What are our dreams about? Dream research.

[Teacher]

Are these messages from our subconscious, reflecting our deepest desires, as suggested by Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts? Or do dream plots arise in the process of clearing our minds - as some kind of by-product of processing everyday experience? Until now, the answers to these questions are inconclusive, and the views of scientists differ.

Dream interpretation history

"Oneurocriticism" by Artemidorus Daldianus
The idea that dreams contain some hidden meaning has been popular for centuries. In the second century AD, Artemidorus Daldianus published a five-volume work called Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams), which cataloged the meaning of a large number of symbols and situations. Artemidorus assumed that dreams are unique to humans, and that a person's waking life affects the symbols in his dreams. He believed that the "dreaming mind" was able to use metaphors in their messages.
Thus, the first volume of "Oneurocriticism" is devoted to the anatomy and activity of the human body: 82 sections explain how objects such as head size, food and sexual activity appear in a dream. For example, section 52 speaks of one action of the body: "All tools that cut and split things in half mean discord, fractions and trauma ... Tools that smooth surfaces predict the end of feud."
The second book examines objects and events in the natural world such as weather, animals, gods, and flight. The section on animals includes mammals (domestic and wild), sea creatures, reptiles and flying. For example, chapter 12 says: “There is a kinship between all wild animals and our enemies. The wolf means a fierce enemy ... The fox indicates that the enemy will not attack openly, but will secretly plot. "

Artemidorus moves from dream content to dream interpretation technique in the fourth book, addressed to his son. He states that the dream interpreter needs to know the dreamer's background, such as his occupation, health, status, habits, and age. Consideration should be given to the plausibility of the dream content. The interpreter must figure out how the subject thinks about each component of the dream. In the fifth book, Artemidorus presents another 95 dreams he has collected so that his son can use them as practical material.
Artemidorus emphasized the empirical nature of his research. "I did not rely on any simple theory of probability, but rather on experience and evidence of actual dream fulfillment." In the course of his research, he visited the cities of Greece, Italy, as well as Asia Minor. He claimed to have studied all the available dream literature and spent years consulting interpreters.
Artemidorus's creation has been the most popular dream interpretation work for centuries. Only relatively recently - in the 1900s - it was ousted from the pedestal by the work of Sigmund Freud "The Interpretation of Dreams".

Sigmund Freud: sleep as attraction
Sigmund Freud tried to associate certain meanings with characters, objects, animals, and scenarios that often appeared in dreams. Despite recognizing the importance of a large number of symbols and situations, Freud mainly focused on two basic hidden human needs: sex and aggression.
According to Freud, a dream is a code, a cipher, through which hidden desires find their satisfaction.
From Freud's point of view, all dreams are forms of fulfillment of desire unsatisfied in reality. In a dream, the desire seems to come true: “If I eat salty food in the evening, then at night I get thirsty and I wake up. Before waking up, however, I dream that I am drinking."

Dreams, according to Freud, are formed as a result of two mental processes. The first process involves unconscious forces that create desire, which is expressed by a dream. The second is the process of censorship, which forcibly distorts the expression of desire and, accordingly, the real content of the dream.
Freud put forward the idea that there is a "manifest" and hidden, true content of sleep. Latent content refers to the real meaning of sleep. During sleep, the unconscious condenses, displaces and distorts the idea of the content of the dream, the real meaning of which is often not recognizable by the individual upon awakening.

Mechanisms for distorting dreams under the influence of censorship:

1. Repression - in which the object of desire changes, but the strength of the emotion remains. It is formed due to the action of censorship, when the desire is antisocial (sex, murder, incest).
2. Displacement - in which thought, avoiding censorship, penetrates into consciousness. For example, a soldier protects a flag (a piece of cloth) that replaces the concept of homeland and duty.
3. Thickening - in which several experienced emotions, objects or events can be combined into one. In real life, there is no connection between these elements.

Freud argued that "the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activity of the mind."

Carl Gustav Jung: sleep as an archetype
Another outstanding psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, rejected the views of Sigmund Freud that dreams are a "cipher" that encodes forbidden impulses of sexual attraction or aggression. According to Jung, the meaning of a dream is much broader and reflects not only the individual, but also the collective unconscious.
Collective archetypes (Anima and animus, Shadow, etc.), universal for all mankind, are manifested through the symbols and characters of the dream. For example, it can be an old man, a young girl, or a huge spider. Each embodies an unconscious attitude, largely hidden from consciousness. Even being an integral part of the dreamer's psyche, they often exist autonomously and are perceived by the dreamer as external figures.

Since dreams speak the mythological language of symbols, mythology can help in their interpretation.
Dreams, like the unconscious itself, speak their own language. As representations of the unconscious, dream images are self-sufficient and have their own logic. Carl Jung believed that dreams could contain "important messages, philosophical ideas, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, irrational experiences, and even telepathic insights."
Acquaintance with the archetypes that appear in the symbols of dreams allow a person to become more aware of his unconscious attitudes, integrate the split parts of his personality and achieve an understanding of his Self (psychological integrity).

Dreams as therapy
Today, the interpretation of dreams is a tool that is actively used by psychologists and psychotherapists. For example, for the analysis of unconscious desires and conflicts (in Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis) and for introducing the content of a dream into the client's real life, helping him to clarify feelings from all sides (in Gestalt therapy).
Therapeutic dream analysis can be used to increase self-awareness, identify hidden emotional states and help people cope with serious life situations and trauma, and to solve many mental health problems. For those suffering from nightmares, interpreting dreams and ultimately influencing them are ways to partially cure their condition.
They also use the concept of lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is aware that he is dreaming and can control his actions. The ability to interpret them is transformed into the ability to influence them, and this ability is often used as a treatment. Lucid dreaming therapy is effective, in particular, in reducing the frequency of nightmares.

Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) is also often used in modern therapy: therapists ask their clients to remember their bad dreams, write them down, and then change their content to something positive, prompting them to mentally rehearse these new dream scenarios each once.

Characters, interactions and emotions. Hall and van de castle scale
Modern sleep scientists have long shown that dreams cannot be limited to dreams of sex and violence, as Freud suggested. Today there are more than 150 scales for assessing dreams according to various parameters.
The most proven and widely used is the Hall & Van de Castle scale.
In the 1940s, psychologist Calvin Hall analyzed thousands of written dream reports and developed empirical categories that he systematically measured in those reports. Later, with the help of fellow psychologist Robert Van de Castle, he expanded, refined and formalized the categorization published in their joint book, Content Analysis of Dreams.
In the following years, the system became the benchmark for quantitative dream analysis, thanks in part to its objective approach, which promotes reproducibility and high reliability.
Hall-Van de Castle's Ultimate Dream Coding System consists of 10 categories (and their subcategories) of elements that appear in dreams, along with detailed rules for recognizing and measuring these elements from written records.

Ten categories:

1. Characters: people, animals and other figures depicted in a dream.
2. Interactions: Social interactions between characters (such as kissing).
3. Emotions: The emotions experienced by the characters or that represent a situation (for example, sadness).
4. Actions: The physical actions performed by the characters and sensory sensations (such as smell).
5. Aspiration: The successes and failures of the characters in performing their activities.
6. (Not) luck: The luck and misfortune that happen to the characters, possibly as a result of their actions.
7. Settings and objects: physical environment or objects present in the scene (for example, outdoors, weapons).
8. Descriptive elements: attributes and qualities of objects, people and actions (for example, color, size, speed).
9. Eating and eating: the presence of food or food intake.
10. Elements from the past: Characters or elements belonging to the dreamer's past (for example, the younger self).

In practice, not all of these categories have the same meaning in reflecting the psychopathological aspects of the dream content. The three categories are usually more valuable and informative than all the others combined.

1. Characters (for example, a depressed man, a friendly woman, a cute dog).
2. Interactions. A plot in which characters interact with each other (for example, a depressed person stroking a dog).
3. Emotions. A process that reflects various affective states (for example, a depressed man now feels safe and relaxed).

Modern dream research
Dream research is usually complicated by the time-consuming manual annotation of text. Dream content analysis scales are difficult to encode and require human intervention.
To address this problem, Alessandro Fogli of the University of Rome and colleagues in 2020 developed a tool that automatically evaluates dream reports using the widely used Hall and Van de Castle dream analysis scale.
They used an adaptive computer program to analyze the content of dreams described in more than 24,000 reports contained in two national databases.
Based on the connotation of certain concepts and their meanings, the algorithm was able to identify and analyze three key features in the content of dreams.
“Until now, most attempts at automated dream analysis have been limited to identifying the emotions that turned into dreams,” the scientists explained. "Other aspects of dream analysis, in particular the characters that appear in them, and the nature of their interaction, were left without attention." The common Hall-Van de Castle scale of analysis takes into account these aspects of dreams.
A computer system developed by Foley and his colleagues, sentence by sentence, examines dream descriptions and, based on choice of words, grammar and context, discovers who the protagonists are - man or woman, living people or ghosts (fantastic creatures). Then, based on the verbs used, the algorithm determines whether the nature of interactions and actions is friendly, aggressive or sexual. To do this, the program evaluated the emotional coloring of the words used in the descriptions. Based on a special emotional vocabulary, the program classified the content of dreams according to the main feelings - anger, fear, tension, trust, surprise, sadness, friendship and disgust.
To test the reliability of their instrument, the scientists one piece of their study with findings from other psychologists and sleep researchers compared. “Our results show that this technology can detect and analyze important aspects of sleep,” Foley said.

Dream Continuity Hypothesis and Night Therapist Theory
Scientists found that their analysis of the content of dreams contained indications of the correctness of the "continuity hypothesis of dreams" (continuity hypothesis of dreams). She claims that most dreams are an extension of what happens in everyday life. For example, anxiety in life leads to dreams with negative affect and vice versa. Thus, in a dream, people work through and live through everyday experiences. “Many factors determine our everyday life, including gender, stage of life, deep feelings and experience of everyday violence,” the scientists explain.
Regardless of a person's daily experience, 80% of dreams are associated with various forms of negative emotions. This significant presence of negative emotions is explained by what scientists have called the nocturnal therapist theory. According to this theory, dreams can be viewed as a "night therapist" who helps the dreamer to identify worries and fears. The "night therapist" has also been found to help find innovative solutions to problems: in dreams, the mind tries to solve a problem by looking at it from an unusual perspective.
If the continuity hypothesis is correct, then the dreams of women, for example, should be different from those of men, adolescent dreams - from those of adults, and the dreams of war veterans - from the dreams of people who have never been involved in military affairs. This is what Alessandro Foley and his colleagues have verified.
In total, they put forward five hypotheses (H1-H5):

1. Gender
Cultural and psychological studies have repeatedly shown that aggressive behavior in women is less common and less intense than in men. These differences can be the result of evolutionary as well as social, cultural and economic factors. In addition, the ability to express emotions, which has been shown to relieve stress and improve well-being, is another factor that influences aggressiveness. This ability is more developed in women than in men. For example, girlfriends tend to talk about their emotions, while male friends are more likely to suppress them. As a result, men do not receive emotional support from each other, but rather “do something” together (golf, skiing, drinking). In 2007, a manual inspection of a small corpus of dreams did show that, unlike women, "Men often dream of physical aggression."

H1. Women's dreams are characterized by emotions rather than interactions around activities and a limited level of aggression.

2. Adolescence
When children reach adolescence, their emotional resilience is put to the test. Social anxiety increases due to various factors, including new social experiences, increased conflicts with parents, and hormonal changes. The experience of negative emotions in adolescents was systematically recorded for both sexes, especially for women. Girls between the ages of 10 and 14 usually experience an initial decline in emotional stability, followed by an increase as they reach adolescence and begin to have sexual intercourse. The second hypothesis based on the theory of continuity of dreams:

H2. Adolescent dreams are characterized by negative emotions followed by sexual interaction in early adulthood.

3. War
About 17% of American soldiers returning from Iraq and 11% of those returning from Afghanistan suffered from PTSD (that is, an anxiety disorder caused by very stressful, frightening, or disturbing events). So the third hypothesis:

H3. The dreams of a war veteran are characterized by negative emotions and aggression. Previously, this hypothesis was confirmed among Vietnam veterans: they often had dreams associated with feelings of guilt and violence.

4. Blindness
The daily life of blind people is comparable to the daily life of people in general, but there are two major exceptions. First, blind people may need guardians, which are often women, and therefore the continuity hypothesis suggests that guardians will be present in blind people's dream reports. Secondly, the sensory perception of blind people, as a rule, is enhanced by the increased sensitivity of tactile, acoustic and olfactory receptors. This sensitivity affects the inner workings of the imagination so strongly that previous research has shown that blind people present more “unreal” images than sighted people. This is consistent with the thesis that there is a conceptual connection between perception and sensory imagination. Based on these elements, the fourth hypothesis is:

H4. The dreams of blind people contain more imaginary characters and aspects associated with their real guardians (for example, they portray women).

5. Everyday aggression
The violent crime rate in the United States was significant in the 1960s, then steadily declined and continues to decline today. Therefore, the fifth and final hypothesis is this:

H5. Dreams during social aggression (in the 1960s) are characterized by aggression.

This latest hypothesis was tested during the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. The attacks sparked a sharp increase in the number of people in the United States who dreamed of explosions, deaths and fires. Thus, not only experiencing a stressful event, but also hearing about it can lead to very traumatic dreams.

The following sets of dream reports were used for the analysis:

1. "Installed blindness." A set of 400 dreams told by people who have lost their sight since birth or within 20 years.
2. War Veteran Set. A set of 600 dream reports recorded from 1971 to 2017 by a Vietnam War veteran who went through a very intense and traumatic experience of the conflict.
3. There are no conditions. A set of 23,000 reports obtained by subtracting from the complete set of all reports in the blindness and war veteran set. This “unconditional set” included only those people for whom no apparent pathology was recorded based on the dreamer briefs appended to most dream reports. Given its considerable size, this set made it possible to compare the dreams of people with special conditions to those of people in the general population.
4. Izzy's set. A collection of over 4,300 dream reports recorded by a passionate dream-collecting young woman, Izzy, over a period of 13 years from 12 to 25.
5. Normative set. A set of 1,000 dream reports hand-coded by Hall and Van de Castle themselves in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Two hundred American university students (100 men and 100 women) in Cleveland, Ohio were asked to record five dreams each. Normative values in dream study are usually based on this set.
6. Annotated set. A collection of 1,700 dream reports from 50 people (21 women, 25 men and four unknowns), collected over four decades on various campuses. A panel of experts coded all dream reports using the Hall-Van de Castle system.

The research results are as follows.

1. H1. The dreams of men and women are actually different in basic ways. “Unlike women, men had more markers of aggression and, as a result, more negative emotions. But women more often talked about the positive feelings and friendly interactions of the characters in the dream. "For Foley and his team, this broadly reflects the average day-to-day experience of both genders:“ As in real life, women tend to be friendlier and less aggressive than men.
2. H2. Dreams of adolescents more often reflect their transition from childhood to maturity: "As a teenager, Izzy experienced many negative emotions in a dream, later sexual interactions came to the fore," scientists cited a specific example.
3. H3. For the war veteran, reports contained more aggression, more masculine characters, and fewer sexual interactions than reports from non-combatants, which is consistent with the third hypothesis. However, given that these results are based on only one subject, the authors cannot say that this hypothesis has been confirmed.
4. H4. Blind people's accounts tended to contain more female and imaginary characters, and this is consistent with the H4 hypothesis. In addition, these reports had significantly fewer episodes of aggression and decreased prevalence of negative emotions.
5. H5. Among all dreamers from 1960 to 2000, the level of aggression in dream reporting was highest in the 1960s and then steadily declined, in line with official statistics on violent crime in the United States.

These tendencies were not obvious when analyzing individual descriptions, but when examining a large number of dream stories, they were easier to identify and quantify. The large database made it easier to identify such aspects, the scientists explained.
Based on their research, the scientists that the hypothesis of the continuation of everyday experience in dreams is confirmed: "Our results are consistent with the idea that there is continuity between what a person actually experiences and what he dreams."

So, a computer analysis of more than 24,000 dream descriptions confirmed the assumption that in a dream, people mainly work through their impressions received in the waking state, that is, the experience of everyday life. In the dreams of men, negative emotions and aggressive actions are more often present than in the dreams of women. But the dreams of adolescents reflect their transition into adulthood.

Sources:

1. Was verraten unsere Träume?
2. Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports

 

[Lord777]

Why dream big?​

People often go to different extremes. They lie on the couch for years and indulge in daydreams. Others, on the contrary, became "truly grown-ups" and stopped dreaming altogether. They live in a cruel reality that they have invented and try to impose this reality on the people around them.
Which is better, you ask? I will answer. Both the first and second options are bad.
In the first case, a person is attached to his far-fetched illusions and does nothing in his life, lives life in his fantasies and reflections. In the second case, the person also does not shine, because he is afraid or is simply lazy to look through a very low fence that protects his territory and see how much interesting there is for him. Well, here, you can only advise one thing, develop imagination and fantasy, there is nothing more to add here. And for those who do nothing, the advice is to stop reading and reflecting, but roll up your sleeves and take real steps.
Now let's look at the next option. You really want to achieve something in life, even make some attempts to implement your plan, but everything is in vain. You simply don't have enough energy to get things done, or it's hard to even lift your butt off the warm couch. What is the problem here? The answer is obvious. You don't have enough energy to act. And you may even really want to achieve your goal, but you are not able to take even a small step.
Look closely at the picture.
Is it clearing up a bit already? The universe is abundant and it costs nothing to give you so much energy that you can become a person no less bright than Einstein, Osho or, for example, Caesar.
But the point is that this energy cannot be stored in you and never belongs to you. All energy belongs only to the Universe. That is, it is impossible to accumulate a large amount of energy with special practices or techniques. You can only do so that your channels are cleared, and you could pass more energy through you. But that's not all. Even if you become like a powerful pipeline for pumping energy, you still need to know exactly where and why you will spend it. That is, you will never be energetic and cheerful if you do not strive for anything.
The Universe always gives you exactly as much energy as you need to achieve your goals (as shown in the picture). The larger, brighter and larger the goal, the more energy will be allocated to you (of course, if you are ready to accept it).
If you don't dream of anything, you don't want anything in life, you accordingly don't have energy, because you simply don't need it. Conversely, the more global your goals are, the more energy is allocated to you. But here you do not need to go to the other extreme and set goals for yourself that you simply do not believe in the realization of. Then you will simply be disappointed in yourself and you will have one more reason to suffer and cry for your pleasure.
I am often asked questions about what to do when I don't feel like doing anything. Or when there are specific goals, but there is no strength to achieve them. For the first, I answer like this. If you don't want to do anything, you need to understand yourself, remember your childhood dreams and desires, see how you can transform them into today's adult life and immediately do it. First, doing what you love will give you extra energy. Secondly, you will have specific goals, for the realization of which you will also begin to receive energy.
And if there are already clear goals, but a person cannot force himself to act, then here it is already necessary to work with the goals themselves. The first reason is that the goals are not yours, but imposed on you from the outside. This is logical, if you don't want to do it, then the soul resists, since the soul cannot be deceived (you always have enough energy to go to the kitchen and take something tasty to eat in the fridge, or go to the chef for a salary). Therefore, you need to look for your goals by asking the right questions and performing special exercises.
The second reason is your goals, but you have not drawn them clearly enough for yourself. That is, you want something, but it is not clear exactly what. The goals are, as it were, in a fog. Here, too, you need to perform special exercises to clarify your goals, to pump them up. That is, as a result of these exercises, you should be so burning with your goals. But here another problem may arise. You will be engaged in your goals around the clock, seven days a week, and your family will gradually begin to worry about your condition. But that's okay. When you go to your goals, you can work day and night and not rest at all. As Celentano said in the wonderful film “The Taming of the Shrew”: “They get tired when they do what they don't like. And I do my favorite thing and never get tired."

Let's reiterate the most important points:
1. Energy does not appear just like that. She always appears for something, to achieve a certain goal.
2. The more global your dream / goal, the more energy you will receive.
3. The dream should be big, but real for you. You must believe in its implementation. If you do not believe in it, you will not receive energy.
4. Energy cannot be stored. You can only create such conditions when you can always get it in the right amount.
5. If you don't want to do anything, remember your childhood fun and transform it into an adult activity.
6. If the goal is not inspiring, then it is either not yours, or not sufficiently thought out and formulated.
In principle, all the basic information has already been said here. As a conclusion: your main goal is to come up with such dreams and formulate them into goals so that they do not just inspire you, but make you tremble at the thought of them. And then you will not need to force yourself to do something or motivate something else. It won't be a problem anymore. On the contrary, you will sometimes have to restrain yourself in order to cool your ardor a little.
I wish you to dream of things that inspire you and achieve your goals easily.
Author: psychologist, coach, trainer Alexander Konelsky