Dream a Little Dream?

exploring the mind's nighttime entertainment

Jefferson Scott

"A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep." That’s what Cinderella thought, anyway. Elias Canetti said, "All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams." And Charles Fisher said, "Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."

Dreams. What are they? Where do they come from? What do they mean? Since 2200 BC, man has recorded his nighttime visions. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans all speculated about them. Dreams were and are used in primitive societies to find game, predict the weather, and prophesy about the future.

The Biblical account contains some famous stories related to dreams, Joseph and Daniel being the foremost. Through dreams and visions God influenced Abraham, Jacob, Zacharias the father of John the Baptist, the Magi, Joseph the carpenter, Pilate’s wife, and the Apostle Paul, to name a few.

Dreams have changed the course of human history. The Roman Emperor Constantine had a dream which led directly to Christianity being named the official religion of Rome. The man we know as Saint Patrick dreamed about "the voice of the Irish" calling him to bring the Gospel to the Emerald Isle. The tune for Paul McCartney’s song Yesterday came in a dream, as did Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and the last movements of Handel’s The Messiah.

But what are they really?

The serious study of dreams is usually said to have begun with Sigmund Freud. He hypothesized that dreams were the key to unlocking the mysteries of an individual’s personality. But for Freud, all roads led back to hidden sexual problems. Carl Jung, a pupil of Freud’s, broke from his master over the issue of dreams. His theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious literally arose from dreams.

In 1953, American sleep researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered a biological stage of sleep in which people often have dreams. We know this state as "rapid eye movement sleep," or REM sleep. There are five stages of sleep: REM and four non-REM stages. The sleeper cycles through these stages four or five times during the night. Altogether, the average eight-hour sleep period garners ninety minutes of dream-rich REM sleep. Following this discovery, most dream research focused on REM sleep.

Secular scientists are now mostly of the opinion that dreams have no purpose whatsoever. They believe dreams are either accidental by-products of the brain restoring its chemical balance or an evolutionary holdover that we don’t need anymore, rather like an appendix.

According to some researchers, dreams occur when the brain stem gives out random signals, usually during REM sleep. The cortex does the best it can to categorize these impulses into comprehensible symbols. It does this by handing out familiar images from the dreamer’s mind—like a prop manager distributing masks to actors. This might explain why we sometimes say, "You were in my dream, but it didn’t look anything like you." Some scientists argue that the only purpose for REM sleep is to send the sleeper back into non-REM sleep. Dreams, then, are just the hiccups produced while the brain regenerates itself.

Not everyone agrees with the purely biological explanation of dreams. "Science has always tried to put God in a box and explain away the wonders of how He works," says David Dickerson, Director of Cornerstone Counseling Center in Fort Worth. "Surely there are chemical reactions in the brain and there may be something to that. But throughout history, God has used dreams to instruct His people about how they should live. Dreams shouldn’t just be dismissed as a random act of biocranial housekeeping."

Dickerson believes dreams can be useful in many ways. "They are sometimes God’s way of communicating to us, even today. Dreams help us put things together that with our conscious minds we have failed to do. They can shed light on our situations and help us see direction in our lives."

So, if you have a dream about robbing a bank and absconding to Tahiti, should you accept it as a word from God? "Don’t take every dream as Gospel," Dickerson says. "Check it out with various sources, not least of which should be the Bible. Is what this dream is telling you to do consistent with Scripture? Do some reality checking with people you trust. Make sure it’s something from the Lord."

Besides biology or theology, there is a third option for what dreams are: they may be messages from the deepest part of our minds. They tell us things we need to hear, things we have been either unable or unwilling to think about in waking life. In dreams, decisions are clarified, fears are identified, and desires are laid bare.

Dreams can convey information that our unconscious mind somehow knows but which our conscious mind could never fathom. Cancer patients have dreamed of where their tumors are before their doctors have even detected cancer. Women have had dreams accurately notifying them that they have conceived or miscarried. People have had dreams predicting things that later came to pass. Dreams may express the voice of the dreamer’s true self.

What about the images we see in dreams? What does it mean if I dream about a boat or a vending machine or a wolf? Are there some universal images that mean the same things for everyone, or are they always variable?

It depends on whom you ask. Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious essentially says that all humans share a common base of knowledge and meaning. Certain archetypes (a Jungian term) such as father, child, the shadow, and the hero populate every person’s unconscious and, consequently, every person’s dreams. These dreams represent specific aspects of the dreamer’s personality or the quest to individuation (wholeness).

Visit your local library, however, and you’ll see more books claiming to be the definitive dream interpretation dictionary than you can shake the archetypal stick at. These books rarely agree with Jung or Freud, much less with each other. For instance, three books on dream symbolism gave different definitions to a dream about a coffin: no escape, the end of something, or an impending change.

In the end, the dreamer is the best and only qualified interpreter of his or her dreams. That said, we can tentatively talk about the most common symbols or themes in dreams and what they are usually said to represent. They are: clothing (or the lack thereof), death and dying, flying, and pursuit (chasing or being chased).

Dreams about clothing often tell us something about our self-image or status, while dreams about wearing no clothes are usually about embarrassment. Dreams of death rarely signify physical death, but rather some kind of loss, ending, or change. Dreams about flying usually represent the dreamer’s desire to "fly away" from something, but can also express a desire to gain mastery over a situation. Dreams about chasing something represent something the dreamer is trying to achieve, while dreams about being chased usually signify that the dreamer is suppressing some fear.

So, are dreams messages from God or are they merely brain gas? Do they tell us what we should do or only what we want to do? What about recurring dreams and nightmares? What about those who say they’ve been visited in dreams by deceased loved ones? What is the importance of REM sleep and the dreams there produced?

While theories abound (one writer says an insomniac could count theories instead of sheep) no one seems to know for sure. So, while scientists keep investigating dreams and others make their living interpreting them, the rest of us will just go on happily dreaming them. Because, as Carl Sandburg said, "Nothing happens unless first a dream."

SIDEBARS

Sidebar 1: Dream Interpretation Comparison

Note: N/A means the book did not mention that symbol.

Sidebar 2: Questions to ask about any dream

Dream researcher Eugene Gendlin developed sixteen qualities about dreams which I have formed into the questions listed below. Some questions are not relevant for some dreams.

1. What comes to mind when you think about this dream?
2. What did you feel in the dream or what in your life feels like that?
3. What were you preoccupied with yesterday?
4. Where did the dream take place, and what comes to mind about that place?
5. What was the story of your dream, and what in your life is like this?
6. Who was in the dream, and who was the most important character?
7. Are any of the characters like you in any way?
8. How would you feel and act if you were any of the characters in the dream?
9. Did any scene in the dream end, and if so how did the ending make you feel?
10. What did the symbols in the dream mean to you?
11. Were there any symbols that might represent the body—look especially for things which are high (thoughts), low (feelings), or below (unconscious)?
12. Was anything in the dream contrary to a real situation, and what would such a change mean?
13. Does this dream make you think of anything in your childhood?
14. Does this dream represent anything about your personal growth or development?
15. Could this dream be saying anything about your current feelings about sexuality?
16. What spiritual dimensions does this dream touch on?

Sidebar 3: Lucid Dreaming

Have you ever been in a dream and realized you were dreaming? If so, you’ve experienced what scientists call a lucid dream. Lucid dreams occur only 1-2% of the time during REM sleep. And, since REM sleep only comprises about 20% of sleep, lucid dreams are rare indeed.

According to The Lucidity Institute, an organization founded by lucid dreaming researcher Dr. Stephen LaBerge, "[u]sually lucidity brings with it some degree of control over the course of the dream. How much control is possible varies from dream to dream and from dreamer to dreamer. Practice can apparently contribute to the ability to exert control over dream events. At the least, lucid dreamers can choose how they wish to respond to the events of the dream."

Having nightmares? LaBerge claims mastering lucid dreaming can help. "[Y]ou can decide to face up to a frightening dream figure, knowing it cannot harm you, rather than to try to avoid the danger as you naturally would if you did not know it was a dream. Even this amount of control can transform the dream experience from one in which you are the helpless victim of frequently terrifying, frustrating, or maddening experiences to one in which you can dismiss for a while the cares and concerns of waking life."

If this sounds good to you, begin keeping a journal beside your bed to record your dreams. Then read one of LaBerge’s books. With practice, researchers say, you should be able to begin controlling your lucid dreams.

Sidebar 4: The Ultimate Rorschach Test

What images we dream may be the most revealing aspect of dreaming. Whether dreams are something our subconscious is trying to tell us, divine communiqués, or accidents of nature, the people and actions we dream about speak volumes about us. The mind is given random images and the freedom to interpret them as it pleases. It’s free association without the mental chaperone. The ultimate Rorschach Test.

Dream researcher G. William Domhoff says, "We have shown that 75 to 100 dreams from a person give us a very good psychological portrait of that individual. Give us 1000 dreams over a couple of decades and we can give you a profile of the person’s mind that is almost as individualized and accurate as her or his fingerprints."

But what if I dream about an ink blot?

Copyright © Jefferson Scott. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission. http://www.jeffersonscott.com