Sigmund Freud is considered the father of dream science, even though most of his dream theory is largely discredited today. But from the get-go Freud assumed that dreaming was an expression of the mind-brain system, a premise still widely accepted by scientists, psychologists and philosophers today. Still, in popular culture, we still hear the question asked, “Do dreams have meaning? or are they random bits of brain trash?”

So let’s take a look at the neurological and cognitive evidence, focusing on the brain layer by layer. Many parts of the brain contribute to the experience of dreaming: from the lower brain and upwards to the middle and higher brain structures. Nihilists may gnash their teeth, but judging by the theories coming out of neuroscience today, it appears that meaning is built into the fabric of dreaming itself.

The Lower Brain Structures REM sleep
Evolutionarily speaking, the brain stem is the most ancient part of the human brain, shared by all vertebrates.  In 1977, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley discovered that electro-chemical pulses from the brain stem create the architecture for REM sleep.  Not all dreams occur in REM sleep of course, but it is this stage of sleep that provides the relatively active mind state where many of our remembered dreams occur. These brain stem pulses create the substructure of the dreaming experience, including how long the REM period lasts.

The idea that these brain stem pulses are essentially randomly generated has been misinterpreted by many a journalist to mean that the content of dreams is also randomly generated or “meaningless.” Rather, this hypothesis suggests that the function of dreaming is primarily physiological. Psychologists don’t dispute this. And as Hobson himself has clarified, he does think that dreams have psychological meaning—in fact Hobson has kept his own dream journal for decades.

What about the idea that dreams are the defragging of the brain — the process of deleting information? This theory comes to us from Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison in 1982, known as the “reverse learning theory of dreams.” While it conveniently mirrors computer science, the evidence for defragging as the function of REM is rather poor, and most scientists do not support it today.

The Middle Brain Integrates Emotions
When dreaming sleep begins, the middle brain becomes an electro-chemical fireworks display of activity. In fact, the middle brain is so active in REM sleep that Hobson (1999) has appended his theory of brain generation  to suggest that it may be just as responsible for the structure of dreams as the lower brain. This part of the brain is shared by all mammals.  Also known as the limbic system, it regulates emotional responses and cravings. During dreaming, the middle brain is more active than it is in waking life, so you could say that emotional intelligence is the guiding structure here.

Fear is a primary emotion in dreams

One part of the middle brain is especially active: the amygdala, a walnut-sized lump that philosopher Rene Descartes, and later Emmanuel Swedenborg, once thought was the seat of the soul.  Today, we call the amygdala is the seat of emotion, and especially fear, due to its role in maintaining fight or flight responses.

But why so emotional? Dream researcher Rosalind Cartwright argues that we are replaying old memories and updating them with information from recent experiences.  This is emotional logic: it’s not about cause and effect, but emotional correspondences. Cartwright’s laboratory research suggests that most dreams are negative in emotion, the most common ones being fear, anxiety, anger and confusion.

This idea is mirrored in the evolutionary theory of dreaming, which supposes that dreams rehearse possible threats. Threats from the past are important data in this sense, showcasing how a dream can both be about the past and future simultaneously.

The Higher Brain Takes a Nap

So, when we’re we are in dialogue with a talking bear, how come we usually don’t realize that we’re in a dream? Neuroscientist Allen Braun (and company) published a provocative finding in 2002 using new evidence from brain imagery scans. They discovered that, during dreaming sleep, the higher brain is essentially offline. The higher brain is the newest part of the brain –the cortex—and humans have the most grey matter, as well as the most infolded grey matter, in this layer than all the other mammals. Braun argues that the prefrontal cortex—which generates language, logic, and critical thinking–is taking an electro-chemical siesta while we argue with that talking bear.For whatever reason, we largely accept the bizarre landscape around us.

Working memory may be out to lunch, but something is oddly familiar when we are in the dream itself. Perhaps, as depth psychologist James Hillman argues, there’s a part of ourselves that belongs in the dreamworld, and is quite comfortable with the rules of the realm.

Something similar happens in other highly creative states. For example, a recent fMRI study (Limb & Braun, 2008) showed reduced activation in the prefrontal cortex when expert jazz musicians were spontaneously jamming compared with when they were playing memorized pieces. From this perspective, dreaming sounds like a flow state as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, not a deficiency in cognition.

Keep in mind, some critical thinking still occurs in dreams, as we actually co-create dreaming outcomes when we “work around” the weird plot changes and bizarre visual imagery that the other parts of the brain throws our way. Indeed, cognitive psychologist Tracey Kahan has amassed plenty of quantifiable evidence that we have meta-cognition in dreams. Metacognition used to be thought of as the pinnacle of waking thinking, and dreams were assumed to be completely devoid of it. Kahan’s data shows that we still think about our feelings, ponder decisions, and wonder about what’s going on around us in the dreaming narrative.

The extreme of this trend in metacognition, of course, is lucid dreaming, which is when the dreamer knows “this is a dream.”  Scientifically validated by Stanford psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge, lucid dreaming is marked by conscious choices, active thought, and logical reasoning in the dream. This claim was recently strengthened by researcher Ursula Voss in 2009, who along with her colleagues from Neurological Laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany, published strong evidence that the brain has heightened activity in the frontal and frontolateral areas during these “self-aware” dreams.

But where is the meaning? You decide, literally.

As cognitive psychologist Bill Domhoff has quantitative shown, the content of our dreams largely matches our interests, worries, and preoccupations from waking life. Domhoff’s evidence supports the continuity hypothesis for dreaming, one of the most widely supported modern theories of how dream content is formed, experienced in the moment, and interpreted upon awakening.

In my world, reviewing theories about how the brain creates and interprets the dreaming experience does not reduce dreaming to “only” a biological event. Rather, a holistic approach to dreaming must integrate the material, the psychological and the transpersonal to reflect the depth of our experience.

Today the question is not do dreams have meaning but rather emerges as:

what do you find meaningful?

References

Allan Hobson and R. McCarley, The Brain as a Dream State Generator: an Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977), 1335-1348.

Psychology Today: Dreaming up a good mood

Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin., Hobson, J.A. (2009). Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 2009 Sep 1;32(9):1191-200.

Balkin, Braun, Wesensten, Jeffries, Varga, Baldwin, Belensky, Herscovitch, 2002. The process of awakening. Brain, 125, 2308-2319

Kahan, Tracey and Stephen LaBerge. Dreaming and waking: Similarities and differences revisited. Conscious and Cognition, 2010

Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS One, 3(2), e1679.

First Image credit: Brain coral by bsmith4518

Image by h.koppdelaney

This is a guest post by psychotherapist G. Scott Sparrow. Image by h.koppdelaney

I have spoken and written about how cocreative dream theory transforms the way we think of dreams, but I have devoted just as much time to developing a dreamwork methodology based on  the theory, which is surprisingly easy to learn and to use. While I began developing this method over 35 years ago, only in the last decade has it has matured into a systematic dream work approach, which has been called the FiveStar Method (FSM).

Rather than presenting this method in great detail, I will only summarize the five basic steps. Copies of complete papers and articles can be found on the DreamStar Institute website. Please note that in contrast to Montague Ullman‘s or Gayle Delaney‘s efforts to insulate the dreamer from the dream helper’s projections, I believe that a more open dialogue represents a tolerable risk in a client-centered, one-on-one setting. Moreover, I have found that the FSM protects the dreamer from excessive projections by restricting the dream helper’s comments to descriptions of dream process, at least in the first three steps.

Step One: Sharing the Dream in the Present Tense and Sharing Feelings.

Rather than considering the imagery from the outset, the FSM takes some time developing the affective and relational context of the dream. First of all, the dreamers share the dream in the present tense (as Fritz Perls recommended), and then the dreamer and the dream helper share their respective feelings that arose in the course of retelling the dream. This is the first step (or “star”) in this method.

Step Two: Summarizing the Dream Theme (or Process Narrative)

The FSM’s second step is to analyze the dream theme, or process narrative. Unlike some dream experts who have come up with a list of “universal” dream themes, the FSM prescribes a phenomenological distillation of the dream’s observable process, and nothing more. So, an appropriate process narrative might be, “Someone is trying to get away from something and no matter what she tries, she does not succeed until she asks for someone’s help.” Once again, the FSM keeps the focus entirely on what is observable, and emphasizes action over static content. Indeed, any mention of nous (names, places, colors, etc.) are discouraged in the formulation of an effective process narrative.

Step Three: Identifying and Troubleshooting the Dreamer’s Responses

The first two steps establish the affective and process context of the dream experience. The third step is the “crown jewel” of the FSM. In this step, the dream work focuses on the dreamer’s responses to the dream, which includes assumptions, beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors. Since most dreamers are unfamiliar with this emphasis, these responses have to be accessed outside the original dream report. But as client/dreamers become familiar with the FSM, they begin to incorporate these dimensions into their initial dream recollections.

The third step also considers what the dreamer could have done differently, and would like to do differently if a similar dream should ever recur. By considering alternative responses to the dream scenario, the FSM promotes the view that the dreamer can alter the dream memory and its effects in the here and now, and can rehearse for future dreams of a similar nature. The assumption that the dreamer is free to change grows out of the lucid dream literature, but is strengthened by the belief that I have espoused earlier that all dreams evidence some degree of dreamer reflectiveness.

Step Four: Imagery Transformations and Associations

The growling dog is more than an image of your instinctual nature. Image by Luciano Joaquim

The fourth step of the FSM finally addresses the imagery, and may involve noninvasive imagery work such as Jungian amplification and Gestalt dialoguing. But rather than treating the imagery as static, the dream worker focuses on the ways that the imagery may have changed in the course of the dream, and raises the question of how these changes might mirror changes, or the lack thereof, in the dreamer’s responses to the dream.

So instead of asking, “What does a growling black dog mean to you?” the dream worker might ask, “How did the dog’s behavior relate to your response to it, and what do you think would have produced a more desirable response from the dog?”

In the context of this process-oriented analysis of the imagery, it is, of course, important to discuss the dimension of life to which the dog might be alluding (e.g instinctual urges, dependent people, etc.). But the FSM discourages a direct one-to-one bridge between the dream imagery and a waking situation, because such narrowing, however appealing, effectively locks the imagery into place, thus ignoring the possibility of transformation.

For example, I had a client who literally dreamt that he was floating above a growling black dog that was barking and jumping up at him. My client flapped his arms and continue to float just above the barking dog. By focusing on his responses in therapy, my client was able to see how he was remaining aloof from his feelings, for fear that they would overwhelm him. A month later, after trying to trust his feelings, he dreamt again of floating just above a beautiful woman, who playfully tried to grab his foot and bring him down to earth. While he again remained aloof throughout the dream, he awoke feeling playful and desirous of her affections. By focusing principally on his reactions to the dog, and avoiding a hard-and-fast connection between the static image and parallel waking concerns, my client was able to alter his relationship to the dream imagery, thus freeing it to transform and evolve alongside him.

The Fifth Step: Applying New Responses

The last step of the FiveStar Method involves having the dreamer identity a life context in which he or she can practice the new responses that were identified in the dream work. This commitment to change one’s response prepares the dreamer to transform his waking relationships as well as to prepare for future dreams of a similar theme. At this point, the client may or may not adopt a lucid dream induction strategy in order to leverage the therapeutic benefit of the dream work.

In the final analysis, the FSM treats dreamer awareness and imagery analysis as equally valuable components in a larger framework that values the evolving relationship between dreamer and dream as the centerpiece of a dynamic and relational approach to the dream experience.

About the Author

G. Scott Sparrow, EdD is a psychotherapist and Associate Professor at University of Texas – Pan American, and the author of many books including the classic Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light.  His website for dream mentorship is the DreamStar Institute.

This is guest post by psychotherapist and author Scott Sparrow.

A client of mine once dreamed that she was lying in bed. A man dressed in a robe, with a hood covering his face, walked up and stood beside her bed. He said, “I want your heart.” Visualizing the man ripping her heart from her chest, the woman awoke in terror.

She asked what countless people have asked upon awakening from such a dream, “Who was that man? What does this mean?” If she had posed this question to a frequent lucid dreamer, he or she might disregard the dreamer’s preemptive search for an interpretation,  and say, “Too bad you didn’t become lucid. Then you could have realized that it was only a dream.”

A therapist, looking at the dream as an indication of past trauma, or unrealized potentials, or both, might ask in classic noninvasive fashion, “What are your associations to this figure? How might he serve as a metaphor for some aspect of your life?”

If the dreamer had simply become lucid, she could have responded fearlessly, or simply woke up. Her fear would have subsided with the realization that the man and his disturbing words were only part of a dream. Or, if the dreamer had acquired in retrospect the insight that the man portrayed, for instance, the dominating, Apollinian quality of maleness, she may have realized that her sense of self was feeble in the presence of such strength, and she may have associated her fear with actual past events and relationships.

What’s Missing

Lucid dreamers and psychotherapists are quick to dismiss each other's perspective but each have what the other lacks

Both of these approaches — of the lucid dreamer and the dream analyst — have merit and can produce meaningful results, but what is lacking in both of these orientations is the balancing perspective of the other. In my experience, lucid dreamers can be too quick to go off in search of something more desirable.  It’s their dream after all, so why not bag the old dream and go in search of a new one?

And therapeutic dream analysts, especially those of a psychodynamic bent, may remain stuck trying to discern the meaning of the imagery without regard for the dreamer did, or could have done, to alter the dream’s outcome.

As an early lucid dreamer, I was passionate about the possibilities of experiencing higher states of awareness, and dream interpretation was initially not very important to me. My little book, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (ARE, 1976)––an outgrowth of my master’s thesis––went to the heart of what I considered the ultimate lucid experience: communion with the white light. I was largely uninterested in the unresolved conflicts to which dreams often alluded.

To give some sense of my priorities as a hot-shot lucid dreamer, I once told a psychoanalytically trained colleague the following dream:

I am on the streets of a Mexican town with my two best friends. We meet a beautiful woman, who could be a prostitute. We flirt with her, and them make arrangements to visit with her that evening. Just as we say goodbye to her, I notice my father standing nearby in the shadows. I know that he has overheard our conversation with the woman, and I can discern his disapproving look even in the low light. But just as we stand facing each other in silence, there is an explosion to the east. We both turn and see an orb of white light the size of several suns hovering 50 feet above ground. I look at my father lit-up face, and can see that he has forgotten the tension that was between us. I become aware that I am dreaming as the light begins to approach and pass over us. Then there is another explosion, and the light appears again to the east. This time, a strong wind begins to blow in its direction, and I am pushed along toward it until I lose my footing and fly up into the light.

When I shared this dream with my psychoanalytically trained friend, he immediately seized upon my relationship with my father, and wanted to ask probing questions regarding my sexuality and my father’s values. I was shocked that he would trivialize such a profound experience. I grew increasingly irritated with his questions, and cut short our conversation.

Somewhere in my late 20s, however, I began to shift to the therapeutic side of dream studies. Not only was I encountering my own powerful unfinished business in non-lucid and lucid dreams alike, but I began to pursue a career as a psychotherapist, working with individuals for whom the prospects of having a lucid dream seemed as remote as winning the lottery.

At first, I was convinced that if my clients could achieve lucidity in dreams depicting their life struggles, the therapeutic process could be greatly accelerated. I tried on many occasions to introduce lucid dream induction as a therapeutic intervention. While some of my clients were successful in having memorable and therapeutic lucid dreams, the great majority of them were not.

The Revelation

A breakthrough came for me in the form of a realization about ordinary dreams. In working with  clients on a day-to-day basis, I began to notice that dreamers already exercise considerable reflective awareness in their non-lucid dreams. In retelling their dreams, dreamers exhibit the kind of deliberate thinking that characterizes waking cognition, but everyone seemed to have overlooked that fact. Just because dreamers aren’t lucid, I concluded, it doesn’t mean that they are always passively involved in the dream’s unfoldment and outcome. To the contrary. I wanted to shout from the housetops that dreamers were not merely “recording secretaries” in the dream, but were reflective and clearly influencing the outcome of virtually every dream!

It was right in front of our eyes, but neither the lucid dreamers who seemed overly focused on lucidity per se, nor the content-oriented dream analysts who remained devoted to analyzing the imagery, seemed cognizant of this feature of ordinary dream reports.

To me, it was an astounding fact, upon which an altogether new theory of dreaming could be developed.  I was talking about this “revelation” 30 years ago, and have never stopped talking about it. It’s simple: If the dreamer is reflective and thus capable of exercising a wide array of responses, and if these responses actually alter the course of the dream as they seem to do, then all dreams can be seen as an interactive, relational process, and analyzed from the standpoint of relational dynamics.

So from this point of view, systems-oriented family therapists are probably better at analyzing the dream than psychodynamically trained therapists.

A Co-creative Model for Dreaming

I wasn’t the first to articulate a cocreative, relational model of dreaming and dream analysis. I found a kindred spirit in the work of Ernest Rossi, who in his seminal work, Dreams and the Growth of Personality, announced that “there is a continuum of all possible balances between the self-directive efforts of the dreamer and the autonomous creation of the dream content.”

In this pithy statement, Rossi basically said that there are two systems interacting in every dream–the dreamer and the source of the imagery. (To those of you who are interested in brain science, you will probably think of the two prevailing positions on dream generation – but that is a vastly complex debate, which exceeds the scope of this essay.) By positing these two somewhat distinct co-contributing elements in the dream, he laid the groundwork for a view of the dream as an interactive, relational, and co-created event.

This view of dreaming make full lucidity less necessary for good things to happen, and treats it as a special event within a continuum of awareness that is readily observable in ordinary dreams. It also suggests that the dream content, as a largely autonomous creation, may ultimately elude the understanding and control of even the highest states of lucidity.

A relational view of dreaming can also threaten the traditional clinical view that dream images can be analyzed as static content, unaffected by what the dreamer is feeling, thinking, and doing in the dream. What kind of interpretive conclusions can we draw if the dream imagery is in constant flux, tethered to and influence by the dreamer’s responses? One can no longer say, “this means…,” but instead has to describe the dream process in such terms as, “this is what happens when you respond in this way.”

Although this approach can frustrate a person’s needs for “answers,” it underscores personal responsibility and unacknowledged competencies, as well as approaching the dream as an unfolding relationship.

Editor’s note: This is part I of an introduction to a new relational method of dreamwork called the Five Star Method. Stay tuned for part II which goes into detail about each of the steps for this way of working with dreams.

About the Author

G. Scott Sparrow, EdD is a psychotherapist and Associate Professor at University of Texas – Pan American, and the author of many books including the classic Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light.  His website for dream mentorship is the DreamStar Institute.

If you’re new to this site, here is a list of my most popular content and core essays from the last few years. You can also check out the categories list on the right side bar to find a specific topic, as well as the archives.

Dreaming 101

What’s Wrong with Dream Dictionaries?

How to Keep a Dream Journal

How to Incubate a Dream

How to Start a Dream Group

Honoring a Dream By Taking Action

Contemporary Dream Theories (a 4 essay series)

Where I’m Coming From

Calling All Dream Warriors: My Story (the brief version)

The Trouble with Dream Studies (A 3 essay series)

Toward an Integral Science of Consciousness

Beginner Lucid Dreaming

What is Lucid Dreaming?

Lucid Dreaming Definitions

3 Myths about Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dream Supplements

How to Have more Lucid Dreams: Lucid Living

Tactics for Lucid Nightmares

Advanced Lucid Dreaming

Erotic Lucid Dreams

Geometric Imagery in Lucid Dreams

The Void in Lucid Dreaming

Lucid Dreaming as Shamanic Technology

Dream Reliving

Health and Dreams

Dreams that Warn of Illness

The Power of Grief Dreams

Managing Cancer Pain Through Dreamwork

Causes of Nightmares

Depression and Dreams

Sleep Paralysis and Hypnagogia

Introduction to Sleep Paralysis: Awake and Can’t Move

9 Ways to Wake Up from Sleep Paralysis

Sleep Paralysis and Seeing Spirits

The Succubus and Sexuality in Sleep Paralysis

Dreams and Spirituality

Big Dreams

Visitation Dreams

Christian Mysticism and Lucid Dreaming

Ancestral Dreaming

Eco-Dreaming: Dreams and The Spirit of Place

The Anthropology of Consciousness

Sleep Patterns Around the World

The Prehistory of Lucid Dreaming: New Vistas in Cognitive Archaeology

History of Lucid Dreaming

Hallucinogens in the Stone Age

Nature Awareness as a Field Technique for Anthropologists

The brain as computer: our modern myth that denies the intelligence of the body

This is the fifth article in my series about working with dreams without buying a dream dictionary.  Even though we all say we want to interpret our dreams, I think often we are not looking for an explanation so much as a chance to deepen the experience of the dream, to bring the dream into our lives and work its magic in this realm too.

At least, that’s what I want!

That’s why now is time to discuss the connection between dreams and the body.  If you’ve been reading my blog, you probably know that I  believe that dreams are more than some random linguistic foam left over from the brain’s defragging of the memory systems each night.   Dreams contain expressions from the body-mind, and as such they offer a pathway to self-knowledge, to our private myths,  as well as some pretty clear warnings of bodily issues.

And, who knows, maybe every linguistic image is as its root a metaphor of the body, a view espoused by philosopher and linguist George Lakoff.  Not a popular idea in our Western history of ideas, which posits that thoughts are the product of some disembodied logic from on high  — but one that is actually gaining support from neuro-philosophy.

Working with the Dreambody

This we know: we are humans, and dreams come through our bodies, and so we must use our bodies to explore their significance.  Psychologist Arnold Mindell has been working with his clients for decades on this assumption.  He asks them to focus on their “dreambody” or how they take shape within the dream.

Understanding the patterns of your dreambody can lead to many insights, such as how you view yourself in relation to others, and also which aspects of yourself can go underground in everyday life.  Similar to the idea of the shadow in depth psychology, a “body double” is often present in our dreams that exhibits underdeveloped or repressed aspects of the personality.

Focusing on Bodily Discomfort in Dreams

cc Eve and Adam 2009 by jcoterhals

Eugene Genlin also developed a dream method based on body signals. Known as focusing, this technique is still used by thousands of psychologists and is useful for anyone who wants to work on themselves. (In fact, Genlin’s book Focusing essentially launched the “self-help” movement in popular psychology in the 1970s).

At its core, focusing is a way to develop your emotional intelligence as it is reflected in the body.  By acknowledging an ill-defiined tension that, for example, is felt in the belly, we provide opportunities for that feeling to clarify and even resolve.  In Genlin’s Let your body interpret your dreams, he presents a 16 step process for working with the bodily feelings that naturally surface while retelling a dream.

One of the strongest parts of this method for me is discovering childhood memories that can come up with the fuzzy and ill-defined feeling of a dream.  After identifying the feeling, a childhood connection is often right behind it.  Then the question to ask is “why am I feeling this old feeling now?”  This can expose old ways of coping or old patterns that are being re-triggered today, in this current life situation.

Memory is the Body’s Mythology

Memory is so much more than a synaptic circuit in the brain; it is a living presence also at home in the belly and our hearts.   I’m not being poetic here: many psychiatrists still believe, as was suggested by their 19th century forerunners,  that the cognitive “unconscious” is a catch-all phrase for the intuitions, desires and lamentations of the body’s organs and muscles.  The more we learn about memory, the clearer it becomes that it is not a deposit that sits in waiting like a computer file, but rather a story that lives through us, and that is re-created and relived each and every time.

Memories are just as much bodily habits as they are mental patterns.  Dreams, amongst other functions, offer up these habits and give us a chance to see them and take responsibility for them.   The stories we create from these bodily expressions are our private myths.

Luckily, these myths aren’t set in stone, but in flesh.  They are mallible, and ultimately yielding.

Oh, there’s so much more to say about the connection between dreams and the body.  For instance, dreams can provide the first indications of serious illness, using direct and unmistakable metaphors to tell the dreamer that somthing is amiss.  But this subject is so rich I am going to save it for the next post, dreams that diagnosis illness.

Dream sharing is ubiquitous across the world’s cultures and you can bet that dream sharing has been a standard human activity for as long as we have had the ability to:

1. Remember our dreams
2. and articulate them.

It’s Our Cognitive Heritage

Paleolithic rock art contains many of the features of archetypal dreams, including mythological creatures, abstract geometry, and the depiction of flying or falling.

That pretty much means we’re talking about an dream-centered behavior that reaches back at least one hundred thousand years, or as long as modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) have had a functional larynx.   Do we have physical evidence for this?  No, not directly.  But we do have some ancient rock art that dates into the Upper Paleolithic that happens to bear a striking iconic similarity to what we today call “big dreams.”  And as cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams has suggested, “Humans cannot refrain from dreaming.”

The human visionary capability is simply part of our cognitive heritage.  However, I could be wading into bad science by suggesting that ancient humans talked about their boring dreams too, which surely existed in the ancient past as much as today.  Luckily, we don’t have evidence for that.  (What would an ancient human dream journal look like?  “Ate dried elk tendon for dinner again, tastes like feet.”)

In any case, as social creatures, we humans share our dreams, and typically we share them with those who we are most intimate with.  Across the world today, most intact dreaming cultures do their dream sharing with their kin and their friends.  It’s a domestic thing.

A smaller amount of dreaming cultures share in other settings, such as village meetings, in private to healers and shamans, and occasionally during seasonal festivals.

Taboos in Dream Sharing

Purple Shock by andraspfaff (CC 2.0)

Bringing dream sharing back into your life is pretty easy, but there are some pitfalls.  Some dreams are not meant to be shared, but the rules for that differs from culture to culture.  For instance, for the Dine (Navajo) people, sharing the dream from a vision quest could rob the dreamer of his power.

Because social taboos are frequently encountered in dream content, their telling is often highly ritualized.  A good example of this is the Iroquois people in the 17th century, who acted out their tabooed dreams twice a year, even if it meant admitting they had a crush on someone who is married, or violent feelings for a rival.  This special kind of dream-sharing seems to have functioned to “air the dirty laundry” in order to reduce its charge, and prevent unconscious acting-out that could escalate if left unchecked.

Which is why I wish dream sharing was a mandatory start before every meeting of the United Nations, by the way.  (hey, I’m a dreamer…)

There’s no way around it: if you engage in dream sharing you will brush up against some tabooed material.  Whether or not it is appropriate to share the dream is completely up to you.  For instance, sharing a sexual dream with, say, a co-worker can be grounds for sexual harassment.  Lawsuits aside, the way to share appropriately is to share safely and with good boundaries.

How to Start Dream Sharing Safely

Most importantly, you have to build some forum and safety.  You don’t want to share dreams around the water cooler, because it’s too conversational.  You want to dream share with someone who you know will listen, preventing the embarrassing yet sometimes unavoidable “I had the weirdest dream last night…” in which your “listener” proceeds to think about what they need to pick up from the grocery store.

There are no boring dreams, not if you have a good listener.  The key is reciprocation.  You share and they listen because they want their chance to share too.

The next key is habit.  I share dreams with my wife every morning while we are still waiting for the snooze to go off one last time.  It’s automatic, part of our daily routine.  If a dream has some power behind it, the topic will come up again over the breakfast table, or later in the evening.  We may explore possibilities of what it means, but I don’t want to get into dream interpretation right now — the main point is that sharing feels good, and it is rewarding in its own right.  It builds trust, emotional intimacy, and compassion.

It’s Only a Dream, After All

Finally, dream sharing is about listening and about not being judgmental.  Dreams are messy, and they contain submerged feelings, tabooed content, and, to be frank, a lot of dark shit.  So choose your dream sharing partner carefully (or dream sharing group — we’ll discuss group dreamwork later).  And that goes for yourself too: take your own dreams lightly and try not to get caught up in the drama if you have some really tabooed material come up.  Even Saint Augustine, the revered Christian saint whose lifework involved the concept of “original sin,” forgave himself for his dirty nasty dreams.

In this respect, it’s okay to say, “Hey, it’s only a dream after all.”  Not because it isn’t important or vital or contains an embarrassing grain of truth, but because that is what dreaming is for: to discover what we really think, feel and believe when our rationalizing and socially-mandated cerebral cortex has been dampened through the marvels of dreaming cognition.   No judgments.

So try it.  Open up to your friends, your lover, or your family about your dream provided the above safety criteria are met.  Make a habit of it.  Notice how the dream changes as you tell it, how parts that seemed unimportant now seem epic, or vice versa.  Watch for slips of the tongue, for puns, and for associations.

But don’t interpret the dream away just yet…. just let it breath; savor its taste in your mouth.   Even if it tastes like feet.

The next article is about how to start a dream journal to remember more dreams.

The Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, probably the most modern dream dictionary you need. 2nd century A.D.

It’s not that I think dream dictionaries are useless.  Actually I have one and consult it at least once a week.  However, the dream dictionary can only provide one way of working with dreams, which is the cultural significance of a symbol or some pan-human experience such as shame, mortality, or stress.  To put it mildly, our dreams are much more than the dumping grounds of our culture’s symbols and our fear of realizing we are butt-naked in public.

Dreams, like any imaginal or hallucinogenic event, have dozens of emotional, cognitive, and physical layers to consider, as well as significance on the personal, communal and transpersonal levels. To say a dream means one thing is to have insulted a dream.

The Quest for Experience

Luckily,  traditional “dream interpretation” is not the only way to honor our dreams.  As world mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

With this in mind, the quest for meaning seems better suited for the interpretation of dead languages, not for the rich sensory experiences of our dreams, some of which we feel more alive than in our day-to-day existence.

So these 10 ways of working with dreams all have one thing in common: a unique way to extend the experience of dreaming.   Don’t worry, meaning is still part of the package, but it’s not the only end result of working with dreams.

A Holistic Approach to Working with Dreams

Instead, this approach to dreamwork brings a fuller and richer sense of the dream, it highlights our fears and passions in life, and reminds us of our unique possibilities as well as the dangers we face as individuals, and as a culture.

By no means are these my “patented” methods or anything like that — most of these techniques are thousands of years old, but have been forgotten in today’s information-saturated world.  What we’re after here isn’t information, but knowledge.

And maybe if we’re lucky, and accidentally can’t look away: wisdom.

Some of these dream work methods you will probably be familiar with, and a few will seem a little bizarre at first, but all together these “dream deepening” techniques bring all of our best capabilities to bear on our uncanny, yet somehow deeply familiar, participation in the dream world.

Stay tuned.  The next article in this series is about Dream Sharing.

When are you interested in dream for the first time and why?
I wrote my first dream down at age 11, and have had a consistent interest in dreams since age 15. My early dreams were both exciting and scary, and I was not satisfied with most people’s answer “it’s just a dream, it doesn’t matter.”

Do people always dream when they are in sleep or can there be someone who doesn’t dream at all?
Current research suggests that everyone dreams every night, but not everyone remembers these dreams. However, there are many sleep disorders that makes it difficult to get much dreamtime, as well as conditions where dreamers act out their dreams violently while they sleep. The average sleeper has about 90 minutes of dreams a night, but if they live in a culture that does not appreciate these dreams, they are less likely to remember them.

I heard that some people have dreams in black and white? Why is that so while life around us is always in color?
This is a confusing matter. It is difficult to discern because dream recall is unreliable about color in dreams. However, recent laboratory research indicates that about 80% of dreams have some significant, or “striking” color. Check out Robert Hoss’s research for more on dreams and color: www.dreamscience.org

Can blind people dream when they do not see anything but dark?
The congenitally blind (those who have been blind since birth) report narrative dreams with specific content but it is difficult to tell if this content is “seen” or “known.” They also report imageless dreams as well. (There is some interesting related research about blind sight during near death experiences).

What is the cause of the nightmare? I heard that some parents said the nightmare is one of processing for children’s growth” If it is true, is it good for having nightmare or bad?
This is a highly debated topic in dream science! I believe that nightmares are important, even though they are unpleasant. I would agree that they are part of psychological growth, as a way of getting us to pay attention to something that needs resolution or healing. Jeremy Taylor, a dream researcher often jokes, “You had a nightmare” How lucky!” He means that this is an opportunity for psychological growth.

About the lucid dream: Could you intentionally have lucid dream in which you can control its contents or it is just unexpected when you have lucid dream?
Many people can decide to have lucid dreams on specific nights (known as “dream incubation”) and others have them spontaneously. Control of the dream is over-rated in lucid dreaming ” it is impossible to fully control every aspect of a dream. Really lucid dreaming is about being self-aware that “this is a dream!” and having more self-control and decision-making power. Manipulating dreams is still possible, but difficult to regulate.

So, someone can decide to dream a new setting, or meet a new dream figure of their choosing, but they don’t always anticipate what comes next! That is the beauty of lucid dreaming ” it is a balance between making thoughtful decisions (such as facing something scary) and being open to the unknown of the dream.

There are dream journals people talk about, how could people write about dream that they don’t remember after waking” Why can some people remember their dreams while others can’t?
Keeping a dream journal is the best way I know to start remembering more dreams. Select one that you like and use it only for dreams. Keep it private, and next to your bed. When you wake up in the middle of the night, use a light pen or a small book lamp and write down the aspects of the dream that you remember.

If you don’t remember many dreams, sometimes at first these are just feelings (sad, anxious, safe, etc) or vague feelings of being somewhere familiar (an old house you lived in as a child, school, etc) or even just a bit of color or a single image. Start here and don’t worry that these aren’t huge elaborate dreams that other people tell. Over time, you are training your waking mind to remember dreams and you will remember more of them.

Personally, I have kept a dream journal since I was 15. I don’t always write down my dreams, because I have so many that I”d be writing all day! So I pick the ones that are most unusual, or emotional.

We read a lot of story in novels that people have premeditation through dream. Can dream predict the future? Is that what other call d j vu?
Great question! There is lots of research on dreams and premeditation and telepathy. Many people have had predictive dreams, but it is difficult to isolate it in a way that has been accepted by the scientific community. Some dreams play out future scenerios that are likely, so they aren’t necessarily evidence of psi. I recommend looking into the work of Stanley Krippner, Robert van de Castle, and the Maimonides Project on Paranormal Dreams.

D j vu is may be a related topic ” the experience of feeling like “I”ve been here before, this has happened before. This could be a memory of a similar dream, but it is difficult to prove! Many cultures around the world (and throughout history) accept that dreams warn of the future, connect people who are separated by large distances, and allow contact with ancestors and the deep past.

So at the end of the day, it may be about what you believe and think is possible. If you keep an open mind, there is a great chance of experiencing some of these things.

A lot of dream interpretation books in bookstore say things like “Whenever you take an oath in your dream, prepare for dissension and altercations on waking.” Where do these interpretation come from” Do you think dream interpretations are reliable or are they just for fun?
I would be wary of easy dream interpretations from a book, although dream dictionaries are a good starting place. Different cultures interpret dream symbols in different ways, so it depends on the individual’s culture.

There are some reliable “universal” dream symbols that seem to be consistent across the world ” check out Patricia Garfield’s book The Universal Dream Key: The 12 Most Common Dream Themes Around the World. Other dream symbols can be very personal and individual, so no book can tell you their significance. That is a mystery best left only to you and those who know you best.

In the future, do you think it is possible that there could be computers that show what peoples” dream like which we can see in the movies (example: Minority report)?
To be honest, I hope not!! Watch the Japanese anime film “Paprika” for a great example of how this could be a bad idea. Science so far has had great success at describing and locating the “exteriors” of thoughts, by which I mean the physical and electrochemical signs of thoughts, but science still can not get “inside” a person’s thoughts or dreams. Partially, this is because many scientists do not believe there is an “inside.”

This is what makes consciousness research so interesting to me. At the end, only we as individuals can “see” the world as we see it.

Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard are conducting a short survey on dreams and memory. I took it in less than 10 minutes. The results will be reported in the New York Times, thanks to dream-enthusiast and journalist John Tierney.

Click here to take the survey.

By the way, these are the same researchers who recently released a study about how dreamers are more likely to make meaning from a dream if it is a message they want to hear.

I covered that piece recently, highlighting the skepticism of dream interpretation in modern culture. Skepticism is good, but understanding the cultural context of dream interpretation makes for better informed skepticism. So let’s help these researchers take the temperature of modern dream interpretation as it is practiced in everyday situations.

ScienceDaily

The studies cited investigated under which conditions do people find meaning in their dreams. Their results, surveyed from various groups of US commuters and students, indicate that, in the US, people are more likely to find meaning in their dream if the dream reinforces something they already believe.

The lead investigator is Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She suggests that

“people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires. This was also the case in another experiment which demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful; agnostics, however, considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice.”

I” m not too surprised by these results. In the US, dreams are not part of polite conversation. This is not a dreaming culture, to put it mildly. While some US sub-cultures engage in regular dream sharing (such as African-American religious communities in the Southeastern US), most Americans who are interested in exploring their dreams must do so alone, relying on hackneyed dream dictionaries that they find in the Astrology section in used book stores.

The studies above suggest that, for the most part, normally neurotic people who grow up in a non-dreaming culture will only attribute meaning to their dreams when it can support a personal mythology they are already entrenched within. This is an important sociological finding. Unfortunately, it does not reveal too much about the nature of dreams themselves: only the way we let ourselves be influenced by dreams in the techno-rational West.

Dream Interpretation in Context

Today’s social pattern is not typical of dream interpretation systems. In fact, solo dream interpretation is mostly an artifact of Western civilization. Dream interpretation, which has a long and storied history, is usually a communicatory event. Anthropologically-speaking, while dreams can reinforce cultural scripts, they are just as likely to upset accepted norms and taboos. Indeed, dreams shared in public can uncover deadly secrets, reveal dangerous ecological behavior, and mediate disputes between family groups.

You don’t have to go to Polynesian islands to see dream cultures like this at work: there are many in the US, including the modern dream sharing movement that arose 30 years ago. In my experience, sharing dreams can break down psychological defenses just as easily as it can reinforce them. Bad dream work might reveal that you are finally reconnecting with the Goddess. Good dreamwork might reveal that your entire matrilineal line has suffered from a fear of men’s infidelity for centuries. Or vice versa.

By the way, another study published by Morewedge and associates indicated that their sample group of 182 Bostonians are more likely to not board an airplane if they have a dream about a mishap — more likely than if a government warning is issued about terrorist activity. Maybe the US is on its way to becoming a dreaming culture after all…

But I already knew this – this study just reinforces my belief in it.

Image cc: Plane Falling out of the Sky by oHoTos