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

Guilt. "My father (whom I'm caring for) is swept away in a flood." "I let my children play by themselves and they get run over by a car."

Grief. "A large round hill or mountain has split in two pieces, and there are arrangements I have to make to take care of it." "A huge tree has fallen down in front of my house." "I'm in this vast barren empty space. There are ashes strewn all about."

Connections

Our conclusion based on a great deal of such work is that dreams make connections broadly, but by no means randomly, in the nets of the mind. The connections are guided by the emotional concern of the dreamer. The dreams contextualize or picture the emotional concern. Furthermore, dreams have their own language for doing this. Dreams obviously do not deal in words or mathematical symbols, but, rather, in pictures--in what we might call picture metaphor. There is a whole continuum in our mental functioning, running from focused waking thought at one end (doing an arithmetic problem, for instance), through looser thought, reverie, daydreaming, and finally dreaming at the other end. As we move from the left-hand end to the right-hand end, we think more in pictures and specifically in picture metaphor.

Thus, dreams contextualize emotional concerns, using the language of picture metaphor. For instance, in our culture, a trip in a car often is a metaphor for the course of lives or relationships. I've heard a large number of dreams something like, "I am in a car going downhill and the brakes don't seem to be working," dreamt when a relationship was in difficulty or seemed to be out of control. I discuss all this in far more detail in my book, Dreams and Nightmares: The New Theory on the Nature and Functions of Dreaming.

There is another important question to consider: Does dreaming have a function or use? Is all this broad making of connections guided by emotions in metaphoric form simply something that happens every night and is of no further significance, or does it have a function in our lives and can we make use of dreaming? Here, I must be a bit speculative, but my collaborators and I agree with workers from a number of different directions that dreaming probably does have a function.

Roughly, the most basic function can be called reweaving or interconnecting. Returning to one of the many series of dreams after trauma, we have found that the person first dreams about tidal waves and gangs, then gradually more and more about other related material from his or her life. The dream is making connections and tying things together. It starts with a new piece of distressing information--in an extreme case, trauma--and ties it in, connects it with other images of trauma, other memories related to the same feelings, etc. This process interconnects and cross-connects the material so that next time something similar happens, it will not be quite so frightening since it will be part of a woven pattern in the mind. The dream reweaves a torn net or redistributes excitation, to use two very different images. Over all, we can talk about the dream as calming by cross-connecting.