The Science of Dream Interpretation

Everyone sleeps and everyone dreams, but what exactly causes us to dream? Are dreams a method of entering our subconscious, or are they simply a review of what happens in our everyday lives? Why do we have dreams? What do they mean? Although there are many theories as to why we dream and what our dreams may signify, there are only three major theories: the psychological theory, the biological theory (or activation synthesis theory) , and the cognitive theory.

You are helping build a house for charity with a rather large group, including your best friend from high school. You live in California and the weather is beautiful when suddenly somebody opens up their lunch bag and inside is a bomb! You run and hit the ground, covering your head as you hear the bomb go off. You notice you are bleeding and you are not exactly sure where the blood is coming from (bluesforallah).

What could this dream possibly mean? Has the dreamer suffered a traumatic event in their life, as the cognitive theory would argue? Or is it possibly their subconscious wishing such an event would never occur in reality, as the psychological theory would say? Perhaps it is as the biological theory states: it was simply a casual dream. The differences in mental action among the different stages of sleep and dreams have been one of the most popular topics among psychological research (Kuklick).

It was directly before the First World War that Sigmund Freud seemed to have become interested in mass psychology (The Killing of the Father: The Background of Freud's Group Psychology). As Sigmund Freud has written in book, The Interpretation of Dreams, "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind" (The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus). Freud believed that our fears, desires, and emotions make themselves recognized through dreams, and that they are simply about wish-fulfillment, including negative dreams, which signify events you do not wish to happen. He believed that dreams were encrypted in specific codes since they did not 'speak' verbal language (Mendham).

"To Freud, then, all forms of deviant behavior-any form of sexuality other than conventional adult heterosexuality, and diverse psychological disorders represented some departure from the orderly process of individual development, which should recapitulate the historical process of human evolution, for the structure of the unconscious mind has been shaped by this experience (Kuklick)."

Freud's major method for investigating dreams was free relationship. The dreamer is encouraged to look at the thoughts and emotions a dream generates rather than what it shows (Mendham). He believed dreaming was not a wish within the unconscious, but a form of protection of the unconscious from the disruptive results during sleep. He believed that even our most devilish wishes were transformed into what seemed like harmless metaphors (Dream Machine: End of a Fantasy?). For example, if a person has a dream involving birds, perhaps that image reminds them of when they used to feed the birds as a child with their mother, which will remind them of their mother, which then may remind them of a tragic divorce and so on. Freud looked at each individual module of the dream and then attempt to bring all ingredients together to form a final recipe (Mendham). Dreams consist of transforming conceptions into images, and there are many methods of how this happens. Concepts about the world may bring to mind what the dreamer feels the world's situation is. These are often expressed by the setting of the dream. For example, if the dreamer feels that the world is a cold place, they may have a setting of a cold climate. Concepts of self believe that dreams are mirrors that reflect on the self-conceptions of the dreamer, and that they may be give out in several dreams rather than one. Concepts of other people tend to be about the true feelings of what the dreamer feels about other people, from family to co-workers. These dreams could reflect what a person may fear about a particular person, such as a business manager or boss. What kinds of formations are found in dreams? Nobody knows, and there are perhaps thousands of possibilities, but the main concepts include: self, other people, the world, and problems and conflicts. Dreams may also consist of obstacles in the dreamer's life, but it is only one dependable source of information and is useful because it can affect the dreamer. If a boy dreams he becomes involved in a serious car wreck, he will be much more careful when driving (Hall).

Psychiatrists who believe in the biological theory say that the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, and that dreams help solve them (Crisp). They believe dreams identify with physiological instead of psychological components as the main force behind dreaming (Dream Machine: End of a Fantasy?). An example would be of a man climbing a cliff who slips accidentally. He then may dream of clasping psychiatrists who believe in the biological theory say that the function of dreams is that by reproducing difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences, and that dreams help solve them for a branch. They believe dreams make us relive areas of anxiety or difficult experience (Crisp). Psychiatrists that believe in this theory argue that dreams are physiologically motivated. They believe they are a function of REM commotion in the brain. During this stage of sleep, the brain, although we are unaware of it, is highly active. According to these psychiatrists, the brain tries to make sense of all the casual activity, thus creating a dream (Kuther). They also believe that dreams arrive in "90-second bursts", thus explaining why we forget 95% of our dreams along with increased REM activity. According to these psychiatrists, humans have only a limited amount of storage capacity and we use dreams to remove unnecessary information (THEORIES OF THE FUNCTIONS OF DREAMS: Biological vs. Psychological). Two psychiatrists, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, came up with a theory that refused to believe that dreams have meaning or are in any way related to the dreamer's environment; however, some psychiatrists believe that not all dreams are completely random since they are sometimes repeated over a period of a few nights (Activation synthesis theory).

Psychiatrists that support the cognitive theory argue that dreams are a form of processing information in which we go through all knowledge learned throughout the day. "From the cognitive perspective, dreams help us to solve problems, work with information, and think" (Kuther).

"By analyzing reports collected during relaxed wakefulness in an under-stimulated environment, they found that when the cortex is sufficiently activated to support cognitive processing and the environment provides few stimuli of significance, thought and imagery produced under these conditions have characteristics similar to those of dreaming. These findings have led them to hypothesize that spontaneous mental production, as far as its formal organization and amount of contents are concerned, is dependent on and constrained by both cortical activation and perceptual thresholds. Cortical activation would be responsible for the levels of functioning of the cognitive system, and perceptual threshold levels would determine the amount of environmental stimulation which disrupts the stream of thought and imagery (Cicogna)."

The results of mental productions in sleep and relaxed wakefulness in a natural environment support the hypothesis of the existence of a unitary cognitive system. Previous researches investigated mnemonic essentials activated during dreaming within the different sleep stages to learn whether they differed (Cicogna).

"Major findings were as follows: 1. Associations referring to discrete episodic memories are more frequent in the sleep onset NREM condition than in the REM condition. 2. When episodic memory associations are classified by their temporal reference, residues from the preceding day are more frequent in the sleep onset than in the REM condition, whereas memories of events occurring in the year before the dream day are more frequent in the REM than in the sleep onset condition. 3. Associations to initial sleep onset reports, to later sleep onset reports and to mid-night NREM. Stage 2 reports are comparable to one another (and different from associations to REM reports) in containing a relatively high level of episodic associations and a relatively low level of semantic associations, suggesting that the mnemonic activation is stage dependent. However, day residues were more frequent in associations to initial sleep onset reports than in associations to other (later) NREM reports or to REM reports (Cicogna)."

These findings about mental productions in sleep support the hypothesis of the cognitive theory (Cicogna). Although none of these theories have been fully proven, these theories are considered to be the "main dream theories" in psychology today. As this topic continues to be one of the most popular among psychiatrists, it seems to be a topic whose mystery will never be solved.

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