Sleep and Dreaming 2024-2025 - Lecture 15 Notes

Theories of Dream Function and Conclusions

Conclusions So Far

• Whether dreams are meaningful and whether they are insightful are separate questions.
• These are separate from the questions of whether dreams reflect functional brain processes and whether dreaming has been selected for in evolution, hence having a function itself.

Dreams and Insight

• The metaphorical nature of dreams may provide insight, offering metaphors to think about aspects of our lives.
• Example: Dreaming of one’s family at a table shaped like the one in a similar, odd family's house.

Stickgold's Theory

• The mixing of memories in dreams, combining new and old, resulting in metaphors, may stem from brain processes of merging new memories into long-term memory.
• This mixing may also result from incomplete processing or issues from the day.

Investigating Claims of Insight

• To investigate claims that dreams have resulted in insight, it must be clear that creativity or insight has occurred.
• Allan Hobson: “I never learned anything from a client’s dreams that I did not already know.” (Hobson & Schredl, 2011).
• Ullman Dream Appreciation technique can be used.

Frontiers in Psychology: Dreaming and Insight

• A study addressing claims that dreams can be a source of personal insight.
• Anecdotal backing exists, with tangential support from sleep's facilitative effect on cognitive insight, and REM sleep's role in emotional memory consolidation.
• Metaphorical representations of waking life in dreams suggest the possibility of novel insight as an emergent feature of metaphorical mappings.
• 11 dream group discussion sessions were conducted using the Ullman Dream Appreciation technique (1 session per 11 participants, 10 females, 1 male; mean age = 19.2 years).
• Self-ratings showed the Ullman technique is effective for establishing connections between dream content and recent waking life experiences, although wake life sources were found for only 14% of dream report text.
• The mean Exploration-Insight score on the Gains from Dream Interpretation questionnaire was very high and comparable to outcomes from the well-established Hill (1996) therapist-led dream interpretation method.
• This score was associated between-subjects with pre-group positive Attitude Toward Dreams (ATD).
• A distinction is made between "aha" experiences from discovering a waking life source for a dream part, and "aha" experiences of personal insight from considering dream content.
• Difficulties exist in designing a control condition to which the dream report condition can be compared.
• Keywords: Dream, sleep, REM sleep, insight, psychotherapy
• Many claims have been made regarding dreams enabling individuals to obtain insight about their emotional and interpersonal life (e.g., Freud, 1953/1900; Rycroft, 1979; Blechner, 2001).
• However, much of the evidence here is anecdotal, or based on case-studies.
• That sleep, by restructuring new memory representations, facilitates extraction of explicit knowledge, and results in insightful behavior.
• Later studies, investigating the cerebral correlates of cognitive insight using the NRT and fMRI, highlight an involvement of

Types of Insight

• Insight about the sources of dream content: “Aha, this is where that part of the dream came from.”
• Insight about one’s waking life as a result of considering the dream: “Aha, this tells me this about myself”.
• The Gains from Dream Interpretation questionnaire exploration-insight subscale assesses these, and engagement in working with the dream.

Control Conditions Needed

• Someone else’s dream.
• A waking life episode.
• Because it may be the process and time given to interpretation that may result in insight or creativity, rather than the dream itself – (Clara Hill et al, 1993).

Tarot Cards and Insight

• Even the reading of Tarot cards can result in some personal insight, because of the conversations they elicit!

Frontiers in Psychology: Comparing Personal Insight Gains

• Reports exist in psychotherapeutic literature that considering recent dreams can lead to personal realizations and insight.
• Theoretical support comes from REM sleep having a function of consolidating emotional memories and creatively forming connections between new and older memories.

American Psychological Association: Insight From the Consideration of REM Dreams, Non-REM Dreams, and Daydreams

• Reports and claims have been made that consideration of dreams can produce personal realizations and insight.
• Exploration-Insight scores associated with discussing REM and non-REM dreams in connection with recent waking life experiences were assessed.
• Participants were cued in the sleep laboratory for a daydream report and then awakened from REM and N2 sleep for dream reports.
• Participants discussed each of their dream and daydream reports for 30-40 min with two experimenters, following the structured Ullman (1996) dream group discussion procedure.
• Participants assessed the benefit of discussing the reports by completing the Gains from (Day)Dream Interpretation (G[D]DI) questionnaire.
• No difference in G(D)DI scores between discussing REM and N2 dream reports was found.

Explaining the Results

• The dreamer takes part in a simulated environment that depicts metaphors about the dreamer’s life.
• Any new metaphor will provide some restructuring of waking life knowledge, even if the waking life issues are quite well known and already well-considered and explored.

Literature on Dreams and Metaphor

• Lakoff (1993, Dreaming): How metaphor structures dreams: the theory of the conceptual metaphor.
• Malinowski and Horton (2014, Frontiers in Psychology): Metaphor and hyperassociativity: the imagination mechanisms behind emotion assimilation in sleep and dreaming.

Example

• The capitalized tweet dream!

Recent Research

• The aim of discussing dreams has been to elicit insight in the dreamer.

Effects of Dream Discussions

• Realization of the effects that discussions about dreams can have on those doing the discussion, and could have on the significant others of the dreamers.

Frontiers in Psychology: Testing the Empathy Theory of Dreaming

• Dreams are a novel but realistic simulation of waking social life, with a mixture of characters, motivations, scenarios, and positive and negative emotions.
• Sharing dreams has an empathic effect on the dreamer and on significant others who hear and engage with the telling of the dream.
• Study 1 tests three correlations: trait empathy correlated with frequency of telling dreams, frequency of listening to dreams, and attitude toward dreams (ATD).
• 160 participants completed the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire and the Mannheim Dream Questionnaire.
• Pearson partial correlations were conducted, with age and sex partialled out. Trait empathy was found to be significantly associated with the frequency of listening to the dreams of others, frequency of telling one's own dreams to others, and attitude toward dreams.
• Study 2 tests the effects of discussing dreams on state empathy, using an adapted version of the Shen (2010) state empathy scale, for 27 pairs of dream sharers and discussers.
• Dream discussion followed the stages of the Ullman (1996) dream appreciation technique.
• State empathy of the dream discusser toward the dream sharer was found to increase significantly as a result of the dream discussion, with a medium effect size, whereas the dream sharer had a small decrease in empathy toward the discusser.
• A proposed mechanism is that the dream acts as a piece of fiction that can be explored by the dreamer together with other people, and can thus induce empathy about the life circumstances of the dreamer.
• The story-like characteristics of adult human dreams may have been selected for in human evolution, including in sexual selection, as part of the selection for emotional intelligence, empathy, and social bonding.

Study 1: Empathy and Dream Sharing

• Toronto Empathy Questionnaire: 16 items, each scored on a 5 point scale, anchored at Never (0) and Always (4).
• Example items:
  • ‘It upsets me to see someone being treated disrespectfully.’
  • ‘I become irritated when someone cries.’
• Attitude Toward Dreams, and Frequencies of Telling and Listening to Dreams assessed.

Correlations Between Empathy and Dream-Related Variables

• Empathy and Attitude toward dreams: 0.29***
• Empathy and Frequency of telling dreams: 0.32***
• Empathy and Frequency of listening to dreams: 0.14*
• Dream recall frequency: 0.19*
• *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, and *** p < 0.001

Study 2: State Empathy Scale

• Pairs of participants discussed one or more dreams of one of the participants
• Empathy of each of them towards the other was assessed on the State Empathy Scale

State Empathy Scale Items

• I can feel my friend’s/partner’s emotions.
• I can see my friend’s/partner’s point of view.
• I recognize my friend’s/partner’s situation.
• I can understand what my friend/partner goes through.
• My friend’s/partner’s reactions are understandable.
• When I talk to my friend/partner, I am fully absorbed.

Results of Study 2

• Empathy of the discusser towards the dream sharer was increased.
• But there was no significant change in empathy of the sharer towards the discusser

Dream as Fiction and Empathy

• Increased empathy on discussing a dream with someone and relating it to their waking life is mediated by the dream being fiction.
• Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar in Toronto, and others, have shown a relationship between engaging with fiction and increased empathy

Perspective Taking and Emotional Response

• The reader sympathizes with the characters in the story, through taking the perspective of the characters, and experiences the events as if they are the reader’s own experience.

Immersion in Fiction

• This effect only occurs if the reader is fully immersed into the story, ‘transported into this narrative world.’
• The emotional response is greater than with non-fiction because of the involvement with the characters and story, and because ‘the focus of fiction is primarily on eliciting emotions, rather than on presenting factual information…’

Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Fiction - Simulation of Social Worlds

• In long-term associations and shorter-term experiments, engagement in fiction, especially literary fiction, has been found to prompt improvements in empathy and theory-of-mind.
• Fiction is the simulation of selves in interaction. People who read it improve their understanding of others. This effect is especially marked with literary fiction, which also enables people to change themselves.
• Improvements of empathy and theory-of-mind derive both from practice in processes such as inference and transportation that occur during literary reading, and from the content of fiction, which typically is about human characters and their interactions in the social world.

Dreams as Fictional Narratives

• Dreams are fictional because they have scenes and characters often taken from waking life but which don’t copy waking life episodes.
• This is shown by: Fosse, Fosse, Hobson and Stickgold (2003). Dreaming and Episodic Memory: A Functional Dissociation? J Cognitive Neuroscience.
• Dreams also often have unknown characters and places

Dream-Lag Effect and Novelty

• In our (2023) book The Science and Art of Dreaming we speculate that the dream-lag effect might bias dreams towards being novel, being fictions, rather than replicating experiences from the previous day.

Dream Sharing and Empathy

• The dream might thus act as a piece of fiction, that others can explore with the dreamer and that, like is proposed for literary fiction, can then induce interest in and empathy about the life of the dreamer.
• The dream is like blushing, it reveals your emotional state to others, even if that revelation is unintended.

Societal Decreases in Empathy

• Increased dream telling might counteract current societal decreases in empathy, in that empathic concern and perspective taking, the main two components of empathy, have greatly diminished between 1979 and 2009 (Konrath et al., 2011).
• Konrath, S.H. et al. (2011). Changes in dispositional empathy in American college students over time: a meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15, 180- 98.

Caveat from Toronto Empathy Team

• “There is nothing more boring than listening to someone else’s dream!”
• However, one third of people share dreams once per week, one third once per month.
• And the relating of dream content to waking life might be a more interesting activity than just hearing a dream

Theories of Within-Sleep Function of Dreams

• Dream production is complex
  • Threat simulation
  • Fear extinction
  • Weak or novel associations are created
  • Dreaming reflects, or is the experience of, memory consolidation
• At the point of dream production, the dream function occurs.

Empathy Effect Timing

• This empathy effect occurs later than dream production, when we are awake and share the dream.
• So it may be that dreams have a social bonding effect, whether their content is a result of adaptive evolution or not.

Evolution of Fictional Characteristics

• The fictional characteristic of dreams has evolved during human history, just as story-telling has been selected for and has evolved.
• In this case it is remembered dreams that have an adaptive function, and not unremembered dreams!

Dream Sharing and Marital Intimacy

• Dream sharing between partners, coupled with self-disclosure training, was empirically investigated as a means for generating intimacy and satisfaction among 216 participants who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: dream sharing, event sharing, and waiting list controls.
• Both dream sharing and event sharing participants attended a four hour self-disclosure training workshop and received an intimacy building workbook.
• Dream sharing in the context of this study supported the contentions of contemporary therapists that sharing dreams may enhance relationships while providing a forum for self-awareness and self-disclosure.

Social Bonding and Empathic Effects

• Whether or not dreams in mammals and early humans had any within-sleep function, characteristics of dreams (plot, narrative, emotions, social content …) may have evolved because of the social bonding and empathic effects of dream-sharing.
• This function would have taken advantage of the long REM periods near the end of the night.

Human Self-Domestication (HSD)

• Dream-sharing would thus be part of humans having become pro-social, empathic, and able to mentalise (knowing others have their own mental and inner life and perspectives), that is, Human Self- Domestication.

Theory of Human Social Evolution

• This is the theory of human social evolution that proposes that people/genes have been selected for on the basis of low emotional reactivity, empathy, and being pro-social.
• Once language was developed, the sharing of dreams may have contributed to HSD.

Dream-Sharing and Human Self-Domestication

• Theories of the function of dreams, such as memory consolidation, emotion processing, threat simulation and social simulation, generally hold that the function of dreams occurs within sleep, occurs for unrecalled dreams as well as for dreams that are recalled on awakening, and that conscious recall of dreams is not necessary for their function to occur.
• In contrast, it is proposed that dreams have an effect of enhancing empathy and group bonding when dreams are shared and discussed with others.
• It is also proposed that this effect would have occurred in human history and pre-history and, as it would have enhanced the cohesiveness and mutual understanding of group members, the fictional and engaging characteristics of dream content would have been selected for during human social evolution, interacting with cultural practices of dream-sharing.
• Such dream-sharing may have taken advantage of the long REM periods that occur for biological reasons near the end of the night. Complex narrative dream-production and dream-sharing may have developed alongside story-telling, utilising common neural mechanisms.
• Dream-sharing hence would have contributed to Human Self-Domestication, held by many researchers to be the primary driver of the evolution of human prosociality, tolerance and reduced intragroup emotional reactivity. We note that within-sleep theories of dream function rely on associational rather than experimental findings, and have as yet untested and speculative mechanisms, whereas post-sleep effects of dream-sharing are readily testable and have mechanisms congruent with the social processes proposed by the theory of Human Self-Domestication.

The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome

• Proposes that dream content which enables group bonding and empathy between people has been selected in human history and pre-history.

Dream-Sharing and Empathy Connection

• NEXTUP theory of dreaming (Zadra & Stickgold, 2021), holds that in REM dreams 'weakly associated networks are being explored to understand possibilities' (p.111), and that the brain combines memories 'into a dream narrative that explores associations the brain would never normally consider.' (p.109.)
• Zadra and Stickgold illustrate the theory with a dream that Stickgold had in his first faculty position when helping to lead a lab class in which anaesthetised dogs would be operated on by medical students, a class that he says he was 'too squeamish' for. He reports a dream in which as a dog's chest was being cut open, he 'suddenly realized that it wasn't a dog; it was my five-year-old daughter, Jessie.'
• In our view, the dream's novel association between a vulnerable dog and Bob's daughter may well have been produced during sleep. However, the strengthened connection that results might be initially between dream-sharer and listener, when the dream is told and discussed, rather than between neurons during sleep, although, obviously, the dream recall and discussion also make permanent the newfound link the dream created between vulnerable dog and daughter.

Post-Sleep Dream Sharing Effect

• These authors report a content analysis of 632 dreams of 150 Polish Auschwitz survivors, collected in the 1970s, and comprising retrospectively recalled dreams from before World War II, during imprisonment, and after the war.
• War-related and threat dreams were found to be more common after the war than during imprisonment, and dreams involving family and freedom-related themes were found to be more common during imprisonment than they were before or after the war.
• In contrast, the empathy theory of dreaming, and the proposal for the inclusion of dream-sharing within HSD, would lead to consideration of the effects of sharing these dreams.
• Sharing during imprisonment a dream of one's prior life, worth and identity would aid the encouragement of social bonding and empathy during the terrible circumstances of the concentration camp. However, after the war, sharing dreams of the concentration camp encourages social bonding and empathy towards the dreamer for what they have experienced, this sharing sometimes occurring in the face of social, political, and cultural downplaying, ignoring or even denial of those experiences. The sharing of dreams with these contents would thus be adaptive and of benefit to the group, in that self-disclosure and group bonding is promoted, even if from the standpoint of the individual the post-war dreams bring back painful memories.

Dream Function

• The function of dreaming may thus occur on waking, when dreams are shared, rather than during sleep.
• Thank you!