Originally posted by mikelom
What's with the 'assumption' made in the title of this OP thread anyway?
The assumption is that dreams have 'both' a spiritual and a psychological significance.
Sorry, not, but I disagree with the original assumption on the part of spiritual significance.
Psychologically, anybody with any reading knows that the brain uses dreaming to order the days ...[text shortened]... ld be in the science forum, asking about the psychological relevance of dreams only.
-m.
Just for my own pleasure, as always, I thought I'd describe some of what I have been reading on this topic. There are a number of different theories about dreaming.
Freud thought that in sleep the conscious mind takes a well earned break and allows our true desires and wishes to emerge. Every dream expressed a wish which our mind would normally repress. Critics suggest that Freud's theory is itself an example of wish fulfilment since it is not scientifically supported at all.
Revonsuo, in 2000, suggested that dreams serve an evolutionary purpose, in that they enable us to have a dress rehearsal for things that make us very anxious, so that we can visualise what we might be able to do in such a situation without actually incurring any real danger. Critics suggest that self styled "evolutionary psychology" is made up of very interesting "just-so" stories. Maybe dreams serve an evolutionary purpose - as we have evolved to become a dreaming species, that is a tautology. But we need more than a just-so story to provide a convincing explanation.
In 1980, Francis Crick - of DNA fame, the very man - suggested a computer analogy, that dreams are the brain's way to sort through data and decide what is important and what is not. It is a defragmenter and as a by-product, a source for eureka moments. Criticis point out that the brain is not a computer. Analogies may sometimes be helpful but they are just that - analogies.
In the 1970s, James Hobson at Harvard suggested that dreams provide a mechanism to deal with brain activity without waking up. In other words, what we dream about is not as significant as the biological importance of getting a good sleep. He had found that damage to a brain area which is activated during dreaming not only results in people losing the (apparent) ability to dream but also losing the ability to get a decent, restful sleep. Many think this is the most economical account of why we dream and what purpose it serves. We dream because our brain is continually active. We do not wake up because our body is incapacitated during sleep, which thankfully minimises sleep walking, throttling our partners, and the like. Dreams are vague and fuzzy because we are not able to work on our thinking at a conscious level. However, we can learn techniques to take some control over our dreams and make them go where we would prefer. We can also learn how to wake up from a bad dream - twitch a finger or blink for example and the dream will stop.
Generally, sleep research has shown that we all have periods of REM sleep and this is associated with dreaming. Brain evidence suggests that we do all dream several times and for significant periods each night. We are most likely to recall our dream if we are woken up during the dream. We are more likely to report dreams about topics that make us anxious or unhappy or worried. We are also most likely to recall a dream when it has some relevance to an event that brings the memory to prominence in our mind. Hence, we are very selective in how we recall dreams and as a result may have the illusion that our dreams matter and maybe even that they are predictive of something in our future. It is still wisdom after the event - we recall and tidy up what we find relevant and forget the rest.
Given the number of people around and the number of dreams they have, it is unsurprising that when significant public events - especially disasters, plane crashes and the like - take place, there will statistically be someone, somewhere, whose dream can be thought to describe the disaster before it happened. If we allow quite vague connections to be included, thousands may report dreaming of the impending disaster.
Worries are often well founded so if we dream about our worries our dreams will sometimes be very acurate. Lincoln told of a dream that he would be assassinated before he was. But then he had been told of threats to assassinate him and had already surivived attempted assassination, so it is hardly a big deal that he had such a dream; probably lots. It is less common for people to (claim to) dream about future happy events.
Lots of examples are known of people solving problems in a dream. This mainly confirms that our brain is continually active outside of our awareness. We are, indeed, only very selectively aware of a very small part of what is happening in our brains. Creativity is not usually the product of the linear, rational thinking we associate (maybe not always correctly) with our conscious thinking.
Spiritual / Psychological Significance of Dreams
30 Sep '12 07:47
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