Dreams 3

Contemporary Studies

Calvin Hall (Director of Institute of Dream Research) wrote the book on dreams that I like best of all. He studied tens of thousands of dreams produced by thousands of dreamers. I believe he was the one who coined the term “REM” sleep. (This book is currently out of print, but used copies may be purchased from Amazon.com for one cent each. Unfortunately, there is a $6 mailing charge per book.)

In Hall’s studies, volunteers were fitted to an Electro-encephala-cardiogram and studied during the night. Hall reports that a person first falls into a deep sleep, during which they may make large body movements. Then, they settle down, as movie goers do as a film is about to start. Then they have rapid eye movements, which may last for only a two or three seconds or may be considerably longer. Persons awakened during this REM sleep can almost always recount dreams, persons awakened during the deep sleep, cannot. These REM sleeps occur three or four times a night.  Others who have studied dreams in this fashion report similar happenings.

When people are awakened at the start of REM sleep, so that they have none during the night, they become nervous and irritable within a day or two.  Persons awakened the same amount of time during the deep sleep do not have these symptoms. Researchers believe this is because we solve many small problems and concerns during our dreams.

Hall pointed out that dreams are our own creation: we are the creators, directors, actors. Like Jung, Hall believes a series of dreams is more important and easier to interpret than a single dream. In fact, he claims that every person will have every type of dream: retiring people will have dreams in which they are aggressive and aggressive people will have dreams in which they are retiring; homosexuals will have heterosexual dreams and heterosexuals will have homosexual dreams, but the largest number of dreams will portray the dreamer as he normally is. Thus a heterosexual will have numerous heterosexual dreams and few homosexual dreams. This is why dream series are so much more important than individual dreams, which may portray the dreamer in a different way and behavior than would be normal for him.

In interpreting dreams Hall says we must consider the settings, characters, actions and emotions.

            Settings are most often taken from every day life (men outdoors, women indoors, prisons indicate restriction and policemen authority). It is only rarely that people dream of exotic places or, interestingly enough, of their work place.  Home and recreational places are the usual locations of dreams.

Personnel: Almost always a dream includes the dreamer and usually family and friends (children dream about parents while parents dream about children).  A dream series will portray what we think of the people in the dreams.

Dream actions: In dreams a dreamer can be active or passive, actor or onlooker, successful or failure. The actions of the dreamer in the dreams give an indication of how he sees himself and his normal method of behaving in life situations.

Emotions: Dreams are unpleasant more often than pleasant.  

Characters of the dream people tell what we think of them and ourselves, but remember, these dream opinions are not necessarily true. They are important, however, in that what we think of ourselves often determines how we behave in waking life.

Hall says that “In treating a series of dreams, the individual dreams are compared with one another and put together much as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle.” When all dreams are assembled, an analyst can gain picture of individual as he sees himself and others.

I believe in a sub-conscious, as suggested by Jung and Hall, which contains much that we haven’t noticed during the day or “forgotten” and probably some things we don’t wish to remember such as occurrences in combat.  When asked to interpret a dream, I always asked what happened the day before the dream, whom the characters remind the person of and what is going on in the dreamer’s life at the time. From these, most dreams can be interpreted.

I believe symbols belong to dreamer.  A dream I never understood was one in which a girl dreamed she was swimming up a long canal in a cave until she came to a nice pool of water, where she swam contentedly. It was years before that dream made any sense to me and then only during all of the abortion arguments. Were she to tell be the dream today, I would ask her if there was anything worrying her or frightening her in her life: what safer place to return to than the womb?

A common dream among senior girls at our college was one of being blown by wind and being unable to control where they were going. (Between the mail room and the girls’ dorm were two large buildings. A strong wind was frequent between the two.) Consider this. These girls had spent their entire lives in places where they were told what to do: in childhood and school and always had the advice and support of responsible adults. Now, about to graduate, they were to decide for themselves where and how to live and work. Scary isn’t it? Our graduating boys never reported such wind dreams to me but often reported being in cars that they couldn’t control.            

I also believe that only the dreamer can interpret a dream, but can be helped. I may think I know what a dream means, but the dreamer knows.

I believe that during sleep the mind can, when cleared of all the little distractions and necessary work during the day:

                        Express wishes and

Express and solve concerns

Which is why when people are not permitted to dream they become restless and irritable as those wishes and concerns continue to trouble them.

Dreams 2

Carl Jung and Erich Fromm

Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud and an important figure in psychology was President of the Psychoanalytic society, started by Freud. He disagreed with Freud concerning the emphasis on sexuality in dreams. Jung accepted that dreams could represent repressed sexual or hostile acts as Freud believed, but argued that it was not always true. Jung pointed out that during day we experience thousands of things we don’t consider at the time because we are occupied with the normal tasks of daily life. At night, when we are not occupied by more immediate tasks, dreams may consolidate events not attended to during the day.  Thus, responding to visual stimuli and physical experiences we ignore during day, dreams could be predictive – not prophetic, predictive - of future events.

One of his examples was of an influential business man who dreamed that he was driving a train through the mountains at ever increasing speeds, up and down and around curves until he went off the tracks and crashed. Some months later, the man’s business failed from too many speculative investments. Jung argued that the man recognized, in his dream, the recklessness of his business ventures, which he overlooked in the bustle of daily life, and that the dream predicted his business failure.       

Jung identified three different types of symbols in our dreams: archetypes, national symbols and individual symbols. Archetypes are international symbols, such as “mother” who is a loving and giving person in all societies. National symbols include objects such as the American flag or the English queen. Individual symbols are things we have experienced as individuals which come to hold meanings for us that are not common to many.

The only example of an individual symbol, for me, that I could recall involved the game of “hide and seek.” Everyone present at my talk agreed that the game represented a fun activity. Then I told of asking a friend, Sullivan, who was one of seven men from K Company able to walk off of Outpost Harry the morning after the first night of attacks on that hill, what his job had been. He replied, “machine gunner.” When I asked why he was alive, he replied, “My gun jammed so I played hide and seek all night.” I knew what he meant. In my squad, when we were sent out on a “fight” patrol it was common to be told, “We are playing hide and seek tonight.” It meant we would be hunting an enemy who would be hunting us. Patrols were exciting, but not pleasant.  Hide and seek has a different meaning for me than for most people.

Jung also said that only the dreamer can interpret his dream, but that he can be helped by analysis. However, if the dreamer disagrees with the analyst, the analyst is wrong. A nice example of this occurred during my talk. One lady asked about “nude” dreams. I replied that they were common among people, such as preachers and politicians, who exposed their own beliefs in talking to groups, in effect taking off their “clothes” before an audience. On the other hand, professors such as I, who taught classes in statistics and testing, do not expose themselves during their classes and rarely have such dreams. Another lady spoke up and said that she had dreams where she was nude and went to work, walked in and sat at her desk without any concern at all. She was never embarrassed by her nudity in her dream. After the lecture, she told me that she typically had these on nights when she hadn’t done laundry and didn’t have clean clothes for work the next day! Amateur analysts would have interpreted her dreams as typical dreams of exposing some secretive part of herself, instead it was a dream based on her individual knowledge that she didn’t have anything to wear to work the next day.

In understanding dreams, you must remember the language of dreams is not the language of our waking life. In waking life we think with words: at night we think in pictures. Thus in life we may call a person a pig, but in the dream we would see a pig: acting as the person does.

Erich Fromm discusses this in “The Forgotten Language.” He also points out that during the day, we obey the laws of time and space, but in dreams we don’t. During day, we can say, “I am like my father.” But we know we can’t BE our father: in a dream, we can. Similarly, during our waking life we know that if something happened last year, it cannot be happening now. But in a dream, it can be happening now. We can even split ourselves in two. I had a nice example of this given me by a senior student.

An attractive blond coed told me, in private, that she dreamed she was floating in the air and looked down upon herself having sex with a young man she was dating. We discussed this and she agreed that she disapproved of what she was doing. This ended a happy experience for one young man. A couple years later, crossing the floor during half time in a basketball game, she came running up to me and gave me a big hug, then turned and introduced me to her fiancé, a seminary student.  It is always nice to get a hug from an attractive young woman, but not in front of two thousand students, faculty and administrators in a school where you are a professor who is already distrusted by the administration.

Much of Fromm’s book, “The Forgotten Language” is devoted to the manner in which different civilizations and tribal groups have interpreted and responded to dreams. While interesting reading – to me – much of it is not directly relevant to dream interpretation – at least as we now understand it.

More on dreams later.