Dream Practices

Ancient Practices

• Dream incubation: to connect with God through your dreams

• Dream yogas: gaining lucidity + practice for dying

• Shamanic dream practices: connect to other worlds

• Dreamtime in Australia: enter a parallel reality by dreaming

Contemporary Practices

• Lucid dreaming

• Dream incubation: setting an intention to dream about something → for problem-solving or therapy

• Clinical practices: to relieve distress

How to Study Dreams?

• Retrospective self-reports

• Experimental awakenings in the laboratory (but strange situation → new environment + know you are being observed)

• Expert participants (ex: lucid dreamers)

• Sleep science: using neurobiology of REM sleep as a proxy for dreaming

Definition

• Sleep mentation: any form of internal subjective experience that occurs during sleep and that the dreamer remembers upon awakening

• Classic dream: more complex mental activity

Building Blocks of Dreams

• Emotions

• Thoughts

• Sensations

• Narrative structure/scenarios

• Characters

• Memory sources

Asclepios and Dream Incubation

• Asclepios: God of medicine

• People went to sleep in the temple above snakes with questions about their health

• During sleep: hoped for a visit from God in their dreams, ideally from Asclepios to give treatment

• After sleep: if Asclepios didn’t visit the dream, interpretation of the dream by a temple priest to determine the type of treatment needed

Tibetan Dream Yogas

• 2 types of consciousness:

  • Coarse = normal perception

  • Subtle = underling nature of the mind

• Sees dreams as a possibility of full awareness, without distractions from physical reality

  • Dreams: discovery of the nature of consciousness + a test to practice seeing the world as it is

• Relationship with death practices and intermediate states

  • Bardo: intermediate states such as waking life, meditation, dream state, death

• Dream yoga is a practice towards enlightenment

  • To gain lucidity

  • To recognize the illusory nature of perception

  • A practice for dying

Freud

• The dream is a symptom

• Importance of self-observation

• 2 functions of dreams:

  1. Protects the sleeper against awakening

  2. Wish-fulfillment

     • 2 types of dreams

       • Commodity dreams: express a clear and simple desire

       • Dreams that contain disguised wishes

     • 2 types of dream content

       • Latent content: actual thought of the dream

       • Manifest content: observable content, the experience of the dream

         • Allows catharsis → living through the energetic charge of the dream, experience the underlying emotion

         • Linked to latent content

         • Is a mask for latent content

Repression

• Repression: psychic process in response to and defending against intolerable wishes, desires, drives and impulses

  • The energy of repressed drives needs to be expressed

    • These are often expressed as anxiety or transformed into other pursuits

Psychological Material of the Dream Content

• Memory sources

• Childhood experiences

• Somatic/bodily sources

• Some dreams are typical and are shared within a cultural group

Day Residue

• Elements from the day prior that make their way into a dream

  • Are often banal

  • Cheap material for dream formation

• Disguise other symptoms/latent thoughts

Dreamwork Mechanisms

• Process of transformation of the dream into manifest content that can be tolerable to ego

• Similar to defense mechanisms

• Works in an associative manner and are thus potentially legible through dream analysis and can lead to the core of the dream

• Different mechanisms

  1. Condensation: see multiple people in 1 person

  2. Displacement: displace emotion on something else than the original source

  3. Symbolization: symbols + interpretations

  4. Secondary revision: create a narrative with dream elements

  5. Other distortions such as absurdities, lapsus, unexpected elements, bizarreness of the dream content

     → These mechanisms make the dream a safe space to express something that is unsafe to express in reality

Freud’s Repression Model

General Information

• When looking at dream etymologies, they portray dreams as negative because the mind is playing tricks on you

• Dream etymologies often refer to deception or something that is false

• We experience sensations in dreams like in a simulation

• Smells and tastes very rarely occur in dreams

• According to Freud, dream interpretation is the royal road to the unconscious

• According to Freud, repression is one of the main consequences of civilization