IntroductionStarting from ancient times, dreams, aside from playing a major part in literature and arts, have been subjects to drastically different interpretations by people of various regions of the world. Regardless of the interpretations being scientifically based or not, people often managed to come up with certain rationales that seemed plausible at the time of its proposal. For example, ancient Chinese and Indian cultures both believed dreams to be the parting of a person’s soul from the body. Aristotle believed that dreams were precursors to diseases and allowed analyses of them. For this matter, the study of dreams became ambiguous as numerous different theories emerged with supporting evidence. In addition, the brain is a rather complex and difficult subject to study; the phenomena of dreams lie beyond the limit of accurate description using neuroscience. With inevitable uncertainties in the scientific study of dreams, several modern, scientific theories of dreaming had been developed. The following content presents some of the most influential and important scientific theories on dreaming. Sigmund Freud, Wish Fulfillment, and Distortion Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist who, as the “father of psychoanalysis”, played a pivotal role in the development of dream analysis. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, he introduced his Freudian Theory of dreaming, which many people adhere to today, as well as effective methods for dream interpretation. In the book, Freud asserted that every dream serves the purpose of wish fulfillment with slight distortions in its content. In order to prove that he was accurate, he provided numerous examples, the most famous and thorough of which being a dream of his own--Irma’s Injection: “A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving.—Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it’s choking me’—I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that.—She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose.—I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it. . . . Dr. M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven. . . . My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: ‘She has a dull area low down on the left.’ He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) . . . M. said: ‘There’s no doubt it’s an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.’ . . . We were directly aware, too, of the origin of her infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid . . . trimethylamine (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). . . . Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. . . . And probably the syringe had not been clean.” The preamble to this dream was that Irma, an actual patient of Freud’s, had rejected a new treatment proposed by him while she only partially recovered in the previous treatment for her hysteria. And on the preceding day of this dream, the above mentioned Otto had told him that Irma was “better, but not quite well.” Freud recorded the above content right after he awoke from the dream and then proceeded to analyze the elements confined within it. He noted that, in the dream, there were shifts of blame for Irma’s illness to his friend Otto, as indicated by the mentioned injection by Otto and the word “thoughtlessly”. These observations in the dream were, according to Freud, caused by his wish that his inability to implement the treatment on Irma did not cause more symptoms in her. Similarly, when Irma “opened her mouth properly,” it is interpreted as a sign of Freud’s wish that patients should be more cooperative and open in treatments, unlike Irma, who rejected the treatment. Freud then moved on to give more cases of dreams, such as a person in great thirst for water would dream of drinking water before waking from thirst; his daughter, when not allowed to buy chocolate bars, dreamed of chocolate bars being thrown onto her bed. They all have one affinity in that the dream contents were the fulfilled wishes of the individual. Freud did not stop there. He then suggested that distressing and anxiety-dreams that show no signs of wish fulfillment must be interpreted to show that they are actually wish fulfillment dreams. To prove this, Freud introduced the idea of the manifest content (the immediate and apparent content) and the latent content (the content that underlie the manifest content) of a dream, and how the former may cause distortion in the latter. He did so by revisiting the dream of Irma’s Injection and noted that neither him nor a reader could clearly elucidate the wish fulfilling nature behind the dream, and therefore to some extent proving that dreams must be interpreted for the latent content to be determined. Dreams & RealityAs noted by Freud in Chapter I of The Interpretation of Dreams, one’s immediate judgment after waking from a dream usually assumes that the dream had sent him or her into another world. That is, dreams have no connections or links to the waking life—this, however, is not necessarily the situation, as exemplified by many studies and experiments. One of the most famous theories of dreams having connections to one’s waking life is Carl Jung’s compensatory theory. Jung, despite being heavily influenced by Freud as he was Freud’s best friend, did not agree with Freud on his theory of wish fulfillment. As collected in Vol. 8 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Jung notably pointed out that the purpose of a dream is to present "a spontaneous self portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious."In other words, dreams put together symbolic language of the unconscious to represent the state that the mind is in. He then proceeded to argue that, in the form of psychic symbols, dreams serve two functions: to compensate for the underdeveloped content in the unconscious mind that is ignored by the conscious mind, and also to recollect or anticipate (not predict) the events of the past and future, respectively. Aside from compensation for the unconscious mind, dreams are suggested to have many other connections to waking life, such as physical health, mental mood, and personality. Therefore, a number of theories can be provided for the subject of dream and reality and will not be discussed further for our purpose. Problem SolvingThe last major theory we shall discuss is the problem-solving theory of dreaming. This particular theory was developed notably by Deirdre Barrett, who teaches at Harvard Medical School. Note that, alternatively, this theory can be viewed as a special case of wish fulfillment where the desire of solving a problem is fulfilled. In her paper The Committee of Sleep: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving, Barrett, like Freud, presents a variety of instances in which a dream acted as a catalyst to problem solving. The most famous and controversial of these examples was the dream in which August Kekulé dreamed of a snake biting its own tail and thus came up with the groundbreaking hexagonal structure of benzene. Another example being Mendeleev, the widely accepted creator of the Periodic Table, who dreamt of the Periodic Table in its complete form with all the elements already in place. Barrett then proceeded to discuss the results from an experiment in which subjects were asked to induce a dream using a problem of personal relevance with recognizable results. After a dream was successfully incubated, it was recorded. After that, 2 judges, along with the subjects rated the relevance of the dream to the problem, below is an example recorded by one of the subjects: Problem: I'm accepted at a medical school that is asking that I pay $500 to secure my place by a date before my top three medical schools will have answered. Dream: It was winter and I was getting rejections from everywhere, so I decided I should pay the $500. Of the subjects participated, the percentage of agreement that the dream induced was related to the problem was 84% and that of the dream contained a solution to the problem was 88%. CONCLUSIONAn important thing to note is that even though the theories discussed above occupy a relatively big portion in dream analysis, there are still quite a lot of different theories that are rarely given an effort at research. None of these theories are proven to be definitively correct, yet they are mostly consistent with our lives and thus the study of dream analysis enters a staggering phase, waiting for an answer. CITATIONSBarrett, Deirdre. “The Committee of Sleep: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving.” www.researchgate.net/publication/254735243_The_Committee_of_Sleep_A_Study_of_Dream_Incubation_for_Problem_Solving. “Dream.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Feb. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2010. Jung, C. G. The Collected Works of C G Jung. Vol. 8, Princeton University Press, 1983. King, David. “The Relationship among Dream Content, Dream Attitudes, and Waking Life Characteristics .” www.davidbking.net/bsc-thesis.pdf. Morewedge, Carey K., and Michael I. Norton. “When Dreaming Is Believing: The (Motivated) Interpretation of Dreams.” 2009, doi:10.1037/a0013264. Walker, Matthew P., et al. “Cognitive Flexibility across the Sleep–Wake Cycle: REM-Sleep Enhancement of Anagram Problem Solving.” Bulkley, Kelly. “Jung's Dream Theory.” www.dreamresearch.ca/pdf/jung.pdf. Suggested ReadingsFoulkes, David. Dreaming: a Cognitive-Psychological Analysis. Routledge, 2009.
Domhoff, George. “Dreams Have Psychological Meaning and Cultural Uses, but No Known Adaptive Function.”, www2.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/purpose.html. Schredl, Michael. “Dreams and Dreaming: The Effects of Dreams on Waking Life.” www.sleepandhypnosis.org/ing/Pdf/2a920d472cc34a39b986ece7e28336a1.pdf.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
The PrimerStriving to deepen the understanding of STEM-related topics. Archives
June 2018
Categories
All
|