Week 2: (Notes) Consistency between dream and waking states and Dream Motifs

3 points

• The consistency between the dreaming and waking states
• Dream motifs and themes

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives - William Dement.

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison Henri Amiel

Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves. The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: you must live truthfully. Right now. And always. Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become - Marc Ian Barasch

My week in dreaming


Reading about Tesla on Sunday evening
vizualization powers -some serious wake induced lucid stuff going on too I think

1. He could hear the sound of a watch ticking three rooms away;
2. A fly landing on a table in his room caused a dull thud in his ear;
3. A carriage passing several kilometres distant caused his whole body to shake;
4. He could not endure the vibration in his chair caused by a train whistle thirty-two kilometres away;
5. Rubber cushions had to be placed under his bed so that he could rest undisturbed by the vibrations of sounds around him; and
6. In the dark, like a bat, he could sense an object at a distance of about four metres by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead.

The consistency between the dreaming and waking states


If, as philosophers have argued, we can know the world only as a construction of our consciousness, then who is to say that the world constructed during dream consciousness his more distorted than our construction of the so-called real world which his specific to the needs of locomotion, safety, recognition and all other waking activities? Might not one argue that dreams simply offer a different definition of the world, a personal definition that rescues the world from certain limitations of linear and spatial existence?

Poetic context normalizes/ poetic imagery not conceived as bizarred
Saw your head / ‘I met her as a blossom on a stem’
hamlet -ear into a porch/ in a nutshell - Hobson splicing.
Noam Chomsky
not common sense but complex sense

His point - his that dream images are no more bizarre or distorted than poetic images, if you put them in their proper perceptual environment, as we do in a dream where we accept what we dream as being normal, however frightening it may be.


Hypnagogia/ hypnopompic states/ Parahypnogogia/

Hypnagogia - brief transition between wakefulness and sleep we experience each night
Closest to dead
creativity
autosymbolic nature

E.B. Gurstelle*, J.L. de Oliveira - Parahypnogogia - Dream scintillations/

proposing that there exists a previously undescribed state of consciousness that has elements of relaxed wakefulness [3], mind wandering, daydreaming,hypnagogia, spontaneous self-hypnosis [4], everyday trance [5], dissociation, meditation, microsleep
[6], dream scintillations [7,8], waking dreams [9,10], insight flashes and creativity [11].
However, we contend that the phenomenon of DPH is a unique and distinct state that is qualitatively different from each of these aforementioned events.


Jacques Montanegro -waking life shares some properties of dreams.

The degree of thought control—and consequently of mental content coherence—varies in the waking state according to the type and aim of cognition.

Highest degree of control with solving an objective problem and goal-directed tasks. logical thought and full use of our executive functions - working memory, cognitive inhibition, and attention management.

If the problem involves important personal needs or if people make decisions
within a group, irrational elements may influence the process of problem solving.

Other kinds of cognitive activity rely much less on thought control. For example, informal verbal exchanges between friends or family members are elliptical and subjects to abrupt changes of topic.

In fact there is very a correlation between boundaries people have and dream recall frequency(DRF)

• Whereas Blagrove and Akehurst 2000 For instance, there is no correlation or a very inconsistent correlation between drf and Eisenck’s three personality factors Extraversion, Psychoticism and Neuroticism.  There is no clear correlation with  Repression,measured in a number of ways.  In fact there have been two papers published emphasizing the near ubiquity of  negative results on personality factors related to drf
• Boundaries ( thinness of boundaries)  is  the single clear exception.  It has been shown repeatedly that  having  thin boundaries  definitely correlates with drf  
• So if your dream recall his high you are a person with thin boundaries and you are like to experience more consistency through states anyway. So once you go dreamer you go full dreamer.

  A person at the other extreme, a person with thin boundaries in all senses, may experience some synesthesia, will tend to let a lot of sensory material in at once, and may have difficulty focusing on one part of the input.  This person will  be aware of thoughts and feelings together (“I can’t imagine a thought without a feeling”), and will often experience states of being half-awake and half-asleep, or will become deeply immersed in daydreaming or in reverie, so that at times the boundary between real life and fantasy may be unclear.  There will be less sense of clear body boundary and personal space.  This person may be very aware of the past, and have it blend with the present (“I am grown-up, but in a lot of ways I’m still a child”).  Similarly, this person will accept mixtures in sexual identity (“I am a man, but there’s a lot of feminine in me too”).  He or she will not feel solidly a member of one group, but may be an individual taking part at times in many different groups,  or perhaps a “citizen of the world.”  In judgments or opinions about the world, this person will tend to think in terms of shades of grey, rather than black and white (“it all depends, s/he’s good in some ways and bad in others,” “it’s different at different times,” and so on).

The concept of thick versus thin boundaries as a personality measure becomes most clear if we examine the many kinds of boundaries, as in table 1, and consider extreme examples for clarity.  A person who has very thick boundaries in all senses would be someone with a sharp sense of focus, who can easily concentrate on one thing while ignoring others.  This person does not experience synesthesia, keeps thoughts and feelings entirely separate  (“I don’t let my feelings get in the way of my thinking”), and is absolutely clear about when s/he is awake, or asleep or dreaming, experiencing no in between states.  This person has a clear sense of the separation of past, present, and future (“that was then, this is now”),  a  very definite sense of space around him/herself (“this is my space, this is yours”), and  a  clear, delineated sense of sexual identity (“I am a man, you are a woman, vive la difference.”)  The person will have a definite group identity (“this is my group, we do such and such; other groups are totally different) and will tend to see the world in terms of black and white, us versus them, good versus evil.

  A person at the other extreme, a person with thin boundaries in all senses, may experience some synesthesia, will tend to let a lot of sensory material in at once, and may have difficulty focusing on one part of the input.  This person will  be aware of thoughts and feelings together (“I can’t imagine a thought without a feeling”), and will often experience states of being half-awake and half-asleep, or will become deeply immersed in daydreaming or in reverie, so that at times the boundary between real life and fantasy may be unclear.  There will be less sense of clear body boundary and personal space.  This person may be very aware of the past, and have it blend with the present (“I am grown-up, but in a lot of ways I’m still a child”).  Similarly, this person will accept mixtures in sexual identity (“I am a man, but there’s a lot of feminine in me too”).  He or she will not feel solidly a member of one group, but may be an individual taking part at times in many different groups,  or perhaps a “citizen of the world.”  In judgments or opinions about the world, this person will tend to think in terms of shades of grey, rather than black and white (“it all depends, s/he’s good in some ways and bad in others,” “it’s different at different times,” and so on).

Dream motifs and themes

Ernest Hartmann - CI (Central Image) -The central image is what makes ‘Big’ dreams Big: The central image as the emotional heart of the dream.
The idea of thick and thin boundaries.

Limbic system and amygdala activation in sleep. Hobson parts of the brain that are turned off.


Occurrence of certain dream motifs -Yu

remarkable constancy of both prevalence and recurrence of typical dreams across times and cultures suggests that the formation of dream narratives his regularly biased towards a specific group of themes and his operated by highly stable mechanisms and predispositions.

• virtually all types of delusions and paranoid suspiciousness including grandiose, persucutory, religious, somatic, jealous and erotomanic delusions - prevail in dreams.

• 10 minor scales to supplement the assessment of the intrinsic predispositions that are thought to modulate dream content. Paranoia, delusion, erotomania, Appetite-Instinct, Sensor motor excitement, sex, fighting symbolism, oral symbolism and classic symbolism.

Hobson on the stuff that is not working while we dream.

Different and complementary view of dreaming to Freudian notions

Bert O States - If the dream seems bizarre it is because in the dream state we are literally watching our thought process as it searches, indexes, combines and correlates information and creates or revises ‘scenes’ that will be useful predictors of future experience.

Dreams and stories as neuronal events that originate just slightly above the point, so to speak, where electrochemistry turns into psychology?


Similarities between soap operas and dreams

As a consequence of their addiction to daily life, both the soap opera and the dream tend to specialize in the tension between the mundane and the explosive.

• In soaps -  everybody has ‘Pinter’ look

• look that says, ‘I know you’re lying to me about Edgar and you know that I know but I’ll pretend I don’t in such a way as that you’ll suspect I’m having an affair with Susan.

• Also mentions - ‘casual triviality that brings down the mountain of deceit: - ‘I thought you said Ellen came back to the apartment after Jazzersize?

• In your dream, people know: they see through your self-deceits because they are simply yourself perceived as others/ conversations heavily subtextual with emotion  (nonsensical when awake).

Examining dreams along the lines of Vladimir Popp’s study of the morphology of the Russian folktale

• Dream images -characters, animals, objects (which often behave like characters) - as what Propp calls character functions/  like positions on a basketball team/ Guarding function

• So a function is neither a character nor an action, but something a the interface of the two.

• Seeking/ finding/ helping/ hindering

• allow us to break down a narrative structure in even the most erratic of dreams

Propp -trebling device.