On Dreams
Types of Dreams:
- Falling asleep dreams.
- Sexual dreams.
- Moody dreams - dreams that have a haunting quality to them.
- The reoccurring dream.
- Displacement dreams - dreams in which visual images are
"displaced" so that their references are upset.
- Lucid dreams.
- Bad dreams.
- Night terrors - a sleep disorder similar to nightmares
that
occur during early, non-REM part of the sleep cycle.
- Nightmares - several anxiety dreams where the fear and
the
issues in the dream are so intense that they wake up the dreamer.
Occurred during regular REM sleep.
- Warning dreams - dreams warning of impending disaster. In
the great majority of cases that catastrophe never occurs. They also
warn you about the state of your physical health.
- Guilt dreams - dreamer's not the victim but rather as a
murderer or the one who has hurt someone else and not in self-defense.
- Anxiety dreams - similar to nightmares in their themes
and
feelings of fear but not as intense and does not cause the dreamer to
waken in fright.
Gestalt method of dream
analysis:
Put two chairs facing each
other, and sit on one of them. Be yourself, look straight at the empty
chair -- in which your dream or an image from it is supposed to be
sitting -- and simply hold a question-and- answer session with it. You
ask the question, then directly move to the other chair to let the
dream answer.
Developmental stages of
understanding dreams:
- Non-lucid dreams - dreaming takes place in the same
(external) world as the rest of his or her experience.
- Out-of-body dreams - dreams come from the head, but take
place in the external world.
- Lucid dreams - dreams are entirely internal in nature.
William Hudson's three
interpretive principles:
- The ambiguities of the dream can be read as if they were
the ambiguities of a poem.
- In dreams we try to solve the conflicts of waking life.
- As individuals we different, not just in the how we sleep
or
dream, but in the kinds of traffic we permit between sleeping and
waking lives.
Computer-based
theory of dreams and sleep:
- Sleep is where the brain goes offline to debug, maintain
and update its social and psychological programs to get them to
function properly during the day.
- Dreams are the programs being run which are conscious mind
interprets it as a kind of pseudo-event.
- Types of Dreams.
- Type A (REM sleep) - the time where the brain goes safely
offline.
- Type B (REM sleep we are aware of) - the brain comes
online
and our conscious mind has a glimpse of the programs being
run during the debugging, etc.
Lucid
dreaming:
- Recognizing a lucid dream.
- Look at your hands.
- A dream starts to be lucid when
- There is intense fear.
- It seems impossible to happen in your external world.
- You've had this dream before.
- You're aware of your thought processes and when
you're
questioning
yourself.
- Learning to lucid dream.
- Ask yourself whether or not you are dreaming while you
are aware at
least 5 to 10 times a day.
- While lying in bed and drifting into sleep, interrupt
your reveries
every few minutes, making an effort to recall what had been passing
through your mind a moment earlier.
- While drifting into sleep, you simply imagine that your
body is
somewhere else, doing something other than lying in bed.
- Concentrate while falling asleep, on the idea that you
will soon no
longer perceive your body.
- Count to yourself ("one, I'm dreaming; two, I'm
dreaming," and so on)
while drifting off to sleep, maintaining a certain level of vigilance
as you do so. Do this preferably in the afternoon, because this is an
optimal time.
- Become very familiar with your dreams, get to know what
is dream like
about them, and simply intend to recognize that they are dreams while
they are happening.
- During the early morning, when you awaken spontaneously
from a dream,
go over the dream several times until you have memorized it.
- In the lucid dream, control yourself, not the dream.
Dream structure:
- Setting - statement of the problem.
- Due to tension associated with the residue and
pre-existing
emotional status quo.
- What is happening to me?
- What do I feel?
- What might happen?
- Issue raised
- Facing something new.
- Assault on self-image.
- Concern with danger.
- Social loss or frustration.
- Development - exploration and mobilization of resources.
- Components
- Day residue - impinging recent tension,
self-scrutiny, past
experiences.
- Recent experiences which have not been carried
to a
conclusion during the day because of chance interferences
- Experiences we have not had the resources to
cope with at the
time.
- Experiences which we had rejected or suppressed
during the
day.
- Material that is set in motion in our
unconscious by the
activity of the preconscious in the course of the day.
- Daytime impressions which are indifferent and,
for that
reason, have not been dealt with.
- Pre-existing emotional status quo.
- Re-representation of past.
- Makes possible new arrangements.
- Exposes unrecognised aspects of past strengths and
vulnerabilities.
- Questions confronted
- What data and what benefits can my past experiences
contribute toward the solution of the problem?
- What resources, both healthy and defensive, can be
mobilised
to cope with it?
- Process of development
- We have an experience that was unresolved
before we
dream.
- This experience pulls other similar experiences out
of
the
past while we sleep.
- The experiences are then reassembled as images in the
dream.
- Assessment of nature and range of implications.
- Resolution
- Contents
- Day residue
- Past experiences
- Emotional status quo modified by date residue and past
experiences.
- Questions confronted. Given the feeling evoked in the
implications the related issues hold for the future, what can I do
about it: resolve it through the dream or wake up?
- Resolution of issues raised.
- Creative rearrangement of inner resources.
- Temporarily effective defense action.
- Threat too intense: awake.
Metaphors:
- Waking
- Verbal
- No meaning immediately apparent.
- Accepted mode of communication.
- Consciously contrived.
- Subject to conscious manipulation.
- Owned
- Dream
- Visual
- Unknown meaning
- Strange and private language.
- Unconsciously assembled
- Ruthlessly honest
- Frequently disowned
- Mutual characteristics
- Metaphors coming to being with need to convey feelings.
- Reasons for need.
- Intensity and impact of feelings.
- Subtlety, complexity, and unfamiliarity of feelings.
- Object of metaphor: recognition and identification of
feelings.
- Source: our creative imagination.
Questions for analyzing a
dream:
- When are your feelings upon awakening?
- What are real life memories or priori dreams does this
dream remind you of?
- What is the setting of the dream?
- Are there colors in the dream?
- What were the preceding day's events that might have
influenced this dream?
- What are the loaded symbols and key phrases in your dream,
and what are your associations to them?
- What are other traits, as personified by the other
characters in
the dream, that might be parts of yourself that you're disowning?
- What are the unusual or personally significant images in
your dream? What do these mean to you?
- Who are the other people or dream characters in your dream?
Are
they strangers or people you know? Do they changed identity during the
dream?
- What are the personality traits, actions, or lack of
action, if
you dream ego (the character in the dream whom you recognize as
yourself?)
- What are the primary emotions in your dream?
- What are the different points of view in your dream?
- What are the conflicts and unresolved feelings and
situations in your dream?
- What are the opposites or contrasts in the dream?
- What is currently happening in your conscious waking life?
Exercises to understand
your dreams:
- Make a symbol dictionary.
- Talking with your symbol in the form of a written dialogue
in your dream journal.
- Step back into your dream while you are awake and have
someone guide you in further exploration.
- Experience your partner's dream as if it were your own.
This will let you learned something about yourself.
- Draw the dream and let someone else tell the story of the
dream.
- After writing out the entire dream, select the pithiest
paragraph. List every word of it on the left side of the page and write
your associations to it -- whatever pops into your mind -- opposite
it, on the right side of the page. When you've finished listing the
associations, rewrite the dream segment using only the
associations.
- Rewrite the ending or complete the plot of your dream in
the waking state.
- Be everything in your dreams, and then have the elements
carrying on a dialogue. Have the elements start off in conflict,
opposing one another. By giving full expression to each element, the
person eventually arrives and a feeling resolution.
- Fight the dreams fears to the end.
- Demand gifts from your dream enemies.
- Make your dream in happily.
- Make your dream come true.
- Acting out your dream in a group.
- Turn your dream into pictures.
- When having a nightmare, become friends with your foes.
- Also on nightmares, write your dream from the other
character's point of view.
- Finally, about nightmares, have a dialogue with the major
emotion in your dream.
- While lying in bed at night, consciously work on or think
about the particular problem you want to solve.
- What do you want to achieve?
- What obstacles stand in your way?
- What solutions have you tried?
- What would happen if you did achieve your goal?
- What assumptions about the problem have you made that might limit your choice of solutions?