How to build a dream By: PT Staff Dreams have no inherent meaning--but they do have lots of emotion. Somehow you overslept, and by the time you get to class, there's only 10 minutes left to finish to class, there's only 10 minutes left to finish the exam. More troublesome, though, is the fact that you're completely naked, and when you glance toward the front of the room, it's not your math teacher standing there but your mother, chomping contemptuously on a fat Cuban cigar. It's only a dream, of course. But it seemed so real, so vivid, so symbolic, that it must mean something. Freud, after all, argued that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious," our innermost thoughts unshackled from the confinement of our uptight, waking self. Figure out what you dreaming mind i trying to telling you, said Uncle Siggy, and you'll achieve deeper self-understanding. But moderm cognitive neuroscience suggests that Freud had it wrong, that dreams have little or no inherent meaning. According to this new view, the images, objects, and characters in our dreams are not coded postcards from our psyche, but the product of semi-random neuronal firings. And the bizarre plots and storylines of dreams merely reflect a desperate attempt by our brain to some-. how make sense of this chaos. Night Visions Dreams are such a routine part of our lives that we often don't appreciate just how bizarre the very concept of dreaming is. "The mind becomes clinically insane for two hours every night," Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., a Harvard neuroscientist, told the American Psychological Association. "We hallucinate wildly, see and hear things that aren't there. We become delusional." By tracing what happens in the brain during these hallucinations, and analyzing the content of dreams in objective ways, Stickgold and colleague J. Allan Hobson, M.D., director of Harvard's Neurophysiology Lab, are helping create a bold new model of dreaming. Dreaming, they contend, is a bottom-up process. It's initiated by one of the brain's most primitive regions, the pontine brain-stem, or pons. Although many parts of the brain contribute to dreaming, one of the key players on the Dream Team is a pons region called the FTG (the full name, if you must know, is gigan to cellular field of the tegmentum). FTG neurons spring into action as the brain shifts into REM sleep, those nocturnal periods during which your eyes dart frantically from side to side and your dreams are longest and most numerous. Over the course of a night, most of us pass through four to six cycles of REM, each lasting 15 to 30 minutes. Just before a REM cycle begins, the FTG sends bursts of electrical signals throughout the brain--and dream construction begins in earnest. But before a dream has a plot, characters, or setting, it gets assigned an emotion, contends Stickgold. Some of those electrical signals reach one of the brain's emotional centers, the amygdala, which "chooses" a mood or emotion from some mental menu. Whether the proportion of each emotion that winds up in our dreams is somehow fixed in our brain, or whether the amygdala relies on some emotional "thermostat" sensitive to culture and environment, isn't yet known. If dreams are mirrors of our waking lives--or, alternatively, if they represent the emotions we keep pent-up during the day--we would expect to see sex differences in dream emotions. That's because during the day, men and women typically report different emotional states. Men are more likely than women to say they're angry; women are more often anxious or depressed. But Hobson and Stickgold find that the emotional content of dreams is identical in both males and females. Fear and anxiety dominate about a third of our dreams; another 15 percent involve anger. In all, about two-thirds of dreams are emotionally negative--and they typically become more unpleasant as the dream progresses. It might be due to a kind of cognitive-emotional feedback: Negative emotions remind the dreamer of negative thoughts, which leads to higher levels of emotional negativity. A Terribly Awkward Position Meanwhile, the electrical waves from the FTG also activate higher brain regions like the cerebral cortex. These are the brain cells that supply memories and visual images, the nuts and bolts of dreams. But during REM sleep, low-level chaos occurs within the cortex, reports Steve Foote of the University of California, San Diego. Neurons that receive the signal to fire somehow remain silent, while others go off for no apparent reason. Technically, this chaos is called a decrease in the signal-to-noise ratio. But the practical upshot is a mishmash of images, thoughts, and emotion that puts our association cortex in a terribly awkward position: It wants to tie everything together. This may be why our dreams seem so bizarre, says Stickgold. "It is all that the association cortex can do to cobble together some fantastic story line and try to keep up this chaotic melange of images and feeling." Seen Any Object Transformations Lately? The Harvard team has been attempting to document the bizarreness by analyzing the content of dreams in a scientifically objective fashion---a harder task than might first appear. Part of the problem is, we can't rely on dreamers themselves to interpret their own dreams because they will find meaning at every turn. "The human brain is an association maker," observes Stickgold. "It will find associations between almost any two images presented side by side or sequentially. It finds meaning in Rorschach ink blots, in tarot cards, in the arrangements of stars." The trick, then, is to bring in objective observers. That's what Cindi Rittenhouse, then at Harvard, did when she studied that most bizarre dream phenomenon, the metamorphosis of one person or object into another---so-called object transformations. She arranged, side-by-side, lists of dream objects and the things they turned into, then asked judges to match one side of the list with the other. Did the bag in one person's dream, for example, turn into a school bus, a beach, or a burlap sack? The answer, not surprisingly, is the burlap sack. In fact, most of the transformations proved so predictable that a panel made correct matches 94 percent of the time. Transformations, in other words, aren't random, but reflect object associations that most of us would make. But the same doesn't hold true of the location or plot changes that sometimes occur in mid-dream--"as if you were watching TV and someone changed the channel," notes Stickgold. In one study, dreams with plot shifts were randomly spliced together with others at their respective moments of scenery change. Another group of dreams was left intact. Asked to identify which dreams had been spliced, judges chose correctly half of the time--exactly the rate of chance. It's uncertain why transformations are so predictable, yet plot shifts aren't. But a clue may lie in a series of experiments where Harvard researchers woke subjects from REM sleep and tested their ability to make associations between strongly related words--say, cat and dog--and weakly related ones. The newly awakened subjects made strong associations easily, more so, even, than they did during normal waking hours. But weakly associated concepts were far less accessible than they were during their morning peak. Stickgold speculates that the predictable, constrained object transformations in dreams reflect these easily made strong associations, while the bizarre plot shifts may stem from our relative inability during REM to connect the dots between weakly associated concepts and images. Yield of Dreams So are dreams totally irrelevant to our waking selves? Can they tell us nothing about our lives, our thoughts and emotions? Dream fans need not abandon all hope. "There's no question that what's going on in your life has a powerful effect on your dreams," says Stickgold. If you've been worried about losing your job, that's likely to turn up in some of your dreams. But the reason has nothing to do with your subconscious trying to send you a message, he insists. It simply reflects the fact that the neurons responsible for those thoughts and worries have been primed by their recent activity, made more accessible. Their odds of being activated during the chaotic neural firing of REM rise. Dreams, moreover, certainly reflect our personal history. "That's what your brain has to work with, your memories and associations," observes Stickgold. "So whatever it puts together, no matter how clumsily it does so, is still drawn from that well." The problem comes when people attempt to impose elaborate symbolic interpretations on a dream -- that a rose, for instance, represents nostalgia for your lost youth, or that anything cylindrical has phallic implications. "This sort of stuff is clearly nonsensical," Stickgold says. His take-home message: Find all the meaning you want in your dreams -- but Understand that such meaning is constructed by our waking minds after the dream, not by some dreaming unconscious beforehand. Perhaps it was frustration with such overwrought Freudian interpretation that led novelist Stephen King to offer his own theory on dreaming. Its philosophy isn't all that far removed from what Stickgold and Hobson propose. And whatever it lacks in delicacy, it more than makes up for in insight. "I think that a lot of times," King said, "dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence." http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19951101-000037.html
while it is very egotistical to claim to understand what the mind does, i must say that my theory on dreams is quite similar. That they are cause by emotions, but those emotions can be your subconsious trying to tell you something, in the only way that your subconsious can. emotion.
I tend to lean more towards what's said in that article because they are basing their views on research and tests that they've done with dreaming.
Dreams are an excellent tool for discovering the repressed source of our neurotic preoccupations. The more random a dream is the more effective tool it becomes. A dream can be as random as dust blowing past us in a wind storm. Because it's NOT the dream itself, but our interpretation of the dream that unlocks the subconscious source of our neurotic preoccuptions. Indeed, the less the dream has to do with our waking lives, the less interfering bias the dream will impose on our interpretation. In other words, the more spontaneous and revealing our interpretation will be. Unfortunately, The PT Staff takes its usual notorious pop-psy commercial tack of creating a dramatic conflict between Psycho-annalysis and Neuro-cognitive science. Fortunately most Neuro-cognitive science knows better, and gives Freud's ideas on dreams far more credibility than I would. Below is an example of current Neuro-cognitive thinking about Freud's ideas: How do we assess Freud's theory today? Freud's theory, in a sense, occupies a middle position between two competing theories. These are: (1) The theory that there is a universal 'lexicon' of dreams, based on 'archetypes' or some other such thing, and (2) The theory that dreams are the meaningless effect of random nerve firings, which take place during REM or 'rapid eye movement' sleep. The second of these theories is now the prevaling 'modern' view. However both are discussed in Chapter II of The Interpretation of Dreams. In fact Freud would agree with some versions of the second theory which state that dreams are the way we get rid of accumulated nervous tension that has built up during the day. For Freud dreams are not only an elaboration of 'meaning', but also a way to get rid of something. (See the excerpts from his essay 'Children's Dreams'). Although modern science has been unable to discover the neurological basis for Freud's 'dream work', recent research by Mark Solms and others has revealed that the neurology of dreams is more complex than previously thought. A whole set of brain mechanisms are involved - those responsible for instinctual behaviours, emotion, long-term memory and visual perception. It appears that the instinctual and emotional mechanisms near the centre of the brain initiate the process, just as Freud envisaged, and the dream is the culmination of a process of backward projection ontp the perceptual structures at the back of the brain. (Solms, M (2000) 'Freudian Dream Theory Today' in The Psychologist Vol 13 No.12 December 2000). Two brain structures seem most important; if they are damaged, then dreaming is obliterated. The first forms part of a network responsible for visuospatial perception; the secend is the system which 'instigates goal seeking behaviours and an organisms appetitive interactions with the world' (J Panksepp, quoted in Solms 2000). This system is activated by various somatic need detectors located in the hypothalamus, and it plays a pivotal role in states of addictive craving. In other words, modern research is beginning to see that dreams are instigated by goal seeking brain mechanisms which are connected to the pressing demands of instinctual tensions - just as Freud anticipated. Other versions of the second view state that dreams happen in order to prevent us going into too deep a sleep (where we are defenceless). This would seem to be a direct contradiction of Freud's view that dreams are there to preserve sleep. However once again this view assigns to dreams a function in our lives which one would have thought does not fit easily with the idea of 'random' nerve firings. In addition one would like to know why these random firings are so often connected to events in our immediate past experience. It could be argued that Freud would only have to change his views slightly (from dreams as preserving sleep, to dreams as preserving a certain kind of sleep) to take account of this view. The first theory is the popular view which interprets dreams according to symbolic equivalences: 'if you dream of X, then it means Y'. A 'house' represents your mind, 'flying' represents ambition, 'babies' symbolise ideas (a 'brainchild'), 'tigers' are a sign of energy and enthusiasm, a 'museum' warns you not to live in the past. Freud's theory largely undermines the naive assumption of symbolic equivalence. All dream elements are 'symbolic', but they have private meanings which can only be discovered through associations of the individual. 'Tigers' could symbolize lots of things. There are other criticisms of Freud's theory which are of a slightly different order to the other two. These are that: (3) Freud's theory does not account for the narrative structure of many dreams and does not properly consider the relation between elements in the manifest content, and (4) Freud's theory is reductionist in its insistence that all dreams are 'fulfilments of wishes'. As for the latter point, Freud concedes that there is a class of dreams that do not seem to be fulfilments of wishes. For instance in one of his own dreams he was back in a chemistry laboratory where he once worked, doing chemical analyses which he was not much good at and which made him feel quite miserable. He says that if in his waking life he felt quite proud of the 'analyses' he was now carrying out, the dream reminded him of all those unsuccessful analyses of which he had no right to be proud. So between pride and self-criticism, the dream seems to side with the latter and choose as its content a 'sensible warning' rather than an 'unlawful wish-fulfilment' In answer to this Freud says: "It may be remembered that there are masochistic impulses in the mind which may be responsible for a reversal such as this. I should have no objection to this class of dreams being distinguished from 'wish-fulfilment dreams under the name of 'punishment dreams'. I should not regard this as implying any qualification of the theory of dreams which I have hitherto put forward.." Whether we can agree that the theory remains intact with this new admission is another matter. Later on, in another paper, ("Remarks on the Theory and Practice of Dream-Interpretation" 1923) Freud distinguishes between 'dreams from above', and 'dreams from below', implying that something from the superego (another kind of 'wish' perhaps) is going into the construction of the dream (not just as 'censorship'). It should be remembered that in Freud's schema the superego is also largely unconscious. At another point he attempts to justify the wish-fulfilling character of dreams in another way: "one cannot put the wish-fulfilling character of dreams on a par with their character as warnings, admissions, attempts at solution etc. without denying the concept of a psychical dimension of depth -- that is to say, without denying the standpoint of psychoanalysis." ("An Evidential Dream", 1913). It is only the 'day's residues which have these various other meanings, according to Freud. In the beginning was the wish." As for the third criticism above, it could be said that, despite Freud's reluctance to do so there is no reason why Freud's theory cannot take into account narrative structure just as many literary critics now use psychoanalysis to understand literature. It could be pointed out that narrative structure is itself not something particularly 'obvious'. That is to say, it usually reveals itself as an underlying structure. We do not usually realise that the multiple storylines of a soap opera may represent different aspects of the same underlying theme (about 'friendship', or 'paternity', say). When the narrative structure starts to become obvious then we often lose interest in the story because we do not feel that we are 'carried along by it' any more. (5) Finally it might be said that the existence in dreams of overtly sexual material - and the ocurrence of 'wet dreams' - undermines Freud's view about dream-distortion, repression and the part played by unconscious conflict in the formation of dreams. Freud might reply that surely this confirms the connection between dreams and endogenous instinctual stimuli pressing for discharge. Or he might say that overt sexual imagery may well be a cover for more threatening infantile sexual material from the unconscious - and it is this that is being distorted through the dream-work. Sometimes 'sex' is just a metaphor!
