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Discoveries in three distinct areas of dream research make it possible to suggest the outlines of a new neurocognitive theory of dreaming. The first relevant findings come from assessments of patients with brain injuries, which show that lesions in different areas have differential effects on dreaming and thereby imply the contours of the neural network necessary for dreaming. The second set of results...
Factors affecting or inducing nightmares have been investigated repeatedly. However, little research is carried out on the behavioral consequences of nightmares. The present study thus served to investigate behavioral effects of nightmares in correlation to personality variables. 41 non-clinical participants, who suffer from about 2 nightmares per month recorded their dreams and nightmares over a...
This study asked the question, “Are there significant content differences between male and female dream reports obtained in dream seminars conducted in Brazil?” Each of the 240 (137 female, 103 male) research participants volunteered recent dream reports (one per person) during dream seminars that he or she attended between 1990 and 1998. Dreams were scored according to Hall-Van de Castle criteria...
Social as well as personal referents appear in dreams and, when recognized as such, provide insight into how unresolved social issues seep into the personal domain at an unconscious level. Dream-sharing groups (because of the time available and other factors) offer a particularly favorable opportunity to observe this interplay. The truth-telling nature of dreaming consciousness not only exposes disconnects...
As is well known, some dreams have been instrumental in important scientific discoveries. Kekulé's dream of the whirling snakes is probably the most famous instance though there was apparently no public written record of it until some 28 years later. Loewi, even in his own autobiographic material, appears never to have provided a written report of the dream that led him to carry out the experiment...
The Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire was administered twice, with six months in between, to 61 Swiss subjects over 60 years of age taking part in an investigation into the effects of dream-telling on five variables: well-being, sleep quality, sleep duration, dream recall and dream tone. In addition, dream epoch, i.e., the age of life of the dreamer as perceived in the dream, was recorded for those...
The purpose of this study was to identify “exotic” (i.e., puzzling, unusual, extraordinary, anomalous) dreams in a sample of 1,666 dream reports from six countries, and to make gender comparisons as well. Research participants were members of dream seminars that one of us conducted between 1990 and 1998 in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Only one dream report per...
Creative problem-solving dreams virtually always occur only after the dreamer has done extensive work on the issue awake. Most typically, a person is stuck at one particular step of a multiple phase process and the dream solves that step. The dream of Dmitri Mendeleev about The Periodic Table of the Elements is no exception. All accounts of this event agree that he'd worked for years on the Table,...
A contextualizing image (CI) is a powerful central image of a dream which appears to “contextualize” (provide a picture-context for) the dreamer's emotion. For instance, dreamers who have experienced any serious traumatic event sometimes dream, “I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave.” This appears to picture their feeling of terror and/or vulnerability. A scoring system for CIs is examined here...
105 volunteer clients completed single sessions of dream interpretation using the Hill (1996) model, with half randomly assigned to waking life interpretation and the other half to parts of self interpretation in the insight stage of the Hill model. No differences were found between waking life and parts of self interpretations, suggesting that therapists can use either type of dream interpretation...
Despite the fact that a handful of modern dream researchers have called attention to a link between language and dreaming, beginning with Freud (1900) and Kraepelin (1906), and continuing to the present (e.g. Heynick 1993), much remains to be understood about the role of language in dreaming. Certain commonly reported phenomena may be taken as evidence that the linguistic system is active during dreaming...
The question posed by this investigation was whether the spiritual content of dreams could be identified. The Casto Spirituality Scoring System (CSSS) was used to identify spiritual elements in 1,666 dream reports obtained in dream workshops in six countries. The CSSS considers the adjective “spiritual” as a hypothetical construct referring to one's focus on, and/or reverence, openness, and connectedness...
A contextualizing image (CI) is a powerful central image in a dream which can be seen as picturing, or providing a picture-context for, the dominant emotion of the dreamer. Thus the paradigmatic dream, “I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave,” contextualizes the dominant emotion of fear/terror or helplessness. This study examined the question of whether CIs, scored on a blind basis, are especially frequent...
The relationship between the cultures to which persons belong and their internalized object representations as revealed by manifest dream content was investigated. It was hypothesized that because Chicanos are from a more nurturing culture than Anglos, they would represent persons in their dreams as more differentiated, articulated, and integrated, with more benevolent interactions. 50 Chicano and...
The literature on highly significant dreams is filled with references to the bizarreness of their content. On the other hand, the concept of beauty is rarely if ever mentioned in relation to these dreams. Grounded in archetypal psychology's tenet that psychological life is aesthetic life, this article argues that the enduring, even life-long, influence some dreams have on the dreamer's life may be...
The purpose of this study was to develop a dreamwork model that would help individuals deal with relationship issues. Seventy dreams, involving seven major relationships, were selected from the woman participant's dreams. A dream interpretation model, the Personalized Method for Interpreting Dreams (PMID) was developed. Well-founded concepts in the PMID are: 1) dreams reflect emotions; and, 2) pre-dream...
Children's understanding of dreams as mental states was examined as an instance of their development of a “theory of mind.” Thirty-five children between the ages of three and seven were interviewed to determine how well they understood the reality, location, privacy, and origin of their own dream, versus that of a fictional character, matched for emotional valence. Theory of mind developments in understanding...
A single definition for dreaming is most likely impossible given the wide spectrum of fields engaged in the study of dreaming, and the diversity in currently applied definitions. Many studies do not specify a definition, yet results are likely to be comparable only when comparable definitions of the topic are used. The alternative is to develop a classification system organizing the multiplicity of...
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