Dreaming

A Cognitive-psychological Analysis

David Foulkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317855224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1985. This book summarizes the findings of empirical dream psychology and interprets them from a cognitive-psychological perspective.

1 What Dreams Are

Despite widespread disagreement on how to interpret dreams, there has been general agreement, at least since the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams,¹ about what dreams are.

1. Dreams are Involuntary Symbolic Acts

One of Freud’s major theses about dreaming was that dreams are a form of thought or symbolic activity. The major question of his book was why we think in a different way when we are asleep than we do when we are awake. This is still the central concern of dream psychology. One dimension of difference between dreams and at least some of our waking symbolic behavior is that dreams are involuntary. That is, we are generally surprised on awakening from a dream because we didn’t consciously will that we would dream it. If you think of our waking speech, we generally end up saying something that bears some relationship to what we wantedto say. But dreaming generally doesn’t seem to express any coherent set of wishes or wants at all. At least, we’re generally unable, after having dreamed, to figure out why we dreamed what we did, or what, if anything, we meant to express or establish by having dreamed it.

But involuntary ideation is by no means foreign to our waking experience. In fact, in implicitly taking problem solving or reasoning as our model of what waking thought typically is like, we probably greatly over-estimate the voluntary control that we exert over the flow of conscious waking ideation. Often, when we are not occupied with the demands of reality—and sometimes even when we are—unbidden thoughts and images “pop into” consciousness. And, although we may be momentarily bemused or astonished by these thoughts and images, we don’t seriously doubt that we somehow conjured them up. They are our thoughts and images, even if we may not be able to say “where they came from” or why they popped into consciousness just when they did.

With dreams, however, our willingness to accept involuntary ideation as our own is somewhat reduced. Thus, we can find many otherwise sensible people who seem to want to believe that their dreams are not their own thoughts, but are instead messages from the gods, or from other people or planets. There is a sense in which these people are right in denying their personal responsibility for their dreams, for the “persons” they know themselves to be did not willfully participate in creating these dreams. One of Freud’s contributions, however, was to show that we are more than the people we consciously think ourselves to be, and that much of what we do with our minds does not depend on voluntary control or planning.

These points are now generally accepted by psychologists of many different persuasions, and their status in no way depends on accepting Freud’s particular hypotheses about the constituents or operations of the hypothetical mental system he called the Unconscious. For example, the earliest experimental psychologists proposed to study waking thought by having subjects describe (“introspect”) their conscious experience as they solved simple problems. As you can probably also verify from your own experience, research subjects were much better in solving the problems than in describing how they were able to, and they were often unaware even of having exerted volitional control over the process of coming up with their solutions.² Conscious, volitional control is not a necessary feature of the effective organization or utilization of what we call the mind.

But how do we know that dreaming really is a form of symbolic activity—that it’s some kind of involuntary thinking? Before Freud, it had been common for researchers to think of dreaming as a kind of faulty perception. The idea was that dreaming only occurred when the sleeper became sensitive to some external or body stimulus, like the sound of a passing vehicle or a cramp in the stomach. The dream was viewed as the dreamer’s attempt to interpret the stimulus. However, because sleep in some (generally unspecified) way was imagined to impair one’s perceptual faculties, he or she arrived at a faulty interpretation of the stimulus. That interpretation was the dream.

There were immense difficulties in accepting this view of dreaming even in Freud’s day, and with the collection of still further data since that time, the equation of dreaming with perception is now altogether unsupportable. (1) The idea that the kind of interpretation given stimuli during sleep is more like incomplete or faulty seeing or hearing (etc.) than it is like conceptually rich thinking overlooks the detailed, temporally elaborated, and dramatic quality of our dreams. Even if dreams were to be instigated by randomly appearing stimuli during sleep, the process initiated by these stimuli would have to be more like a soaring flight of inner ideas than any kind of passive perception. (2) As Freud noted, and as more recent research³ has verified, stimuli applied during sleep (e.g., moving the sleeper’s leg, or spraying his or her face with water) do not reliably instigate dreams (at least the only dreams we can know about, those which people remember). (3) As Freud also noted, the same stimulus, when it is “incorporated” in dream imagery, can be associated with vastly different kinds of dreams. On one occasion, the water-spray may be associated with a drinking theme, on the next with a flood theme. Thus, it is difficult to see how the external stimulus as such could “explain” the ensuing dream. (4) The picture one gets in the case of most such incorporations, moreover, is of an already ongoing narrative which, if it deigns to “use” the stimulus at all, does so by interpreting it in a way that is consistent with the preexisting dream story. That is, the dream determines the fate of the stimulus, rather than vice-versa. (5) Since the discovery of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, and of its association with vivid dreaming, it has become apparent that dreaming is too pervasive, temporally extended, and cyclically recurrent in the adult human to be explained by infrequent, brief, and randomly occurring stimuli during sleep.⁴ Moreover, experimentally controlled external stimulation has not been found to trigger (REM) dream periods. (6) We now also know that there are, in the visual system, other impediments to perception during sleep than the fact that one’s eyelids typically are closed. Subjects who slept with their eyelids taped open and with their pupils dilated were still demonstrated to be functionally “blind” during sleep. They couldn’t see (or dream about) the stimuli before their eyes.⁵ The visual system is by no means electrically silent during sleep, but it seems to be internally “tuned”; that is, it is organized in a different way in sleep than when it functions as a sensory system.

Perhaps the most convincing demonstration that dreaming is a kind of thinking rather than any kind of perception comes from the study of people whose waking perception is normal (or adequate to navigate the waking world) but whose waking abilities to imagine or think about the world are in some way impaired. One patient, for instance, experienced a severe head injury that did not interfere with his waking visual perception. It did, however, totally abolish his previously highly developed ability to visualize “mentally.” A builder’s manager, he could no longer mentally visualize a plan, and had, instead, constantly to refer back to the blueprints. He claimed that, “When I dream, I seem to know what is happening, but I don’t seem then to see a picture. I can dream about a person without seeing him.”⁶ This account suggests that the patient could dream only as he could mentally imagine the world—without visual imagery—not as he could see it. But this case, and others like it, are less than totally convincing, because the patient was not awakened during REM sleep and asked, then and there, to describe his dreams. As we now know, many dreams, and many details of dreams, are quickly forgotten if they are not described immediately after their occurrence (see Chapter 2).

It is useful, then, that we have at least two case studies which describe the REM dream reports of subjects with defects in waking visual imagination.⁷ In both cases, the individuals were unable to solve mental problems in which a test figure must be rotated mentally in order to have the same orientation as a standard figure, and in which judgment must be made as to whether the figures are identical. For example, the standard figure might be the letter “J,” and the test figure either the letter “J” tilted at a 120° angle from the upright or the letter “J” so tilted and also rotated three dimensionally so that its “tail” now faces to its right rather than to its left. It is assumed that, to solve such a problem, one must first rotate the test figure through “mental space” until it faces upright, and then determine if the figures match one another in this position. That is, solving the problem depends on one’s ability to imagine movement through visual space. One person with task-specific inability to solve such problems never reported visual imagery in her REM dreams. The other was asked if a movie would describe the manner in which he experienced his dreams, and he replied, “I think a radio drama or tape with an occasional picture might be a better means of expressing ….” how he experienced them. Both subjects were bright, and college-educated; neither was generally inept at problem solving. They had a specific waking inability to visually imagine movement through space, and their dreams were similarly devoid of movie-like imagery. The first subject had normal waking perception. The second subject, because of damage to the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, could see only in his right visual field, but by changing his angle of observation, was capable of taking in sufficient visual information to pursue a career successfully and unaided. Thus, the subjects’ dream “disabilities” seemed to be related more to specific thought defects (in visual imagination) than to any visual perceptual disabilities. These individuals dreamed more as they could think about the world than as they could see it.

Such observations not only reinforce the idea that dreaming is more like thinking than like seeing, they also raise some interesting questions about the evolutionary history of dreaming and about the developmental history of dreaming in the human. When we wonder what dogs or cats and human infants dream, we seem to think that, because these creatures can see the world, they ought to be able to dream of it as well. But, if dreaming is more like thinking than seeing, then we ought to be considering how well dogs, cats, and infants can think about the world—whether they can symbolically reconstruct and manipulate in their minds the things they know perceptually—when we consider whether or how well they can dream. In Chapter 3, I review what is known about the early development of dreaming in the human, and show that dreaming in fact seems to follow a course dictated by intellectual growth rather than by perceptual competence. That finding offers still further support for the characterization of dreaming as a symbolic process—something we do with our thinking minds.⁸

2. The Sources of our Dreams Lie in what we Know

It is generally assumed that the sources of our dreams lie in what we know, that their particular images can be traced back to whole units or bits and pieces of memory and knowledge that we have acquired through experience. There are some obvious difficulties with this assumption, because in our dreams we often run across people, places, objects, and situations which have no obvious counterpart in our waking life histories. Nevertheless, the assumption is not an implausible one, and it is difficult to imagine any alternative to it.

Freud sought to demonstrate the derivation of dream imagery from memories and knowledge by having dreamers “free associate” to their dream images. First, the dreamer recollects some particular dream image, and then lets her or his mind wander where it will. Freud’s idea was that, since volitional control doesn’t seem to be operative in creating dreams, an undirected association process beginning with the dream image might be able to travel back through, and permit the reconstruction of, the associative pathways used in creating the image. Ideally, it would lead back to one or more demonstrable source for every feature of the dream’s imagery.

In Freud’s hands, free associations were supposed to lead back not only to the sources of the dream’s imagery but also to the motives that dictated their use. That is, Freud thought that free association would suggest not only where the imagery of the dream came from but also why the dream was dreamed. His ideas about the ultimate sources of the dream—that they lay in repressed sexual wishes and fantasies—are well-known, controversial, almost certainly wrong, and unessential to the argument here. These ultimate sources were not, in fact, identified in the dreamer’s associations at all, but were reconstructed by Freud’s imposition of a particular theory on those associations.⁹ Even though one rejects this theory, however, “free” associations themselves still can be useful in identifying what Freud might have thought of as the proximate sources of the dream—those lying sufficiently close at hand to have served as the mnemonic (memory) basis for the particular imagery of the dream. In this sense, there is only one thing that’s novel about Freud’s method. He’s saying that if you can’t think where in your past experience a particular dream image might come from, then it might be helpful if you’d stop thinking so hard about it and just let your mind do the job in its own undirected way.

Using this method, Freud found just about what you and everyone else who’s wondered about the sources of her or his dream imagery would expect. Some of the imagery of the dream seemed to draw in a relatively direct way on experiences of the day before (the dream day). These experiences, encoded as memories, Freud called day residues. Sometimes day residues referred to important and emotionally impressive experiences of the dream day; sometimes they referred to the sorts of trivial waking events the dreamer might otherwise have imagined to be totally forgettable, had they not recurred in the dream. On the face of it, there seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to what impressions of the dream day appeared in the dream, although Freud thought it significant that some impressions from that day could almost invariably be demonstrated to be present.

From the perspective of contemporary thinking about human memory and thought, in which computer analogies run rampant, it is natural to think of dreaming as a kind of updating of one’s memory “files.” In wakefulness, so the argument goes, information is being processed too continuously to permit complete cross-tabulation with relevant knowledge already on hand. Dreaming either is the process by which, or is a token of the process by which, such cross-filing goes on during sleep, when no new information is being taken aboard from the outside world. On this view, the day residue content of our dreams indicates that reprocessing is occurring for dream day experiences, and the day residue itself may be a means by which relevant older knowledge is being addressed, accessed, or reorganized. Presumably, from the logic of mnemonic organization, it might not matter how impressive or significant the experience was to which the day residue referred: Its importance would lie in its pattern of potential connections with knowledge already in storage.¹⁰

This is one of many ideas about dreams that have at least a superficial appeal, but about whose real value one must entertain some dou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. What Dreams Are
• 2. When Dreams Occur
• 3. When and How Dreaming Begins
• 4. What Dreaming Is
• 5. Meanings and Functions
• General Index