, and helplessness.

I have collected and studied many series of dreams after major trauma and repeatedly have come across such dreams as tidal waves, whirlwinds, or being chased by gangs of thugs. I am convinced that these dreams are a sort of paradigm, a place where we can see most clearly what is happening in all dreams. Such dreams are by no means nonsense. They picture the emotional state of our minds.

My collaborators and I have been developing a view of dreams which differs considerably from accepted wisdom on the subject. Nevertheless, it turns out to be very compatible with the commonsense experience of those who remember their dreams and have developed an interest in them.

Over all, dreams have not gotten much respect in the past few decades. There have been two dominant schools of thought. One view championed by some biologists is that dreams basically are random nonsense, the products of a poorly functioning brain during sleep. If there is any meaning to dreams, it is "added on later" as our brains try to "make the best of a bad job." A related view proposed by other biologists is that dreaming may function as an "unlearning" procedure: a dream is garbage being thrown out by a computer to keep itself from being clogged up. In this view, we dream specifically about what we do not need to remember.

The other view of dreams, more common among psychoanalysts and therapists, derives broadly from the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He did take dreams seriously in one sense, calling them the "royal road" to the workings of the unconscious. However, Freud felt that his main contribution--his discovery of the secret of dreams--was his finding that, when properly analyzed, every dream turns out to be a fulfillment of a wish. Further, although Freud appears to take dreams much more seriously than the biologists do, he does not place much value on the dream itself, which he calls the "manifest dream." He repeatedly refers to the dream as an irrational mental product, whose value emerges only when one subjects it to a process of free association leading eventually to an underlying "latent dream" containing the underlying wish.

After having spent many years conducting research on the biology of dreaming, I disagree with both these broad views. Indeed, there now is available a tremendous amount of information about the biology of sleep and specifically the biology of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the part of sleep in which most of our memorable dreams occur. However, this knowledge of the underlying biology of dreaming does not tell us the true nature or functions of dreaming, and it certainly is not a reason for dismissing the psychological meaning of dreams. Why should the developing understanding of the biology underlying it make dreaming meaningless, any more than the developing understanding of the biology underlying thought makes thought meaningless?

I have spent many years analyzing my own and my patients' dreams in my clinical practice, using Freud's technique of free association as well as somewhat different techniques developed by psychologist Carl Jung and others. There is no question in my mind that dreams are meaningful and can lead us to useful knowledge about ourselves. However, there are many places where I disagree with Freud, most prominently in his thesis that every dream, when properly understood, is the fulfillment of a wish. For instance, the hundreds of dreams I have collected of the tidal wave type can not in any way, with or without free association, be interpreted as fulfillment of wishes. Rather, they are providing a context for an emotional concern.

Work on dreams after trauma as well as in stressful occurrences, pregnancy, and many other defined situations has led gradually to the following view of dreams, which merely can be sketched briefly here. First of all, dreaming makes connections in the nets of the mind more broadly and loosely than waking does. I believe we have no choice but to consider the mind to be based on the functioning of the human cerebral cortex, made up of billions of somewhat similar units (neurons), with some assistance from subcortical parts of the brain. All that can happen in these nets, awake or asleep, is that patterns of units are activated or deactivated in various ways and connections are made and unmade.