Any survey of modern dream research must include Calvin Hall (1909-1985).  Hall was a behavioral psychologist who explored the cognitive dimensions of dreaming.  His work began before the discovery of REM sleep, so little was known about the biology of sleep and dreams.  Hall drew worldwide attention for his cognitive theory of dreaming, which was among the first scientific theories of dream interpretation based on quantitative analysis… rather than wishful thinking.

Dreams Images are the Embodiment of Thought

Central to Hall’s cognitive theory is that dreams are thoughts displayed in the mind’s private theater as visual concepts. Like Jung, Hall dismissed the Freudian notion that dreams are trying to cover something up.  In his classic work The Meaning of Dreams (1966), Hall writes, “The images of a dream are the concrete embodiments of the dreamer’s thoughts; these images give visual expression to that which is invisible, namely, conceptions.” (p. 95).

So dreams reveal the structure of how we envision our lives, a display that is clearly valuable for anyone who remembers and studies their own dreams.

The Way We See the World

After studying thousands of dreams collected from his students and from around the world, Hall suggested that the main cognitive structures that dreams reveal include:

conceptions of self (how we appear to ourselves, the roles we play in life)

conceptions of others (the people in our lives and how we react to their needs)

conceptions of the world (our environment: is it a barren wasteland or a nurturing place?)

conceptions of penalties (how we view the Man.  What is allowed? What is forbidden?)

conceptions of conflict (our inner discord and how we struggle with resolving it).

As a behavioral psychologist, Hall believed these conceptions are antecedents to our behavior in the waking world.  They’re like maps to our actions, and “with these maps we are able to follow the course of man’s behavior, to understand why he selects one road rather than another, to anticipate the difficulties and obstacles he will encounter, and to predict his destinations.” (as qtd in Van De Castle, p. 190)

Content Analysis: the Hall-Van de Castle Scale

Hall’s work is still widely cited today, but his greatest legacy is the system of dream content analysis he developed with psychologist Robert Van De Castle in the 1960s.

Known as the Hall Van De Castle scale, this quantitative system scores a dream report with 16 empirical scales.  Some scales are settings, objects, people, animals, and mythological creatures.  You know, the sort of things you see walking down the street on any given day.  (If you haven’t seen any chimeras or griffins recently, then you’re working too much). Other scales include emotions, sexual content, aggression, etc. .

The value of the project is that there are now hundreds of thousands of dreams measured using the HVdC system, creating a “baseline” for normal dreaming cognition.  So researchers can add dreams from special interest groups (children, Vietnam vets, Armenian students) to measure their profiles against the norm. (see Figure 1 for an example of the possibilities)

This innovation is a huge milestone in the scientific study of dreams.  Now researchers can easily get a snapshot of dreaming cognition that is measurable, quantitative, and statistically significant. Besides psychologists, this scale is still used widely today by sociologists and anthropologists.

And thanks to Hall’s student Bill Domhoff, now a powerful dream research figure in his own right, much of Hall and Van De Castle’s database is available online.

Dream content has coherent meaning—that is the main message behind Hall’s work with dreams.  This view later came under fire by the controversial work of neuroscientist Allan Hobson, who implied that dreams may be nothing more than images stitched together from random brain pulses.   This rift is the central conflict in dream studies today.

Learn more about Allan Hobson and the neuroscience of dreaming.

Further Reading:

The Meaning of Dreams (1953/1966) by Calvin Hall

Our Dreaming Mind (1994) by Robert Van De Castle

Finding Meaning in Dreams: a quantitative approach (1996) by William Domhoff

I’ve been brewing this post series for a long time.  Many readers have asked me to review the influential theories of dream formation that are still at work today.   Unfortunately, in our Western culture, where dreaming has long been considered insignificant, advances have been slow due to a lack of funded research. And no one has yet offered a holistic theory of dreaming that accounts for how dreams form in the brain, what they mean, and why human cultures around the world draw significance from them.   Instead, we have many competing theories, all of which look at different aspects of the dreaming world.

Basically, 21st century dream research is in a state of fragmentation.

As troubled as the field is as a whole, dream researchers are all are doing important work.  One of the troubles with the field that everyone has to contend with is that any theory of dream formation drags along with it a theory of how dreams should be interpreted.  This creates, more often than not, a self-referential system that highlights the data that are sympathetic with the theory but is blind to data that do not fit.  This problem is easier to deal with in other scientific endeavors, but when the object of our study is our own consciousness, objectivity becomes difficult.

So, in this post series about the major theories of dreams now popular today, I recommend a both/and perspective.  The success of one theory does not necessarily negate another, because they may be dealing with different aspects of dreaming cognition.  This hasn’t stopped the debates and rivalries in the field of dream science, of course.  But I hope to highlight the similarities of rival theories as well as their differences.

Freud – the Father of Modern Dream Research

Sometimes, a cigar is just a penis.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is the most popular dream theorist known today, and his ideas are still drawing water a century after he wrote his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams.  Freud trained as a doctor and specialized in the brand new field of neurology, the study of the brain.  But times were tough for Jewish scholars as Freud came of age in Vienna, so he established a private practice and focused on treating people with mental disturbances.

Freud had many research interests (such as the effects of cocaine on consciousness), but the study of dreams was his favorite because he believed dreams hold important clues to the way our minds work, which could lead to more effective ways of treating mental illness.

Freud’s theory of dreams is biological in origin, but psychological in practice.  In a nutshell, Freud showed how dreams reflect basic instinctual drives that are common to all humans, but repressed in polite society.  The Victorian flavor of Freud’s culture especially highlighted how tabooed thoughts and desires causes anxiety, phobias, and even mental illness in some individuals.  Dreams provide a relief to this internal conflict by discharging these desires in a cloaked form that is acceptable to the conscious mind.

Contrary to popular belief, Freud did not suggest that all dreams are sexual in nature. Other conflicts can be expressed too, such as aggressive and selfish drives (Bulkeley, 1997, p. 17).  These drives are clearly visible in children, Freud argued.   When dreams express these hidden drives, they often reveal personal material from our childhood memories when our instinctual natures first clashed with the censorship of society.

The expression of these drives comes through our dreams as wishes.  This is the central truth in Freudian dream interpretation. Dreams express the realization of our intentions, ambitions, and hopes, no matter how much we try to deny them.

Disguised Wishes Fuel Acceptable Dream Content

But of course our dreams do not show this baldly.  Rather, Freud claimed that this under-layer of meaning, or latent content, is disguised as ordinary experiences that reflect our current life situation or recent past.  This surface layer is the manifest content of the dream, and it is largely composed of day residue, or fragments of experiences we remember from the last few days.

Like all dream interpretation systems, Freud’s theory has a circular logic at its heart.  When pressed how nightmares are really wishes, Freud somewhat lamely argued that the dreamer must be a sado-masochist, and the suffering in the dream is fulfilling that secret desire for humiliation and pain.  And if that was shown to be untrue, then the dreamer must secretly want to prove Freud wrong, revealing another wish.  Meh… there’s no way out.

Freud’s method of dream interpretation is psychoanalysis (a term, by the way, coined by lucid dreamer Fredrick van Eeden in 1892).  He encouraged his patients to freely-associate the dream to older memories of their lives, to make connections between the past and the present, and to facilitate a transformation of the dream’s memory so it can more quickly do its discharging work in the brain.

Is Freudian Dream Theory Still Valid?

It’s easy to take potshots at Freudian dream theory, but keep in mind this was the first attempt to systematically interpret dreams in modern science and it’s inspired the entire field of psychology.  Several aspects of Freud’s theory still ring of truth – especially the observation that dreams are often pointedly embarrassing and hint at tabooed material close to the dreamer’s heart, rather than reflecting random nonsense.   Dreams have meaning, and we can scientifically study this meaning-making.

Also, his claim that dreams inter-splice long-term memories (childhood urges) with short-term memory (day residue) is a claim made by several current neuroscientists, pointing to the possibility that dreams have a role in learning.   I will discuss more of the neuroscientific revival of Freudian thought in another post.

But first, we will next look at Freud’s contemporary Carl Jung, another founding father of modern dream studies.

Further reading:

The Psychology of Dreams by Kelly Bulkeley.

Interpretation of Dreams by the Man.

If you are interested in hearing about the secret history of lucid dreaming, as well as how ancient lucid dreaming wisdom is cross-pollinating with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, then please join us!

Here’s the press release:

Lucid dreaming, religion, and cognitive science

A meeting of the GTU/UCB Working Group on Religion and Cognitive Science

May 7, 2009 – Thursday, 10 am-12 noon

Institute of Buddhist Studies

2140 Durant Avenue, Berkeley

This event will explore the phenomenon of lucid dreaming (being conscious within the dream state) from both scientific and comparative religious perspectives. People have reported lucid dreams throughout history, often in religious contexts, and yet modern science is just beginning to investigate this unusual aspect of mind-brain activity.

Ryan Hurd, a graduate of John F. Kennedy’s program in Dream Studies, will provide an overview of the history of lucid dreaming, including spiritual dimensions and contemporary controversies. Eleanor Rosch, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, will share thoughts about how qualities of lucid dreaming (and lucid sleep) relate to Buddhism and, potentially, Western religions. Kelly Bulkeley, visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union, will talk about the various roles of lucid dreaming in the world’s religious traditions and their significance for current scientific models of brain-based consciousness.

The event is free and open to the public. For questions, please contact kellybulkeley@earthlink.net

Image CC: Lotus Flower by ForestMind

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.

Specifically, potential co-researchers in this study are asked to consciously experience their hypnopompic imagery when moving out of a dream state, and then report which sounds they experience at the threshold moment.

If you”re interested in participating in original lucid dream research and testing your conscious dreaming mettle, click here for Simanonok’s website.

Hypnagogia and hypnopompia are two areas in dream research that are vastly unstudied, mostly because of the lack of lucid dreamers who can report back their experiences. Ordinarily, these two sister-states of consciousness last less than a minute, and are usually not remembered by the average sleeper. As with all consciousness thresholds, they hold secrets about the nature of our perceptions, memories, and sensations, especially with regards to the human visionary capability.

Television - Our Filter to the Dreamworld?

Do we usually dream in black & white” Or is the color in our remembered dreams just hard to remember? This has been a perplexing question for dream scientists for half a century, with most studies not able to report a firm conclusion.

Here’s a new take: TV may call the shots for whether we dream in B&W or in color. A new study published in Consciousness and Cognition recently reported that our perception of dreaming in color or black & white is correlated with age and early childhood exposure to television.

From the Thaindian News,

The researcher observed that only 4.4 per cent of the under-25s” dreams were black and white. The over-55s who had had access to colour TV and film during their childhood also reported a very low proportion of just 7.3 per cent.

However, the over-55 participants, who had only had access to black-and-white media, reported dreaming in black and white roughly a quarter of the time.

In a nutshell, the elderly report more dreaming in B &W, the young dream in color, and the middle-aged dream in technicolor.

Seriously, “There could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed,” New Scientist magazine quoted researcher Eva Murzyn from the University of Dundee, UK.

This study reveals one of the biggest issues with dream research: are really studying dreams – or are we studying our remembered narratives of dreams? How reliable is memory anyways? Evidence suggests: not very, at least when trying to recall the insignificant details of a remembered event.

Dreams and Vivid Color

Shades of gray are hard to remember. However, vivid color in dreams has a more powerful calling card. Robert Hoss’s research with color and emotions suggests that vivid colors in dreams correspond to emotional intensity. Here’s an example of Hoss’s approach:

Color is as much a symbol as is the imagery in a dream. Color appears to represent the emotional conditions that stimulated a dream or dream image. As with any other symbol, color combines with the imagery to form a more complete “meaning” for the dream image.

Just as the face of your son might combine with the body of a bird to represent some personal meaning such as “my son has left the nest”, color will combine with a dream image to give it greater emotional significance. A red hat would be more expressive of passion, drive and vibrancy, for example, than a colorless hat.

Just as bad smells in dreams are unconsciously translated into negative dreams, so are emotions represented in our dreams as vivid colors. Hoss suggests that the way a color becomes a “dream symbol” is not absolute, but rather a combination of cultural and personal significance as well as more widespread color values that are pan-human. (Red as passion, for example, may be an evolutionarily hardwired association).

In this light, dreaming in black and white may be a cultural interpretation for a remembered dream with no vivid colors – but is that so surprising, given that most of us are not taught to pay attention to colors in dreams?

So whether or not you grew up watching the Andy Griffith Show or Spongebob Square Pants, some colors in dreams speak louder than others. Tracking these associations can be a fruitful practice.

Today, the day after the full moon, I looked back into the research on the Moon’s Effect on Dreams done by the College of Metaphysics in Missouri. When I first blogged about their lucid dreaming and moon proposal this past February, I was skeptical because the research program did not seem to have any experimental controls in place.

Turns out my hesitancy was unfounded, as Dr. Barbara Condron did indeed set up a control group of dreamers who were tracking their dreams without knowing about her interest in the moon cycle’s effect on their recall or levels of lucidity.

Condron has published the results of this study, but it is only available for download on the College of Metaphysics website. I hope the study is also submitted to peer-review sometime soon. Unfortunately, Condron did not make publicly available the data contrasting the control group (those participants who did not know the dream recall study was tied to the moon’s phases) and the experimental group.

However, Condron did publish the second chapter of her e-book for free, and some of her results are discussed. Here’s a taste of some of their findings:

• More dreams were lucid during the full moon compared to the new moon.
• Dreamers reported more multiple dreams during the full moon.
• Lucidity during the full moon was less fractured and lasted longer than the new moon.

What remains to be seen is if higher lucidity rates can be demonstrated independently of the expectancy effect. In other words, are we more lucid during the full moon due solely to the cultural stories and mythologies that the full moon is a time of greater awareness, creativity, and madness?

The question can be summed up as: is dreaming a failure of cognition, a breakdown of logic, and otherwise deficient OR is dreaming an accomplishment of cognition, a creative fire that burns bright inside us, the original inspiration behind art, genius, and even religion?

It’s always been Either/or. Madness versus Creativity. Proto-mammalian gibberish versus Spiritual Ascent.

Thankfully, researcher Don Kuiken from the University of Alberta is questioning this false dualism. His paper at the Montreal Dreams conference was one of my favorites because of its far-reaching implications. Kuiken simply asked, “What if dreaming is both?” Focusing on the anomalies of dreams – those discontinuities of scene, memory, and thought – Kuiken illustrated how dreaming cognition can be seen as a “failure” and an “accomplishment” at the same time.

Take reflective awareness, for example (a favorite topic of mine). In most dreams, we are absorbed in the drama of the dream, so much so that we never stop to think, “Hey, I graduated from high school 15 years ago, and I really don’t need to worry about where I”m going to sit at the lunch table any more.” No, we have single-minded absorption to a very high degree, and we don’t question this anomaly at all. The cognitive psychologists have labeled this a “deficiency” because we”d never be fooled by this shenanigan in waking life.

Kuiken then notes that this absorption in the dream has its own logic. Our “encapulation” in the dream scene allows long-term memories to come to consciousness, and we participate fully within this drama, to a degree that is generally impossible when awake. So we can think of this bizarre emergence as a “coming to light,” Kuiken says, that would not be possible if our thinking was not simultaneously deficient (too single-minded) as well as a marvel (total participation allowing a revelation of deep emotional material).

Heidegger was then dragged into the fray, as his understanding of Logos can handle this sort of ambiguity. Based on Aristotle’s hermaeneia, Heidegger envisioned logos as the hidden order of things. More specifically: Logos is the uncovering of the hidden order. This view of logos works well with dreaming thought and experience, which naturally lends itself towards making connections with deep emotional traces, as well as the revelation of conceptual and metaphoric similarities. IN other words, this muddy thought has its own poetry.

Dreaming has its own logos, and the question still remains how can we switch back and forth between these different modes of consciousness for thousands of years, yet still fundamentally misunderstand them? We’ll have to discuss this in a dream to really close the loop.

Whether you are a believer or not, it is undeniable that angels have been influential dream figures for millions of people, guiding actions, imparting wisdom, and even playing roles in military campaigns and revolutions. Angels, be them celestial guides or archetypal components of the mind, are a psychological reality.

Van de Castle suggests:

In addition to describing the dream in as much detail as possible and noting when it occurred, it would also be useful if you could comment about any possibly significant emotional events that were going on in your life before the dream and your subsequent reaction to the dream. Have you ever had any other similar dreams?

If you”re interested in participating in this dream study, here is link for the Angel Dream Project.

Dreaming
Online articles from the premiere Academic journal in contemporary dream research

DreamTime
Online articles from the magazine published by the International Association for the Study of Dreams

DreamGate
One of the oldest authority sites about dreams with tons of articles, advice, and information

International Association for the Study of Dreams
A non-profit and interdisciplinary thinktank on dream research

National Sleep Foundation
Information on sleep disorders and tips for better sleeping patterns

Ultimate List of Dreamy Links
This list was started a decade ago, and regularly updated until late 2007

Imagining Sleep
Organized by educator Carolyn Fay, this site offers a free interdisciplinary course on sleep and dreams. Highly recommended.

Sleep and Dream Researchers on the Web

G. William Domhoff
Specializes in quantitative studies, content analysis, and societal patterns in dream content

Jeremy Taylor
Specializes in group dreamwork, personal mythology, and spiritual significance of dreams

Kelly Bulkeley
An expert in religion, politics, brain-mind science, and near-death dreams

Anne Hill
An interfaith minister and host of the weekly internet radio show DreamTalkRadio

Patricia Garfield
Renown for her work in universal dream symbols, as well as women’s and pregnancy dreams.

Robert Hoss
Specializes in significance of color in dreams, also conducts online interviews with other dream researchers

Robert Moss
Brilliant writer, dreamworker and author of The Secret History of Dreaming, Robert Moss focuses on dream interpretation, synchronicity, and the psycho-spiritual dimensions of dreaming.

DreamGates
Robert Moss’s blog on Beliefnet.com, the most popular spirituality site on the web, covers the basics of dreaming and how to tap into the wisdom of the imagination.

Linda Mastrangelo
This San Francisco Examiner columnist, psychotherapist and dreamworker updates regularly with the latest in the SF Bay Area, the undisputed dream center of the U.S.

Rubin Naiman
Dr. Naiman is a pioneer in holistic sleep and dream medicine, blending contemporary and complementary methods.

Dreaming and Personal Growth Bloggers

Oneironauticum
A focused look at dream-enhancing substances. “Once a month, people worldwide take the same oneirogen—any substance, practice, or experience that promotes vivid dreams—on the same night, creating an international network of intentional dreamers.”

The Cobalt Sigil
Fearless and always going deeper, the Cobalt Sigil blogs about her dreams and meditation practices and how they integrate with life.

Sleep Talkin’ Man
A blog that faithfully records the sleep-talking of a normally “mild-mannered” British man. Hilarious and true. Example: “”Don’t eat my hand. Gently…. Gently… There’s a good possum. Goooood possum. I don’t know what you are. Hmm.”

Dreaming Life A fascinating mix of “lucid dreaming, entheogens, metaphysics and the conscious experience.” This blog also features occasional panel discussions too as popular dream bloggers are invited to sound off on particular subjects.

Reality Shifter
Highly recommended blog by an expert in consciousness-shifting technologies, focusing heavily on natural altered states such as lucid dreams and meditation.

The Absent Narrative
A deeply focused blog on mythopoesis, including the narrative elements of dreams, personal mythology, and religion studies.

Healing Power of Dreams
The Healing Power of Dreams pairs ancient wisdom about dreams and healing with contemporary science and mind/body practices. Working with the IASD Cancer Project, they providing dreamwork training and workshops to hospice and health workers to incorporate dreamwork into already established complementary healing programs.

Dream Moods
This is hands-down the best dream interpretation site on the web. Good dream dictionary, but more importantly, the staff understands that good dream interpretation goes beyond dictionaries and must involve personal research.