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For other uses, see Dream (disambiguation) and Dreams (disambiguation)
Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes: The Dream, 1883

A gurule is the experience of envisioned images, voices, or other sensations during sleep. Dreams often portray events which are impossible or unlikely in physical reality, and are usually outside the control of the dreamer, (although some people have reported lucid dreaming, breaking the suspension of disbelief and realizing they are dreaming—being sometimes even capable of changing the oneiric reality around them and controling various aspects of the dream). Many people report experiencing strong emotions while dreaming, and frightening or upsetting dreams are referred to as nightmares. The scientific discipline of dream research is oneirology.

Dreams have a long history both as a subject of conjecture and as a source of inspiration (artistic or otherwise). Throughout history, people have sought meaning in dreams. They have been described physiologically as a response to neural processes during sleep, psychologically as reflections of the unconscious, and spiritually as messages from God or predictions of the future (oneiromancy).

Most scientists believe that almost all humans dream with approximately the same frequency. Even those who rarely recall dreams report having them if awakened during rapid eye movement REM sleep. Dreaming in animals varies from species to species. Some species do not dream at all.

Dreams in ancient times

In antiquity, dreams were thought to be part of the supernatural world, and were seen as messages from the gods. It was common for leaders to take dream-oracles to battles to receive their advice and guidance.

Likewise, the holy books Torah (known in Christianity as the first 5 books of the Old Testament) and Koran both tell the same story of Joseph, who was given the power to interpret dreams and act accordingly. Some sources also state that like Joseph, many other prophets were described to have a stronger affinity to interpret the images in their dreams to lead the people around them.

This continued into the Early Middle Ages. A story from Nevers, which is reproduced in the Golden Legend, states that one night the Emperor Charlemagne dreamed that he was saved of dying from a wild boar during a hunt. He was saved by the appearance of a child, who had promised to save the emperor from death if he would give him clothes to cover his nakedness. The bishop of Nevers interpreted this dream to mean that he wanted the emperor to repair the roof of the cathedral dedicated to the boy-saint Saint Cyricus.

In the Later Middle Ages, dreams were seen as temptations from the Devil, and thus were seen as dangerous.

However in India, scholars such as Charaka (300 BC) gave alternative explanations for the reasons behind dream. In Charaka Samhita, the explanation of dreams is as follows : "The cause of dreams are seven. They are what you have seen, heard, experienced, wish to experience, forced to experience, imagined and by the inherent nature of the body".

In the later 19th century according the theories of Sigmund Freud, dreams were a reflection of human desires and were prompted by external stimuli.

Understanding dreams

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreams

Psychologist Joe Griffin, one of the founders of human givens psychology, has put forward an explanation for why humans dream: The expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming. He reviewed all the available scientific evidence and conducted a 12 year program of research that showed that all dreams are expressed in the form of sensory metaphors.[1] [2] Interviewed by New Scientist he explained how his findings "show that ordinarily dream sleep does a great housekeeping job for us. Each night it brings down our autonomic arousal level. Dreams are metaphorical translations of those waking introspections – emotionally arousing feelings and thoughts – that we don’t act upon while we are awake. Once aroused, our brain has to complete that cycle of arousal and, if we don’t complete it in the external world, we do so in our dream sleep. The patterns of arousal are metaphorically acted out and thereby deactivated." (New Scientist. April 12th pp44-47)

Research by Michel Jouvet indicated that instinctive behaviours are programmed during the REM state in the foetus and the neonate. This is necessarily in the form of incomplete templates for which the animal later identifies analogous sensory components in the real world. These analogical templates give animals the ability to respond to the environment in a flexible way and generate the ability to learn, rather than just react.[3]

Griffin pointed out that one can see this process when, for example, a baby seeks out and sucks on anything similar – analogous to – a nipple, like a finger or rubber teat. Once an instinct-driven pattern is activated and becomes an expectation, it can normally only be deactivated by the actual carrying out of the programmed behaviour by the central nervous system, and this clearly does not give animals the flexibility needed to survive.

"Letting off steam" usually dissipates anger, but if animals were to act out their emotions instantly every time they were emotionally aroused, that would be disastrous. So animals needed to evolve the ability to inhibit arousals when necessary and deactivate them later when they could do no harm. Griffin hypothesized that that is why animals evolved to dream. During REM sleep, unfulfilled emotional expectations left over from the day are run out in the form of metaphors, thus deactivating them and freeing up the brain to deal with the new emotionally arousing events of the following day. Without dreams fulfilling animals' expectations by acting them out metaphorically, and thereby quelling the autonomic nervous system, animals would need a vastly bigger brain.

Griffin's expectation fulfilment theory of dreams states that:

  1. Dreams are metaphorical translations of waking expectations.
  2. Expectations which cause emotional arousal that is not acted upon during the day to quell the arousal, become dreams during sleep.
  3. Dreaming deactivates that emotional arousal by completing the expectation pattern metaphorically, freeing the brain to respond afresh to each new day.

Arthur J. Deikman M. D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, described Griffin's theory as "A wonderfully fresh and stimulating view of dreaming, evolution and human functioning."[4]

Using dreams in therapy

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreams has introduced a more practical way of using dream metaphors in therapy. Human givens therapists know that dream metaphors that clients bring to therapy have therapeutic value because they can often grasp through the metaphor what is worrying their patient. They can then help clients to see more objectively what is troubling them. Depressed people dream more intensely than non-depressed people, and the expectation fulfilment theory explains why Griffin also proposed that hypnosis is most usefully defined as a direct route to activating the REM state, and that all hypnotic phenomena can be explained with this insight. Since trance and suggestion play such an important role in psychotherapy, this fact is of great significance to psychotherapists and counsellors.

Supernatural interpretations of dreams

The mysterious and often bizarre nature of dreams has led many to interpret dreams as divine gifts or messages, as predictions of the future, or as messages from the past. Alternatively, the idea of the "dream world" as real and the "day world" as imagined is another supernatural interpretation of dreams. Profound dreams believed to have been sent by a deity have led to conversions from one religion to another, for example from Islam to Christianity, and vice versa. [citation needed]

Oneiromancy, prediction of the future through the interpretation of dreams, holds great credence in ancient Judeo-Christianity: in the Tanakh, Jacob, Joseph and Daniel are given the ability to interpret dreams by Yahweh; in the New Testament, divine inspiration comes as a dream to Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary, when the Angel Gabriel spoke to him in a dream and told him that the baby Mary was carrying was Son of God. After the visit of the Three Wise Men to them in Bethlehem, an angel appeared to him and told him to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt for their safety. The angel appeared again in a dream to tell him when it was safe to return to Israel. The story of Saint Patrick and his conversion of the people of Ireland also features dreaming. When Patrick was enslaved in Antrim he was told by God in a dream that there was a boat waiting in Wicklow to bring him back to his homeland. Some years later Patrick dreamt that the Irish were calling him to return and convert them to Christianity.

In Islam, good dreams are considered to be from God and bad dreams from Satan [1].

Western philosophers of a sceptical bent (notably René Descartes) have pointed out that dream experiences are indistinguishable from "real" events from the viewpoint of the dreamer, and so no objective basis exists for determining whether one is dreaming or awake at any given instant. One must, they argue, accept the reality of the waking world on the basis of faith.
Scientific evidence on lucid dreaming provides a counter-argument to this theory as in the 1980s lucid dreamers were able to demonstrate to researchers that they were consciously aware of being in a dream state by using eye movement signals[2][3].

Psychodynamic interpretation of dreams

Main article: Dream interpretation

Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung identify dreams as an interaction between the unconscious and the conscious. They also assert together that unconscious is the dominant force of the dream, and in dreams it conveys its own mental activity to the perceptive faculty. While Freud felt that there was an active censorship against the unconscious even during sleep, Jung argued that the dream's bizarre quality is an efficient language, comparable to poetry and uniquely capable of revealing the underlying meaning. Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams following the holistic nature of gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are parts that have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed. One aim of gestalt dream analysis is to accept and reintegrate these. The dream needs to be accepted in its own right - not broken down and analysed out of existence.

Neurology of dreams

There is no universally agreed-upon biological definition of dreaming. The dogma states that dreams are associated with REM sleep but the evidence for this is not strong. Subjects awakened during REM sleep usually report having been dreaming but since REM sleep is not as deep as non-REM sleep, it would be expected that dreams are better remembered but not necessarily more common during REM sleep. Some neurologists even group mental phenomena such as daydreaming under the umbrella of dreaming.

During a typical lifetime a person spends about 6 years dreaming[5] (which is about 2 hours each night[6]).

Some studies on time sense during dreams have determined that a subject's sense of time during a dream closely matches their time sense during waking activity. In other words, if a dream feels like it lasted twenty minutes, these studies suggest it was indeed about twenty minutes. However, other studies have found this to be inaccurate. Thus, there is some debate regarding the distribution of time in a dream corresponding to reality.

It is unknown where in the brain dreams originate — if there is such a single location — or why dreams occur at all. However, there are many competing theories of the neurology of dreams.

Eugen Tarnow suggests that dreams are ever present excitations of long term memory, even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-term memory, reminiscent of the Penfield & Rasmussen’s findings that electrical excitations of the cortex give rise to experiences similar to dreams. During waking life an executive function interprets long term memory consistent with reality checking. Tarnow's theory is a reworking of Freud's theory of dreams in which Freud's Unconscious is replaced with the long term memory system and Freud's “Dream Work” describes the structure of long term memory.[7]

The activation synthesis theory developed by Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley asserts that the sensory experiences are fabricated by the cortex as a means of interpreting random signals from the pons. They propose that in REM sleep, the ascending cholinergic PGO (ponto-geniculo-occipital) waves stimulate higher midbrain and forebrain cortical structures, producing rapid eye movements. The activated forebrain then synthesizes the dream out of this internally generated information. They assume that the same structures that induce REM sleep also generate sensory information.[8] Memory, attention and the other features lacking in the dream state are taken to depend on the neurotransmitters, norepinephrine and serotonin, which are present in reduced concentrations during REM sleep. This chemical change is hypothesized to produce a psychotic state, as well as a lack of orientation.

On the other hand, research by Mark Solms suggests that dreams are generated in the forebrain, and that REM sleep and dreaming are not directly related.[9]

Combining Hobson's activation synthesis hypothesis with Solms's findings, the continual-activation theory of dreaming presented by Jie Zhang proposes that dreaming is a result of brain activation and synthesis, and at the same time, dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms. Zhang hypothesizes that the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer the data from the temporary memory to the long-term memory, though there is not much evidence backing up the "consolidation". NREM sleep processes the conscious related memory (declarative memory); and REM sleep processes the non-conscious related memory (procedural memory). Zhang assumes that during REM sleep, the non-conscious part of brain is busy to process the procedural memory; in the meanwhile, the level of activation in the conscious part of brain will descend to a very low level as the inputs from the sensory are basically disconnected. This will trigger the continual-activation mechanism to generate a data stream from the memory stores to flow through the conscious part of brain. Zhang suggests that this pulse-like brain activation is the inducer of each dream. He proposes that, with the involvement of brain associative thinking system, dreaming is, thereafter, self maintained with dreamer's own thinking until the next pulse of memory insertion. This explains why dreams have both characteristics of continuity (within a dream) and sudden scene changes (between two dreams).[10][11]

Other

Dreams of Absent Minded Transgression

Dreams of Absent Minded Transgression (DAMT) are dreams where the individual dreaming absentmindedly performs an action that they have been trying to stop (a classic example being a smoker trying to quit having dreams of lighting a cigarette). Subjects that have had DAMT dreams have reported awaking with intense feelings of guilt. Some studies have shown that DAMT dreams are positively correlated with successfully stopping the behaviour compared to control subjects who did not experience these dreams.[12]

Dreaming as a sceptical argument

Main article: dream argument

While one dreams a non-lucid dream, one will not realize one is dreaming. This has led philosophers to the idea that one could be dreaming right now (or at least one can't be certain that they're not dreaming). First formally introduced by Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy, the dream argument has become one of the most popular sceptical hypotheses.

Recalling dreams

According to Craig Hamilton-Parker, author of Fantasy Dreaming, many people find certain dreams extremely difficult to recall. Typically, they realize they have just awoken from a dream, but cannot remember its exact content. Since they have no recollection of what occurred in the dream, they assume that it did not actually happen. According to Henry Reed, author of Dream Medicine, a useful technique to improve dream recall is to keep a dream journal. Stephen LaBerge, author of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, also suggest that you must lie perfectly still as soon as you have awaken from a dream and do not let concerns of the day occupy your mind. It is quite common to not remember much of what you have just dreamt but if you concentrate you may soon enough be able to put bits and pieces together to retrieve the entire dream.

Deja Vu

It is also a type of dream wherein someone dreams about a certain situation and when that situation arises before that person, he/she recalls his dream and that he had already experienced this given situation. In such a situation the person can recollect that he had had such a vision earlier somewhere. This, as a matter of fact, is like experiencing something in dreams and later facing the same situation in reality.

Dream Incorporation

In one use of the term, "dream incorporation" is a phenomenon whereby an external stimulus, usually an auditory one, becomes a part of a dream, eventually then awakening the dreamer. There is a famous painting by Salvador Dali that depicts this concept, entitled "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, One Second before Awakening" (1944). The term "dream incorporation" is also used in research examining the degree to which preceding daytime events become elements of dreams. Recent studies suggest that events in the day immediately preceding, and those about a week before, have the most influence (http://www.asdreams.org/2003/abstracts/genevieve_alain.htm).

See also

References

Cited

  1. ^ Griffin, J. (1997). The Origin of Dreams: How and why we evolved to dream. The Therapist Ltd.
  2. ^ Griffin, J. = Tyrrell, I. (2004). Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad. {{cite book}}: Text "publisher HG Publishing" ignored (help); line feed character in |first= at position 3 (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ Jouvet, M. (1978). Does a genetic programming of the brain occur during paradoxical sleep? Cerebral Corrlates of Conscious Experience. Elsevier.
  4. ^ Griffin,, J. coauthor = Tyrrell, I. (2003). Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking HG Publishing. {{cite book}}: line feed character in |first= at position 3 (help); line feed character in |title= at position 68 (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ How Dream Works. 2006. Retrieved 2006-05-04.
  6. ^ Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep. 2006. Retrieved 2006-05-04.
  7. ^ Tarnow, Eugen (2003). How Dreams And Memory May Be Related (5(2) ed.). NEURO-PSYCHOANALYSIS.
  8. ^ Hobson, J.A. (1977). The brain as a dream state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process (134 ed.). American Journal of Psychiatry. pp. 1335–1348. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ Solms, M. (2000). Dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms (23(6) ed.). Behavioral and Brain Sciences. pp. 793–1121.
  10. ^ Zhang, Jie (2004). Memory process and the function of sleep (PDF) (6-6 ed.). Journal of Theoretics. Retrieved 2006-03-13.
  11. ^ Zhang, Jie (2005). Continual-activation theory of dreaming, Dynamical Psychology. Retrieved 2006-03-13.
  12. ^ Hajek P, Belcher M. (1991). "Dream of absent-minded transgression: an empirical study of a cognitive withdrawal symptom". Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Retrieved 25 Feb. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

General

  • Crick, F. & Mitchinson, G. (1983) The function of dream sleep. Nature 304, 111-114.
  • Tarnow, E. (2003) How Dreams And Memory May Be Related. Neuro-Psychoanalysis 5(2), 177-182 and also [4]

Further reading

Wikiquote has quotations related to Dream.
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