Tag: dreaming

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Bizarreness, Nightmares, and Play

The bizarre contents of dreaming can easily seem like the products of mental deficiency. “Children of an idle brain” is what Mercutio calls them in Romeo & Juliet (I.iv.102). Many scientists today essentially agree with Mercutio that the weird absurdities of dreams are evidence of diminished cognitive functioning during sleep.

But what if the “bizarreness” of dreaming is a sign of health and not disorder? What if, in some conditions at least, the increasing weirdness and unpredictability of dream content heralds genuine healing from serious psychological distress?

At the recent annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Robert Hoss and Alwin Wagener analyzed a 45-year long series of PTSD nightmares from an American veteran of the Vietnam War. They found that over time, as the veteran healed from his psychological wounds, his nightmares included fewer direct or literal references to wartime violence and more references to other kinds of content, with a rising frequency of metaphorical and symbolic content. In other words, his nightmares gradually became dreamier. Instead of unrelenting graphic repetitions of the traumatizing event, he now experienced dreams involving new characters, settings, scenarios, and emotions.

This fits well with the findings of Harry Wilmer and others that long-term recovery from PTSD corresponds with changes in the frequency and contents of trauma-related nightmares. Wilmer observed that, “the emergence of an ordinary nightmare after prolonged recurrent reliving of the exact trauma in dreams is a healing process… It is the psyche’s attempt at healing.” (1996, 89)

It remains unclear which comes first, the shifts in dreaming or the psychological healing. But their close connection suggests an underlying process by which increasing dreaminess signals a loosening of the trauma’s grip and a return to the natural variability and freedom of dreaming experience.

This process also accords well with the theory that dreaming is a kind of play, the play of the imagination in sleep. Typical PTSD nightmares can be seen as the antithesis of play. Fixed in content and inescapable in their repetition, they are symptoms of an imagination paralyzed by the harsh reality of the trauma. But with time and the support of caring others a more playful spirit returns, bringing a renewed experiential awareness of creative freedom and the capacity to grow in the future.

A key implication for therapists is the value of monitoring changes in nightmare frequency and content as a potentially helpful window into the healing process. Those who already have active practices in play therapy or art therapy may find this insight especially congenial to their efforts, but any therapist who works with trauma can benefit from more attention to the vicissitudes and playful dynamics of dreaming.

 

Note: This post first appeared in Psychology Today on June 14, 2024.

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Dreaming as Play and as Mind-Wandering

The neuroscience of dreams has shifted in recent years toward the idea that dreaming can be conceived as a kind of mind-wandering in sleep. According to current evidence, mind-wandering (also known as day-dreaming, or drifting thought) is a product of the “default mode network,” a system of neural regions that remains active in the absence of external stimulus or focused thought. During sleep this same system of neural regions becomes active, helping to generate the experience of dreaming.

Two recent books by esteemed researchers make this argument about the connection between dreams and mind-wandering: When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, by Antonio Zadra & Robert Stickgold, and The Emergence of Dreaming: Mind-Wandering, Embodied Simulation, and the Default Network, by G. William Domhoff. When scientists of the stature of Domhoff, Stickgold, and Zadra reach a common conclusion, it’s worth taking the idea very seriously.

Mind-Wandering and Play

However, the valuable implications of this idea remain obscure when expressed in research terminology. I suggest a more helpful framework is provided by the concept of play. Mind-wandering is, in this view, the mind at play. And dreaming is the play of the mind while asleep. Released from external demands and left to its own devices, whether awake or asleep, the mind becomes active in a more spontaneous, imaginative, emotionally variable, and freely associative mode. If this is not identical to mind-wandering, it at least shares so many core features with play that we should consider the benefits that come from further studying this connection.

The Play of Animals

There is a rich scientific literature on play behaviors in many animal species, all of which can provide dream researchers with valuable evidence, surprising insights, and a stronger grounding in the evolution of our own species. According to comparative zoologists, play in animals is centrally involved in learning and practicing survival-related skills, especially at the younger stages of life and especially for species who live in complex social groups. These features of play correlate very closely with prominent features of dreaming, not excluding the widespread occurrence of terrifying dreams of fear and vulnerability, which seem at first sight to be entirely unplayful. However, the most common form of play in the animal kingdom is play-fighting, which helps to account for the prevalence, and even value, of nightmares in healthy human development. Our fundamentally playful dreams include a great deal of the fighting kinds of play. Although distressing in the short-term, such dreams have the beneficial long-term effect of priming our waking awareness to be vigilant toward similar threats in the waking world.

The Science of Creativity

How does the mind generate novel ideas in art, science, technology, and daily life? Research on mind-wandering is clearly relevant to this important question, insofar as the creative process seems to depend on a moment of unforced openness to serendipity, to a flow of spontaneous images, feelings, and ideas emerging from the unconscious mind. These moments of openness to the unconscious regularly occur in dreaming while asleep, which is why dreams have always been considered a source of creative inspiration.  These moments also occur in playful activities while we are awake, alone or with others, when our focused attention is temporarily suspended and the curious explorations of the wandering mind can yield unexpected insights and discoveries.

Psychotherapeutic Dialogue

The connection between play, dreaming, and mind-wandering has practical relevance for clinicians and caregivers who work in play therapy, art therapy, or any therapeutic approach in which an open dialogue is part of the healing process. Sigmund Freud was one of the first to recognize the therapeutic value of “free association” as a technique of encouraging clients to say whatever spontaneously comes into their minds, as a way of eluding the critical judgment of consciousness and honestly expressing their unconscious feelings. Psychotherapy in this sense has the quality of shared mind-wandering. It creates a safe, playful space in which the clients can, with their therapist as a companion, freely explore questions and conflicts relating to important concerns in their life.

Philosophy

This might sound like more of a stretch, but research on mind-wandering, if slightly reconceived, can also help shift the philosophy of dreaming toward a deeper appreciation for what we experience during dreams. The concept of play is central to Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), a key text for the early German Romantics which suggested that play enables us to achieve a higher union of the mutually opposing needs of our mind and body, intellect and desire, reason and sensation. “Man plays only when he is a man in the full sense of the word,” Schiller stated, “and he is only a complete man when he plays.” If dreaming is indeed a legitimate form of play, we can draw on the reflections of Schiller and his colleagues to affirm the philosophical significance of both dreaming at night and mind-wandering during the day as paths toward a more fully integrated and actualized sense of self.

 

Note: this post originally appeared in Psychology Today on July 30, 2024

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Freud, Jung, and AI-generated Dream Interpretation

This is a post I recently wrote about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the practice of dream interpretation.  In coordination with the team at the Elsewhere.to dream journaling app–Dan Kennedy, Gez Quinn, and Sheldon Juncker–we have been experimenting with “Freudian” and “Jungian” modes of interpretation, and the results are very encouraging. Maybe more than encouraging… I don’t highlight this in the post, but the AI interpretation in “Jungian” mode used the phrase “confrontation with the unconscious,” which was not part of the prompting text for the AI. In other words, the AI seems to have identified this phrase as a vital one in Jungian psychology (it’s the title of the pivotal chapter 6 of his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections) and, without any direct guidance, used it accurately and appropriately in an interpretation . I might even suspect a sly irony in using this phrase in reference to a dream of Freud’s, but that might be too much…

 

Freud and Jung Sharing Their Dreams: An AI Revival

New technologies are transforming the practice of dream interpretation.

In 1909, on their way by steam ship to give lectures at Clark University in the United States, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung passed the time by sharing and interpreting each other’s dreams. This was a truly a peak moment in the history of dreaming—yet a fleeting moment, too. Soon afterward, their disagreements about psychoanalytic theory worsened, and they finally broke off all relations with each other.

Ever since, we have been left to wonder… What if these two giants of twentieth-century psychology had continued sharing their dreams? What if, instead of becoming estranged rivals, they had collaborated in developing a meta-method that deployed each of their interpretation systems in a flexible yet integrated practice?

An answer to these questions is suddenly coming into focus, thanks to emerging uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in the study of dreams. It is now possible for a carefully trained AI system to generate distinctly Freudian and Jungian interpretations of a dream. We can thus revive the spirit of their epic 1909 dream-sharing journey by offering one of their (already-published) dreams for interpretation by the other and reflecting on the interplay of their dual perspectives.

Freud would likely be curious about the dream Jung reports in chapter 5 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which occurred just before their falling out. Set in a bustling Italian city, the dream centers on the anomalous presence of a medieval knight. Jung is shocked at the sight–“suddenly to see in a modern city, during the noonday rush hour, a crusader coming toward me”—especially because Jung realizes only he can see the knight, who is invisible to everyone else. Jung said the dream anticipated his turn away from Freud and towards a more meaningful search for higher truths, comparable to the Grail Quest.

How might Freud interpret this dream? Using an AI system crafted with the developers at the Elsewhere dream journaling app, where I am an unpaid research advisor, we can apply a “Freudian mode” of interpretation to Jung’s dream. I will quote the first and last few sentences of the AI response:

“The dreamer’s description of a knight in full armor walking through an Italian city suggests a possible egocentric wish. The knight, a figure associated with power, honor, and bravery, might symbolize the dreamer’s desire for recognition and admiration. The fact that the knight is visible only to the dreamer could indicate a feeling of uniqueness or a wish to stand out from the crowd… This dream seems to primarily reflect the dreamer’s egocentric wishes and possibly repressed sexual and aggressive desires. The dreamer might be yearning for recognition and admiration, while also grappling with fears of being overlooked or ignored. The knight in armor could symbolize these conflicting desires and fears.”

This may not be the most profound reading of the dream, but it is easily recognizable as a Freudian approach, with clear connections to psychoanalytic theory. It also happens to be consistent with biographical information about Freud’s view of Jung after the split—as a grandiose savior bent on turning psychology into religion.

Jung, in turn, might want to explore a vivid childhood nightmare that Freud mentions off-handedly near the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. It’s a short dream of his mother, “with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with birds’ beaks and laid upon the bed. I awoke in tears and screaming.”  The bird figures referred to strange illustrations from an old family Bible. Freud offers the dream as a self-evident example of an anxiety dream rooted in a sexual wish (i.e., an Oedipal desire for the mother).

How might Jung have interpreted this dream? Using the same AI system in its “Jungian mode,” the interpretation begins like this:

“The dream presents a potent mix of archetypal and personal symbols that indicate a deep process of transformation and individuation occurring within the dreamer’s psyche. The image of the mother, a universal symbol of nurturing, care, and life itself, is presented in a peaceful, sleeping state. This suggests that some aspect of the dreamer’s relationship with the nurturing, caring part of their psyche is in a dormant or inactive state.”

The interpretation goes on to highlight the religious symbolism of birds:

“Birds are often symbols of spiritual messengers or intermediaries between the earthly and the divine. In the Bible, they can represent both divine providence and impending doom.”

And it offers surprisingly sensitive words of encouragement to endure the inevitable struggles of psychological growth:

“The dreamer’s intense emotional reaction upon awakening – tears and screaming – indicates that this transformation is not easy or painless. It’s a significant upheaval, a profound shift in the dreamer’s self-concept and understanding of their place in the world. But this upheaval, this confrontation with the unconscious, is a necessary part of the individuation process. It’s through such confrontations that we come to know ourselves more fully, to integrate the disparate aspects of our psyche into a more cohesive, more authentic whole.”

This AI-generated interpretation can be readily identified as a Jungian approach and a plausible application of his theory to Freud’s dream. Moreover, it accords with what we know of Jung’s post-split view of Freud—that he never found a way to integrate the aggressive authority of the father with the intuitive wisdom of the mother.

The significance here is not just revealing alternate perspectives on these two dreams and their famous dreamers. This little experiment with Freud and Jung is like a horseless carriage, using a new technology to solve old problems. What will happen when these tools are applied to new problems, when they are used by a wide range of people to explore currently unknown opportunities? What new models of the mind and practices of healing will emerge? What new theories of art, culture, religion, and social change will appear on the horizon?

Maybe it’s time to start developing a “Prophetic mode”…

 

Note: Originally posted in Psychology Today, February 8, 2024.

 

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Threat Simulations in War Dreams

An outbreak of war and violent conflict is very likely to prompt a wave of nightmares of traumatic experiences, mournful losses, and threat simulations. This seems to be part of our internal crisis-response system when the external world descends into chaos and bloodshed, and our minds struggle to make sense of what is happening and find a way to survive the dangers.

A few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I had a conversation with two journalists from Eastern Europe who were working on a project relating to dreams. The focus of their project was not the war, but it inevitably came up in our conversation. They shared a couple of dreams with me, and afterwards sent me another from a friend of theirs.  With their permission, I am sharing the dreams below. I find the dreams haunting, horrifying, profoundly creative, and ultimately hopeful.

P., 27 years, male, a semiotics graduate from Czechia

A few days after the start of the war in Ukraine I had this dream:

I went to visit my parents at their house in a Czech village. I wanted to talk to them that night about everything that happened after the war started, but the conversation didn’t go as well as I had hoped and it wasn’t a very warm meeting. I felt disappointed.

Then I was all alone in the room when suddenly I heard a crackling sound from outside. I turned to the window and I saw a great rising glow that blinded me completely. I knew it was a nuclear bomb explosion, and at that moment time seemed to stop for a while. I realized that these were the last moments of my life. (I even recalled some fragments of my life passing through my mind.) Then I woke up.

At first, I wanted to forget about the dream, it felt too horrifying, but then I realized that maybe it is useful in something. It allowed me to imagine an absolute ending, the worst-case scenario. The next morning, I felt different, as if I had to do everything in my life from now on to ensure, such a situation would never happen.

P., 27 years, male, a semiotics graduate from Czechia

I was walking down a street of a historic town, alone or with a friend. I saw two political marches going against each other, one with banners over their heads with microscopes drawn on them, and the other with wooden swords. There was a tension rising, and I wouldn’t expect they would attack each other, which they did, and suddenly it was chaos everywhere on the street. I thought, ok well maybe there was a chance I would expect they could start fighting, but still I wouldn’t expect it would get so harsh, given the fact that their wooden swords were clearly only replicas of the real medieval weapons. So I went on to hide in a back street, but it was noise all over the place, it was a nightmare. I woke up.

R., 27 years, female, Slovak student of filmmaking and French philology

Personally, I can only recall one fragment of a dream linked with tanks. The dream contained some banal everyday story, which I don’t remember and meanwhile, tanks were coming in the night by streets accompanied by something between fireworks and airstrikes, the night sky over the tanks was spectacularly on fire. In the dream, the tanks that kept coming felt like everyday routine.

The interesting thing is, I’ve heard from three more friends from Prague, that they also dreamed about tanks in particular. My first guess “why” is about something deeply rooted in the historical memory of local people. When someone says “when tanks arrived”, or just “the tanks” most of the time it refers to the Occupation of Czechoslovakia in the August of 1968. In general, mostly the older generations use this term(s). Also, many people at protests or in the media are making this reference nowadays- between the tanks of the Warsaw Pact troops back in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and Russian tanks in the war with Ukraine now.

M., 27 years, female, Slovak translator and student

(I experience the worst intrusive images of violence associated with war during the day, probably also tied to the fact that I work as a translator for Memory of Nations, thereby I work with recollections of torture (by Nazis), hiding before Russian soldiers liberating Czechoslovakia, who were looting and looking for women to rape, interrogations by State Secret Services etc daily.)

“Amongst the few dreams about the war in Ukraine, I can most vividly recall the following. At that time, I had a fever, it was approximately 4 days after the war started and we were preparing some items to donate to a local charity.

Dream: I work in the local charity, we are collecting the items and sorting them for transport to the Ukrainian border. Lorries with new items keep coming, the hall is full of boxes with clothes, sleeping bags, toys, food, we are working day and night to sort the incoming material help, but it is impossible. We start to receive many calls, amongst them also video calls from Ukrainian president Mr Zelenskyj. In the style of his famous video-addresses to the world and his own citizens, each of the calls are like a short vlog, in which he encourages Ukrainians to fight, calls others to help and reprimands us for not working efficiently. With every call, the addresses become more bizarre, Zelenskyj becomes angrier and at the end, the calls purely consist of Zelenskyj absurdly scolding us for being lazy, disorganized, responsible for many deaths because we cannot even sort out material help properly.”

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Basketball Diary #5: The Court of Greg Brown III

This has been a rough season for fans of the Portland Trailblazers basketball team. The players are learning a new system from their rookie head coach, Chauncey Billups, in his first season in that role. Their star player, Damien Lillard, plays poorly (by his standards) at the outset, then is forced to undergo season-ending surgery. Three other players in the original rotation—Cody Zeller, Larry Nance Jr., and Nassir Little—go down with injuries. The General Manager of the team, Neil Olshey, is summarily fired after years of internal conflict, leaving the operations in the hands of neophyte executives and detached ownership. Just before the trade deadline they deal away three of their best remaining players—Norman Powell, Robert Covington, Jr., and the beloved C.J. McCollum. In return the Blazers receive some promising guys (Josh Hart, Justice Winslow, Keon Johnson), plus draft picks and salary cap flexibility (an aspect of the game I don’t understand and don’t want to understand). In the midst of it all, the team wins a few surprising games, but loses many more, often by huge margins. Now, with a season-ending injury to Jusuf Nurkic, the lone remainder from the starting line-up at the beginning of the season, the Blazers have been reduced to a fragment of what they hoped to become this year.

Perhaps the green shoots of new growth that signal better things for the future can be observed in player performances today, even in recurrent circumstances of dispiriting defeat. Three guys in particular—C.J. Elleby, Trendon Watford, and Greg Brown III—have been interesting to watch this year, as their roles have shifted dramatically from regular “DNP (coach’s decision)” benchwarmers to starters and vital rotation players. Each of them has an impressive set of skills and abilities they are testing and honing against the toughest competition they’ve ever faced. Sometimes it’s painful to watch, but just as often there are flashes of potential that seem to be harbingers of future greatness. Twenty-year old Greg Brown III, for instance, has so much athletic talent and basketball intuition, I can easily imagine him continuing to grow and eventually becoming a dominant player in his own right. When he’s on the court now, there’s always a sense he might do something amazing, some huge, leaping feat of blocking a shot, stealing a pass, or slamming an alley-oop dunk on a fast break. He and C. J. Elleby are the best on the team at that latter move, one that electrifies a crowd and pumps up the whole team.

My dreams about the Blazers this year have been vague and impersonal, but this brief one (following a 124-92 blowout loss to the Denver Nuggets) expresses special hope for the future play of Greg Brown III:

Lots of Energy

I am helping Greg Brown III with his basketball court, the game that is happening there….Lots of energy, with players moving quickly back and forth on the court….

The feeling is that the court is his, Greg Brown III’s. Like he owns it and reigns over whatever happens on it. Hmm. It’s true, now that I think about it, GBIII is the only player on the team right now who is emotionally demonstrative when he makes an amazing play. After dunking hard over another player, he doesn’t pretend to be cool and nonchalant. No, he lets everyone in the arena know what he just did. He expresses authentic, heartfelt enjoyment of these heroic moments, which is really all that we fans want, a chance to share in those moments of enjoyment. It also makes it easier to sympathize when he tries to dunk or block a shot and fails spectacularly, which happens rather frequently, too.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the ownership and management of the Trailblazers have essentially given up on this season, and on this group of guys. That’s too bad, because we may be seeing a glimpse of the future court of Greg Brown III—that is, a glimpse of what he and the guys like him could do with their potentials if fully supported and developed. It’s worth noting that the Blazers are still in contention for the tenth and last seed in the playoffs. And there’s more than a month of regular season games to go….

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The Essence of a Dream Library

A Dream Library is a playground for studying and dreaming: for studying while dreaming, and dreaming while studying. It’s a spatial technology for stimulating your oneiric imagination. It’s not a shrine to dreaming, but it’s not not a shrine to dreaming, either. It’s your personally crafted portal into the intuitive depths of your own mind.

What exactly makes a library a Dream Library? What are the essential elements that create a library of dreaming, in all senses of that term? This may seem abstract, but it has potential benefits for anyone who pays attention to their dreams. You can easily create a Dream Library for yourself, and if you do so you’ll find it opens doorways to new dimensions of insight and understanding. There are, in my experience, four essential elements to a Dream Library: books, numinous objects, a cup of tea, and a candle. I’ll describe each in more detail, in reverse order.

A candle: The soft golden light of a candle creates a human-scale sphere of illuminated space. The gently flickering flame brings a dynamic, unpredictable natural force into your presence. Multiple candles can be fun, but one is enough to serve the candle’s essential role in creating a Dream Library. Throughout history the candle has been a classic companion of scholars and sages, symbolizing the enlightenment that slowly emerges from a deep immersion in a collection of wisdom literature. Lighting a candle is a ritual act that opens the Library anew; blowing the candle out is a ritual closing. Of course, a candle with its open flame poses a danger, too (see: Library of Alexandria), so its role in the Dream Library is also to stimulate vigilance and respect for the elemental powers.

A cup of tea: Whether it’s black, green, or herbal, or even some variant of coffee or cocoa, the presence of a hot beverage also plays a vital role. Sure, you might say, but is tea necessary? Is it essential to a Dream Library? Yes, I believe so. Tea can be conceived as an ideal provision for the journey ahead. Entering the Library means a significant commitment of your time and presence. It’s not a quick, in-and-out kind of place. And if you stay there for a while, eventually you will get thirsty. Plain water is fine, but adds nothing atmospherically. A cup of hot tea, however, poured fresh and then brought straight to the Library so the first blooming swirls of redolent steam can fill the immediate surroundings, enhances your experience at many levels. It’s another small but meaningful ritual act that signals a new entry into the Library, and a new commitment to spend time there, to become enveloped for a while within that space. Again, this runs counter to typical library practice, as liquids of any kind can easily damage or destroy books. Water and Fire compete for the title of gravest threat to libraries of all kinds. So you have to be careful. Think about where you can and can’t safely place your cup, stick to that plan, and you’ll be fine.

Numinous objects: This is a broad, potentially infinite category of small material objects that carry special memories, meanings, and values for you. Examples can be a beautiful seashell, a ceramic bowl made by your grandfather, a favorite toy from childhood, or a framed photo of you and a friend on a faraway trip. They can be as simple as a small piece of weathered wood, a cool rock, or an old piece of metal. They can be as elaborate as crystals, antiques, mandala images, and mechanical curiosities. Unusual teacups and candleholders can also double as numinous objects. With this element of a Dream Library, multiplicity matters. The combined effect of these objects is to stimulate wonder and playful curiosity, inviting your mind to wander far beyond the here-and-now, towards distant horizons of exploration and discovery.

Books: There can be no library without books, of course. But for a Dream Library, having books simply means having more than one volume. Two books together already constitute a library. This is a key point: The dynamic vitality of a Dream Library arises from the quality of interaction between books and reader, not the total quantity of books. Naturally, at the center of this Library are various books about dreams. Classic and contemporary, famous and obscure, academic and popular, books you know well and books you hope to read soon. I always suggest including a few texts from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, not because they were right about everything (they weren’t), but because they knew so much about ancient dream traditions and expressed those insights in ways that can still enlighten us today. I’d also suggest including your favorite books of all time, not just about dreams. What was your favorite fairy tale from childhood? What novel did you love as a teenager? What non-fiction book has given you a sense of wonder about the world? Those should also be at the Library’s core. You might add other anthologies of fairy tales, other novels by that same author, other non-fiction works on that same topic, thereby expanding and deepening your collection. But again, it’s quality that matters, not quantity. A rich, vibrant Dream Library can have just four or five volumes, if they are the books that speak most powerfully to you.

A Dream Library may be enhanced in other ways, too—e.g., with a comfortable chair, a window with a view, cats. The four elements named here have special appeal because they can be inexpensively acquired, easily transported, and endlessly refined, elaborated, and expanded. Every one of us is a dreamer, and thus everyone can benefit from spending time in a self-created, self-curated library of dreaming.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today, November 30, 2021.