On Dreams Part 2

There are two parts to this blog. I will first continue with my evaluation of Freud's book On Dreams and hopefully this will add extra insight into the nature of our dreams. And then I will look at what modern science has told us about dreams.

To review: Freud posited that dreams are essentially wish fulfillments, though they are often disguised. The reasons why dreams are often so obscure are multiple. First, the brain must convert ideas into situations and images. Second, the brain must condense these scenes for the sake of brevity. And now we will continue on to the other forms of distortion that I did not cover in the previous blog.

Freud hypothesized that dreams contain wishes that are typically repressed but, because the agency that keeps unconscious memories down is impaired during sleep - these thoughts creep to the surface. However, the repressing agent is impaired but not completely down and so the dreams are altered by some sort of a mechanism that is trying to protect us from our repressed wishes. The first is displacement: taking ideas and creating a metaphor to convey them. The second is intentional distortion, the dream thoughts are distorted by the brain for the purpose of protecting us from our repressed thoughts. I do not give much credence at all to this last mechanism.

So why do we dream? Freud says that dreams are meant to allow us to sleep, because with so many denied wishes during the day we need some incentive to sleep. And secondly, dreams act as a guardian of sleep: keeping us asleep when we need to be and awakening us when we need to awake.

But what does modern science tell us about dreams? First of all, dreams occur during REM sleep where the eyes move rapidly back and forth and the body is temporarily paralyzed from moving. Secondly, researchhas shown that one purpose of dreams is to consolidate memories. People perform better on memory tasks after they have had a night full of dreams. It appears that memories are cataloged during sleep so that retrieval of them is facilitated. (This is why 8-9 hours of sleep is so important before a test, because most dreams occur in the last hours of our sleep cycle)

For Freud that means his hypothesis of dreaming for wish fulfillment is probably wrong. Also his posited repression control mechanism: no evidence for that. But he brings to light several key elements of dreams: multiple ideas are represented in one object, ideas are turned into pictures, and ideas are changed into metaphors.

So, even though dreams may simply be a byproduct of a psychological process of storing memories, what we dream and how we store the memory is still interesting. Phew! I was worried that dream interpretation was all a bunch of honky tonk for a second there. I wish I could write more but I'm already beginning to ramble on. But don't worry, there will be a part 3 that will look at the spiritual side of dreaming.

Some links:
Dreams on Wikipedia
Dream control