Dreaming – motivated or meaningless?

Mark Blagrove

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Freud’s term ‘day-residue’ refers to the frequent incorporation of events from the previous day into dreams. This is even found in the sleep laboratory, where a third of dreams are found to refer to the laboratory environment and events. Decades of studies on the relationships between dream content and waking life events, cognition and emotions are documented in Kramer (2007); for example, the dreams of people undergoing surgery and psychotherapy, and dreams after divorce. Propper et al. (2007) recorded dreams in the weeks after 9/11, finding dream references to the attacks were a function of the amount of TV coverage of the attacks watched on the day.
Such work looks at the reaction of dream content to waking-life events. Domhoff takes more of a trait approach, quantifying the surface content of large samples of dreams from one person over time, or from a group of people. Many variables can be derived, for example the percentage of characters who are aggressive, the percentage of dreams with negative emotions, the percentage of dreams that contain a misfortune, or the percentage that contain a success. Domhoff shows that these variables can be stable across time. This method of the scientific study of surface dream content, and related statistics, is described on the website www.dreamresearch.net, and in Domhoff (2003). Importantly, the possibility of a motivated selection by participants of what dreams to recount is reduced by having participants recall their Most Recent Dream: this method enables appropriate non-selective sampling of dreams while allowing participants to be required to recall only one dream.
However, although dream content variables can be statistically related to waking-life experiences and other wakinglife variables, this seems to account for only a minority of the entire dream content, leading to the claim by Hobson (1999) that much of dream content is delirium-like, rather than motivated or meaningful.
The delirium view of dreams is a more extreme version of the common view that there are deficiencies of cognition in dreams, such as of memory, rationality and volition. We rarely notice bizarre instances, or deliberate about what to do next in the dream, or even realise that it is a dream. One possible physiological parallel noted by Hobson is that deficiencies in volition during dreams might occur due to the lack of activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during sleep. However, there is evidence from Kahan and LaBerge (1996) that volition, choice and deliberation can be shown to occur in dreams if the dreamer is asked about it soon after waking, rather than with the more usual method of having an independent judge rate written dream reports for the presence of characteristics such as choice, deliberation, self-talk and thwarted intention.
That just 4 per cent of REM dreams are lucid – dreams in which one knows one is dreaming (Gackenback & LaBerge, 1988; LaBerge, 2007) – reinforces the deficiency view of dreaming. However, levels of self-awareness and lucidity in dreams can be increased by cognitive training methods, and Blagrove and Hartnell (2000) found lucid dreamers have a greater internal locus of control and need for cognition than do non-lucid dreamers, which is evidence for the continuity hypothesis of dream variables being associated with waking-life variables.

Dreaming and insight

A frequent question is whether dream content provides information about waking cognition and emotions that is not within conscious awareness, and whether studying dreams can thus provide insight – even therapeutic insight. However, a complication here is that insight could be obtained from dreams in the same way that insight can be obtained from the reading of Tarot cards, or horoscopes, with the process and effort of interpretation providing the reorganisation and linking of information. To address this, attempts have been made to compare the insight obtained from dream interpretation with that obtained by interpreting someone else’s dream, or interpreting an event of one’s own life. However, the results are unclear, and are no doubt confounded by participants’ beliefs about whether dreams are a superior source of insightful knowledge. One possibility here is to assess claims that dreams can provide the inspiration for inventions and discoveries, such as is claimed for the discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule by Kekulé; the plot for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson; the machine sewing needle (with a hole near its tip) by Elias Howe; and Stockhausen’s Helicopter Quartet. However, some of these anecdotal claims are disputed (see www.bps.org.uk/dream and Blagrove, 1992), and hence there always remains the possibility that the surprise in looking at dreams can be due to the imagery they use to depict what we know already, rather than due to any surprise at new knowledge.
Freud (1900/1953) claimed that dreams provide the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, because during sleep we censor thoughts less than when awake. His method of dream interpretation required the person undergoing analysis to freeassociate to each component of the dream (see box opposite), the theory being that this would lead from the manifest dream content back to the latent dream thoughts (the wishes and other factors, often unconscious, that were the source of the dream). Clearly this method can result in confabulation of links between the dream content and waking-life cognition and memories, and such criticisms were made at the time of the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, and in the major critique by Grünbaum (1984). A similar free-association method is, however, now used by Cavallero and many other Italian researchers to distinguishwhether items in dreams from the different stages of sleep have as their source a waking episodic memory, a semantic memory, or semantic knowledge about the self.