Think of dreams
and you might think of
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, of sex
and phallic symbols. Of
Freud's "royal road to the
unconscious" paved with weird metaphors
and obscure
symbolism. Maybe of psychedelic hallucinations, the
visual
counterpart of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." Or
even
of ties to another world. Some might remember Gregory Peck
being haunted by surrealistic nightmares in Alfred
Hitchkock's
"Spellbound," with its ingenious production by
Salvador
Dalí, the master of burning giraffes and
melting watches.
Whatever dreams are, most of us view them
as enigmatic visions
from the abyss of our mind.
When psychologist Bill
Domhoff thinks of
dreams, he sees them as short tales or
theater plays with coherent
story lines, no more bizarre or
obscure than our routine waking
thoughts. But most of all,
he thinks of an Excel 5 spreadsheet
brimming with numbers
and a bar diagram he calls h-profile.
That is Domhoff's unspectacular
way of trying to quantify
and thus decipher our nocturnal movie
shows.
What Domhoff finds in thousands of dreams
dreamt all over
the world is a surprising regularity in dream
content that
underlies individual and also cross-cultural
differences.
Besides, his results show a striking consistency in
what we
dream of throughout our adult lives. In Domhoff's view,
it
is through dreams that our sleeping mind expresses our daily
concerns and ideas about ourselves and the reality that
surrounds
us.
Domhoff, who collects dreams at the
University of
California, Santa Cruz, shares with Freud and Jung
the firm
belief that dreams offer the most direct path to the
dreamer's personality. But other than their conviction that
dreams
have meaning, Domhoff's notions differ radically from
those of the
founders of psychoanalysis. For both Freud and
Jung, dreams were
puzzling accumulations of strange
scenarios flooded with arcane
props, as if the cameraman or
the director of the movie went
berserk.
To Domhoff, most dreams do not appear
bizarre or alien at
all. "I used to think of dreams as much more mysterious and
symbolic because I shared many of the cultural beliefs bac
k
in the Sixties, when Freud was all-pervasive. But the more
we looked at dreams, the more regular and the more
consistent they
got," Domhoff says. "In a way [our
research] demystifies
Freud and Jung."
And dreams need not be fantastic
or absurd to tell us
something about the dreamer, Domhoff
contends. Buying
groceries, not finding what you want and losing
your car
keys are just as telling as dream scenarios. But what
does
dreaming of Safeway reveal about our inner selves?
To decode a dream, Domhoff begins - oddly enough - by
coding it. At the core of this process figures a tabular
system.
It features a variety of categories, such as
characters (say,
people or animals), objects (perhaps a
car), settings, social
interactions between them (an act of
aggression for instance) and
various other classes and
subdivisions, such as misfortunes,
emotions and striving.
Using this system which was developed by
pioneering dream
researchers Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle
in the
1960s, Domhoff deconstructs the content of a dream or
preferably of a collection of dreams, a so-called dream
series.
For example, the dream fragment, "My parents sat in
the audience
when I sang a Cole Porter song," would
translate into:
1MFA/1FMA-2JUA-1MPA. Then, Domhoff simply
counts each single
occurrence of an image, or dream element.
What he ends up with is
a sheet full of numbers, an
alpha-numeric translation of a
dream.
"Dreams are stories that we tell ourselves
at night. Our
coding system is a way of turning a text into a set
of
numbers or, in other words, turning symbolic behavior into
scientific data," Domhoff says. This systematic and
quantitative
approach makes dreams comparable across the
world, Domhoff
says.
Since the late 1940s, Hall, Domhoff and
others have used
this system to analyze thousands of dreams of
American
college students. Viewed collectively, they form the
so-called "norm," the average dreamer's dream or frame of
reference, with which other dreams can be compared. College
students, being quite abundant at a university, became the
first
dream Guinea pigs for Hall and Domhoff - a simple
matter of
convenience (the researchers could just as well
have chosen
firefighters or opera singers). A norm dream is
characterized by
how often friends, strangers, cats, dogs,
screwdrivers, mud
slides, sexual escapades, broken legs,
etc. occur. Individual
dream elements are then assigned to
one of the various categories.
Thus, an average female dream
consists of 5.3 objects, 1.3
settings, 2.8 characters, 0.6
friendly and 0.7 aggressive
interactions (all with further
subdivisions, of course). Findings
in the norm group have
been replicated quite accurately four times
with dream
series gathered independently from different dreamers
within
a period of forty years. Hence, there seem to be only
minor
changes, if any, in what comparable groups of people dream
over the years, Domhoff says.
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The
theory behind the Hall/Van de Castle system and its
predictions
about the dreamer assumes continuity between
dreams and our waking
thoughts. Both are manifestations, so
the theory goes, of our mind
in action, an idea that dates
back to ancient Greece. Aristotle
was the first to state
"dreaming is thinking while asleep." Hall
and Domhoff could
not agree more. For Hall, the images of our
dreams are "the
embodiment of thoughts." And Domhoff says all the
results
Hall, himself and others have obtained so far, seem to
support this so-called cognitive theory of dreams, first
proposed
by Hall in the early 1950s. "It's about us and our
thinking of the
world while we sleep," Domhoff says. "Dreams
are the most
completely subjective picture of what's on our
mind. They are
extremely revealing about our
self-conception."
In this cognitive dream theory, the frequency with which
dream
elements appear is thought to reflect the concerns and
the
interests of the dreamer. Thus, any obvious deviation
from the
norm, or any other group of reference, should allow
predictions
about the dreamer's preoccupations, concerns,
conflicts, and his
or her conception of the surrounding
world while he or she is
awake. Once the dreams are
analyzed, Domhoff scrutinizes his
inferences, and hence his
dream theory, in an interview with the
dreamer.
And since the Hall/Van de Castle system
is, at large,
statistical in nature, the more dreams Domhoff has,
the more
accurate his predictions. "I don't think I can tell you
much
about a single, isolated dream. But about 70 dreams [of
the same person] - that's a psychological X-ray or a
fingerprint. With this in hand, I am confident that I can
tell you
a lot about that person," Domhoff says.
Dream
research à la Domhoff has come a long way
since Freud's
Vienna days. Domhoff's coding headquarters is
a white, office-like
room with a neutral, almost clinical
atmosphere - not very dreamy
(as some of us might say). No
couch, not even a dreamer in sight.
Just the reports
scattered all over. Most of them are computer
printouts
looking like manuscripts - which is what they are,
dream
manuscripts, screenplays of our sleep. One of them is a
photocopy of a dream diary, enriched with hand-drawn
sketches of
what the dreamer encountered on his mental
excursions. A detailed
railroad engine dominates one of the
pages. On another one a
naturalistic drawing of a beetle
figures alongside the dream
report.
The stacks of dream reports are
interleaved by yellow,
handwritten sheets. These sheets contain
the rules by which
Domhoff and his colleagues code the dream
reports. Cryptic
columns of letters and numbers on the left are
facing short
explanations, reminiscent of a handwritten vocabulary
for a
foreign language. (Quite a peculiar language, one might
say.
A8, for example, stands for "an aggressive act resulting in
the death of a character," or 1ANI would mean my dog.)
Everything
you could possibly dream of is listed here. It is
a bare-bones
guide to dream content analysis.
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Following these rules, Domhoff takes apart dream series
of
individuals, as well as of certain groups like skydivers,
vegetarians, or gay men. He compares them to the norm, but
also to
each other or to any other group, for differences
and similarities
in the various categories. Adam Schneider,
one of Domhoff's
colleagues, recently developed a computer
program for these
sophisticated statistical analyses. The
result is a bar diagram
that mathematicians arbitrarily term
the h-profile. It portrays
the deviations of the analyzed
dream(s) from any given reference
group. Each bar
corresponds to one of the various dream elements.
With one
glance, Domhoff sees how dreams differ between
individuals
or groups (see h-profile
figure).
One of the early results obtained with
this system was
what Domhoff refers to as "astonishing
regularities in
dreams from all over the world". The general types
of
characters, interactions and elements in dreams are much the
same worldwide. One common thread in our dreams is, for
example,
that aggression prevails over friendliness and
misfortune over
good fortune. But clear-cut gender-specific,
developmental,
cross-cultural, and individual differences
also emerge.
For example, men are more likely to dream about other men
(almost 70 percent of all characters), whereas women are
less
discriminatory (both genders figure around 50 percent).
Also, men
show more aggression in their dreams than women
do. So, the
h-profile of male dreams shows large bars (in
the positive
direction) on the Male/Female percent and the
aggression scale
relative to female dreams.
Dreams also differ in several ways between children and
adults. Animals play a more prominent role in children's
dreams
(up to 50 percent of all characters, compared to only
5 percent in
adults' dreams). So do outdoor activities.
Besides, children are
more often the victims of aggressive
behavior rather than the
source. After adolescence, however,
dreams don't change
significantly with age. When Domhoff
compared dreams within three
individual dream series that
extended over 20 to 50 years, he
found surprisingly little
change in an individual's dream
history.
Perhaps the most telling result using
the Hall/Van de
Castle system concerns cross-cultural differences
in dreams.
"[Individuals from] tribal hunter-and-gatherer
societies dream much more about animals [than the US
college
student norm], and that's exactly what you would
expect. In
Japanese dreams, animals are really low, which
reflects the life
in big cities where you're not allowed to
keep animals," Domhoff
says. And while he admits that these
are not very profound
insights, "it tells us we're on the
right track" using their
quantitative system of content
analysis. "I think of dreams as the
4 C's: concern,
conception [of ourselves and the surrounding
reality], continuity [between our waking thoughts
and our
dreams], and consistency [throughout our
adult
lives]," Domhoff says.
(Back to top)
Domhoff has learned, however, that dreams do not always
reflect
our daily behavior or actions. Compelling examples
are dream
series with a high overall incidence of murders or
highly sexual
dreams. (The latter, in contrast to common
belief, make up only
about 10 percent of all reported
dreams, including dreams with
hugs or kisses.) When Domhoff
analyzed these dream series he, of
course, predicted that
the dreamers were aggressive and sexually
active,
respectively. In interviews with two of them afterward,
this
turned out not to be the case. However, both dreamers
admitted that, in their thoughts and day-dream fantasies,
they
would often experience these feelings. At the moment,
Domhoff says
he still has trouble separating dreams that
actually reflect real
behavior from the ones that "only"
reflect thoughts and
ideas.
According to Domhoff, this example also
shows the
validity of the Hall/Van de Castle system, which
completely
relies on what Domhoff calls "blind analysis." "The
less we
know about the person the better," Domhoff says. "There are
a lot of conclusions we draw when we only see or hear
somebody."
To find meaning in dreams, Domhoff looks only at
the dream reports
themselves and analyzes the content
statistically without any
interpretation. He does not rely
on - or even want - free
associations, biographical or any
other information provided by
the dreamer. The interview
with the dreamer is Domhoff's measure
of all things. "When
we ask them, people often realize their fears
and their
concerns. We are usually right [with our
inferences], and even when we're wrong we learn
something
[about our theory]," Domhoff says.
Even
more challenging for Domhoff are dream series where
the Hall/Van
de Castle system fails completely, where it
leaves an apparently
irreconcilable contradiction between
Domhoff's predictions and the
dreamer's self-perception or
self-portrait. In separate interviews
with friends or family
members of the dreamer, Domhoff tries to
bridge the gaps.
"If some of the psychological traits are
confirmed in
outside interviews we might have discovered a blind
spot of
the dreamer, a misconception of him- or herself for
example,
an unrecognized rivalry with an older brother. A
"conflicting" content analysis somehow is a sign for
self-deception - that is, the dreamer is not aware of a
certain
attitude, feeling or emotion," Domhoff says. But
even though
dreams might contain unconscious material, he
says "the process
[of dreaming] itself is first and
foremost a cognitive
process during sleep." This is as close
as Domhoff gets to the
realms of psychoanalysis or the
unconscious and its "inventor,"
Freud.
In contrast to Domhoff, both Freud and
Jung concentrated
mainly on a specific subset of dreams to develop
their dream
theories. Freud was fascinated by sexual dreams, which
he
considered wishes in disguise. These fantasies are usually
repressed by our consciousness when we are awake. Jung
focused on
universal mythical symbols, and he came to
believe that dreams
reveal undeveloped parts of our
personalities. For Jung, we dream
what we do NOT think
about.
(back to top)
Extended dream series, without any preselection or bias,
do not
support either of these theories, Domhoff says. But
even Domhoff
admits that there are some dreams - often the
most captivating,
puzzling and memorable ones - in which we
create highly
metaphorical pictures. In collaboration with
linguists, Domhoff
tries to nail down and analyze these
metaphorical elements in
dreams, such as "exposure is
embarrassment," "up is feeling good,"
"hot is anger,"
"bridge is transition," or a "fallen" woman. His
goal is to
see whether their general meaning in our colloquial
language
and their appearance in dreams fit his theory that
dreams
express how the dreamer conceives the reality he or she is
living in.
"Ultimately, it's these very
metaphorical dreams that we
want to understand," Domhoff says.
"The danger lies in doing
the same thing as Freud and Jung, who
were mere interpreters
of isolated metaphors and symbols." A
metaphoric analysis
has to be embedded in the context of a
person's 'regular'
dreams, Domhoff thinks. Information obtained
with the
Hall/Van de Castle system about a certain dreamer, he
says,
should provide effective insurance against Freudian
over-interpretation, which resulted from Freud's belief in
the
unconscious as the creative force behind our dreams.
Not everyone in today's psychological community has
chucked the
unconscious altogether.
Veronica
Tonay, a clinical
psychologist also at UC Santa Cruz,
studies the connection
between dreaming and personality traits,
especially
creativity. She still sees plenty of room for the
unconscious.
To a large extent, her findings
support Hall's theory
about the continuity between dreams and
waking thoughts and
concerns. This is not as much a surprise for
Tonay now as it
was when she first began her analyses. "I started
out
thinking that Hall's theory was too reductionist. I wanted
to prove him wrong," she said. But after years of experience
with
the Hall/Van de Castle system she changed her mind.
"It's
absolutely amazing how much you know about a person
after coding
their dreams," Tonay says.
The one level of our
personalities that she says does not
fit the continuity theory
concerns the emotions we
experience while dreaming. She observed,
for example, that
sad people had predominantly cheerful dreams and
vice versa.
"Feelings in waking life and in dreams are not
necessarily
the same. Often this is a subconscious process," Tonay
says.
She agrees with Jung in that we dream about the emotional
side within ourselves which is unknown to us or repressed
during
our waking life.
Tonay notwithstanding, many
psychologists have left the
Freudian/Jungian track these days. A
major turning point was
the discovery of a certain phase of sleep
called REM
sleep, during which most dreaming
was thought to occur.
But after an initial euphoria, psychologists
slowly
discovered that dreaming occurs throughout our sleep.
Their
hopes of finally understanding dreams on a physiological
level were dashed. For Domhoff, a promising period ended in
disillusion. "From 1965 it went straight downhill. Many of
us felt
we had lost our reason for being in the lab. A whole
world started
collapsing around me," Domhoff says.
So, Domhoff
changed gears completely in the late 1960s
and made a 20-year-long
leap into sociology, studying the
political and social power
structure in the United States.
It was only toward the end of the
1980s that he turned back
to his earlier love, the field of
dreams.
Having collected several thousand dreams,
Domhoff is as
firmly convinced that there is meaning in dreams as
he is
that there is no psychological function to them. "Most
people who claim a function for dreams, for example in the
consolidation of memory, in fact talk about REM
sleep. My best guess is that there is no function in
dreams
because it seems we don't really need them," Domhoff
says,
referring to brain injury patients who lost the
ability to dream
without suffering any other obvious
aftermath. Even Allan Hobson
agrees on this point. "I think
we need to have REM, but I don't
think we need to dream," he
says.
We may
not need dreams, but most people would not want to
lose them
either. Whatever their function or meaning will
turn out to be,
they will always fascinate us. After all,
there is a (bit of a)
dreamer in everyone. Through our
dreams, life with all its
adventures and (mis)fortunes
thrills us even - and in some cases
especially - while we
sleep. Life just keeps going on behind
closed eyes, it
seems. As the late Havelock Ellis, the English
psychologist
and writer, put it: "Dreams are real while they last.
Can we
say more of life?"
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