Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “DREAMS”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources
PubMedDate not supplied

Alexithymia and dream recall upon spontaneous morning awakening.

OBJECTIVE: The issue of a quantitative and qualitative impoverishment of dream activity in alexithymic subjects was assessed by analysis of the 14-day dream reports of two groups of accurately selected alexithymic and nonalexithymic subjects. METHODS: Ten alexithymic and 10 nonalexithymic women were selected from a larger sample of 160 undergraduate students. The transcriptions of their audio-recorded dream reports on 14 consecutive morning awakenings were compared with regard to their length and emotional content. Self-ratings obtained from sleep and dream diaries were further considered to assess between-groups differences in dream recall frequency and in the emotional valence, vividness, and bizarreness of dreams. RESULTS: Dream recall frequency and mean length of dream reports were lower in alexithymic than in nonalexithymic subjects. There were no significant between-groups differences in emotional valence, vividness, bizarreness, and emotions scored according to the Hall and Van de Castle coding system. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest a general difficulty of alexithymics in accessing (recalling) their dreams.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

The dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective.

In this paper I discuss the nature and role of dream and the dreaming process in Jungian clinical practice in the light of neuroscience. Insights from contemporary neuroscience support rather than contest Jung's view that emotional truth, not censorship or disguise, underpins the dreaming process. I use clinical material to illustrate how work with dreams within the total interactive experience of the analytic dyad enables the development of the emotional scaffolding necessary for the development of 'mind'. Large scale evidence-based research reveals that dreaming is caused by brain activity during sleep that is both biochemically and regionally different from that of waking states. Recent imaging studies confirm that dreams are the mind's vehicle for the processing of emotional states of being, particularly the fear, anxiety, anger or elation that often figure prominently. Dream sleep is understood as also being the guardian of memory, playing a part in forgetting, encoding and affective organization of memory. In the clinical section of the paper I let a series of dreams speak for themselves, revealing the emotionally salient concerns of the dreamer, weaving past and present, transference and reality together in a way that demonstrates the healthy attempt of the brain-mind to come to terms with difficult emotional experience from the past. The dreams become dreamable as part of the meaning-making process of analysis.

Brain↗
PubMed1992

Dreams of anorexic and bulimic women. A research study.

The research paradigms used in this study fit with the content analysis paradigms of Hall and Van de Castle (1966) and Dippel et al. (1987), but differ in the use of descriptive scenarios specific to eating disorders. Anorexic and bulimic patients are often able to share their dreams with their therapists, and this process is sometimes the start of building an analytical relationship. This study compared the dreams of twelve eating-disordered women with eleven 'normal' women. A total of 275 dreams was collected over a four-week period and rated on a 91-item scale (Brink 1991) by eight raters. Significant differences were found between the two groups, with eating-disordered women having more dream scenarios depicting themes of: impending doom at the end of the dream, attitudes of 'whatever I do I won't succeed', and images of the dreamer being attacked, and being watched. Significant differences were also found in dream content portraying the psychological traits of: ineffectiveness, self-hate, negative emotions, an inability to self-nourish, obsession with weight, and anger. The discussion centres around the role of 'inordinate oral rage', the nature of ego defences, how these defences manifest themselves in dream images and in daily living, and how they severely impair positive transformative processes. The implications for clinical practice are that dreams are an amenable way of working with eating-disordered women, and that the therapist is more likely to promote positive transformation through focusing on their dreams than trying to change their behaviour.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Lucid dreaming as a treatment for recurrent nightmares.

BACKGROUND: Lucid dreams occur when a person becomes aware that he or she is dreaming while still in the dream state. Previous reports on the use of lucid dreaming in the treatment of nightmares do not contain adequate baseline data, follow-up data, or both. METHODS: A treatment of recurrent nightmares incorporating progressive muscle relaxation, guided imagery, and lucid dream induction is presented for 2 case studies. Three other cases were treated with lucid dream induction alone. The duration of the nightmares ranged from once every few days to once every few months. RESULTS: The procedures were effective in all 5 cases. A 1-year follow-up showed that 4 of the subjects no longer had nightmares and that 1 subject experienced a decrease in the intensity and frequency of her nightmares. CONCLUSIONS: The alleviation of recurrent nightmares in these 5 cases parallels the results reported by other authors who have used training in lucid dreaming to treat nightmares. Our results support the idea that treatments based on lucid dream induction can be of therapeutic value. Based on these and other case studies, it remains unclear whether the principal factor responsible for the alleviation of nightmares is lucidity itself, or the ability to alter some aspect of the dream.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Religious dreaming: a viewpoint.

Religious dreaming is as universal an experience as dreaming. But, unlike the ancients who interpreted their religious dreams in context of their religious views, contemporary man has been too shackled by scientific materialism to fully appreciate religious dreams. I have presented a review of some contemporary observations on religious dreams, and presented two clinical cases and current dream material to show that we still can harness the power of religious dreams. Religious images and symbols in dreams can provide a source for growth and health today as they did in ancient times. When the outer religious symbols of groups lose their effectiveness in our lives, inner religious symbols as seen in dreams can become more effective in human life. The need to work with religious images and symbolism is indicated.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Forms of dreaming.

A classification-rating system for formal anomalies in dream experience focuses on the contribution a cognitive psychology of dream bizarreness might make to the question of whether dreaming is a form of thinking. In Part I, two traditional issues in the psychology of dreams--dreaming as "hallucination" and dreaming as symbolic thought--are connected via phenomenological method and cognitive theory. Parts II and III present the relatively infrequent categories of typical dream bizarreness and demonstrate that (a) in departing from realism dreaming tends toward a delirium--visual hallucinosis and cognitive clouding--and seems distinct from schizophrenic, psychedelic, or meditative states and (b) if dream anomalies show a symbolic transformation process, then the roots of that process are visual-spatial, not verbal-propositional.

Cognition↗
PubMed2001

The meaning of dreams in the psychotic state. Theoretical considerations and clinical applications.

The authors consider that the Freudian theory of dreams is not directly applicable to psychotic and borderline patients with their constantly varying states of mental integration. Because these patients' dreams lack associations, the usual psychoanalytic approach cannot be used to ascertain their meaning. After reviewing the literature on the specific quality of dreams in the psychotic state, the authors point out that such dreams have nothing to do with the metaphorical language of the dream work but instead express the concreteness of the hallucinatory construction. For this reason, a dream's meaning may fail to be understood by the patient even if it seems clear to an observer. Yet the analyst's reception of a 'psychotic dream' is a unique and essential source of valuable information on the manner of construction of the delusional system, allowing analytic work on the psychotic nucleus. In the authors' view, such dreams may help the analyst and the patient--while still lucid--to acquire insight, thus affording a stable foundation for emergence from psychosis. The paper includes some case histories, in one of which a psychotic female patient is enabled by work on dreams to reconstruct a psychotic episode and thereby to ward off an imminent fresh lapse into psychosis.

Borderline Personality Disorder↗
PubMed2003

On not being able to dream.

In this paper, the author explores the phenomenon of not being able to dream (as opposed to not being able to remember one's dreams) from three different vantage points. First, from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory, he discusses Bion's idea that the work of dreaming creates the conscious and unconscious mind (and not the other way around). A person who cannot dream is unable to generate differentiable conscious and unconscious experience and, consequently, lives in a psychic state in which he is unable to differentiate waking from sleeping, dreaming from perceiving. The author then approaches the problem of the inability to dream from the perspective achieved by a literary work. He discusses a Borges fiction that creates, in a singularly artful way, the experience of not being able to dream. Finally, the author utilises the vantage point of a detailed account of a clinical experience to explore what it means not to be able to dream. He describes an initial state characterised by the patient's proliferation of unutilisable 'psychic noise' which, over a period of years, led to the analyst's experiencing 'reverie-deprivation' and brief periods of countertransference psychosis. Two analytic sessions are presented and discussed in which psychological work was done that contributed to an enhanced capacity on the part of both patient and analyst for genuine dreaming - both in sleep and in analytic reverie states.

Countertransference↗
PubMed1999

Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences: a topical debate on dreams.

The author begins by pointing out that, whereas Freud first turned his attention to dreams in 1895, they became an object of neuroscientific interest only in the 1950s, after the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and the observation that a subject woken in an REM phase could remember and narrate them. He discusses the various brain structures found by the neuroscientists to be implicated in dreaming and the associated hypotheses about their involvement in the processes of remembering dreams, their spatial construction and semantic organisation, and the dreamer's emotional participation in and narration of dreams. Attention is drawn to recent psychophysiological research findings indicating that dreaming occurs in all sleep phases and not only in REM episodes. The cognitivist contribution is also discussed. The author goes on to demonstrate the difference between the neuroscientific and psychoanalytic approaches to dreams. Whereas the neuroscientists are interested in the structures involved in dream production and in dream organisation and narratability, psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning of dreams and on placing them in the context of the analytic relationship in accordance with the affective history of the dreamer and the transference. The brain structures and functions of interest to the neurosciences, while constituting the physical and biological substrate of these aspects, are stated to be irrelevant to their psychoanalytic understanding.

Dreams↗
PubMed1989

Contributions to psychohistory: XV. Structural characteristics as an index of mental health in Freud's, his patients' and colleagues' manifest dreams.

Evolution of psychoanalytic dream theory from the topographical-conflict model resulted in the relative ascendance of manifest dream content and structure. Correspondingly, Freud's emphasis on the latent dream, disguised unconscious wish-fulfillment function, was paralleled by the development of an ego problem-solving-conflict function demonstrably observable in subjects' and patients' nocturnal dreams in sleep-lab REM awakenings. This development culminated in clinical, theoretical, and operational adoption of binary opposition as a language of manifest dream structure and a corresponding definition of mental health in terms of personal problem-solving efficacy measured in a narrative as self-defined, self-advocacy-adversary statements of sequences. Process and outcome measures from initial studies of psychoanalytic patients and nonpatients' dreams evidenced concurrent validity. Use of this measure on the three types of dreams reported in Freud's seminal The Interpretation of Dreams yielded results which support the inference that Freud's dreams are significantly more healthy than those of his patients or others (mostly colleagues).

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1996

Lucid dreaming and the mind-body relationship: a model for the cognitive and physiological variations in rapid eye movement sleep.

The psychophysiological properties of the lucid dream state were examined to evaluate the relationship between lucid and nonlucid dreaming, emphasizing the fact that the components of self-reflectiveness and other cognitive features commonly associated with lucid dreams occur in all dreams to various extents. Although lucid dreams are clearly toward one end of the continuum, they still share many of the characteristics present in most dreams. In this respect, exploration of lucid dreams may not necessarily be a misguided path toward the understanding of dreaming in general. A simple model was described to illustrate the mind-body relationship in various forms of REM dreaming.

Awareness↗
PubMed1998

Prevalence of auditory, olfactory, and gustatory experiences in home dreams.

Although numerous studies have investigated the content of laboratory and home dream reports, surprisingly little is known about the prevalence of various sensory modes in dreams. 49 men and 115 women completed a battery of questionnaires and kept a home dream diary for two to three consecutive weeks. Retrospective responses to the questionnaire indicate that approximately 33% of men and 40% of women recalled having experienced sensations of smell or taste in their dreams. A total of 3372 dream reports were collected and scored for unambiguous references to auditory, olfactory, and gustatory experiences. Auditory experiences were reported in approximately 53% of all dream reports. Olfactory and gustatory sensations occurred in approximately 1% of all dream reports. A significantly greater percentage of women than men reported one or more dreams containing references to olfactory sensations. The results lend support to previous studies which have shown that a variety of sensory experiences, although relatively rare, can occur in dreams.

Dreams↗
PubMed2004

Typical dreams: stability and gender differences.

Although the variability of dream content is large, typical dream themes that occur quite often and are reported by many people can be identified (e.g., being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom). The present study is an investigation of the stability of the rank order of the dream themes and of gender differences in the content of dreams. The authors administered A. L. Zadra and T. A. Nielsen's (1997) Typical Dream Questionnaire to 444 participants. The findings indicated that most of the 55 dream themes occurred at least once in most of the participants' lifetimes. In addition, the correlation coefficients for the rank order of the themes were very high; that is, the relative frequencies were stable. The gender differences in the present study were in line with content analytic findings; for example, men reported dreams about physical aggression more often than did women. Overall, previous research and the present data indicate that available research results of the measurement of typical dream themes are reliable and valid. The question of the meaning of these themes or the relationship between typical dream contents and waking life experiences, however, has not yet been answered and is open to future research.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The use of dreams in psychotherapy: a survey of psychotherapists in private practice.

Since the publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, dream interpretation has been a standard technique often used in psychotherapy. However, empirical studies about the frequency of working on dreams in therapy are lacking. The present study elicited, via a self-developed questionnaire, various aspects of work on dreams applied by psychotherapists in private practice. The findings indicate that dreams were often used in therapy, especially in psychoanalysis. In addition, a significant relationship was found between the frequency of the therapists' working on their own dreams and frequency of work on dreams in therapy. Because work on dreams was rated as beneficial for the clients, further studies investigating the effectiveness and the process of working on dreams will be of interest.

Behavior Therapy↗
PubMed2004

[Fear in dreams of 9- to 11-year-old children].

The present study investigated anxiety dreams in 9- to 11-year-old children. 103 children completed a dream questionnaire, in which they were asked about their anxiety dreams and their coping with these dreams. Furthermore, they completed an anxiety inventory to measure their trait anxiety. Girls reported a higher frequency of anxiety dreams than boys, although they could not remember their dreams more often. Girls dreamt more often than boys of the loss of another person, of falling, of socially disturbing situations and small animals, of animals as aggressors, of family members (mainly siblings) and other female persons of known identity. Thus, the dreams clearly reflect the importance of social relationships in girls' lives. Stress from anxiety dreams could only partly be explained by their frequency. Girls and more anxious children of both sexes turned out to be stressed the most. Further studies may concentrate on children's inner experience, if they want to find out the meaning of anxiety dreams in children's emotional development. This could be important for the prevention of affective disorders.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1989

How are dreams made? Towards a computational model.

In order to account for how dreams are made, both information structures and energy systems must be made more explicit. This paper attempts to spell out in more detail two of the three components that Foulkes postulated as essential to dream construction, namely, memory and planning. It draws on the mechanisms in Mueller's computational model of human daydreaming, in particular, a planner--which consists of personal goals, daydreaming goals, and planning and inference rules for a particular domain--and a set of emotions that determine the choice of daydreaming goals. We analyzed the laboratory REM dream of an adult male subject in terms of the three kinds of goals in Mueller's model: namely, the personal goals that derive form the day residue elicited from the subject prior to the dream; the dream goals of reversal, rehearsal, rationalization, and revenge; and the planning goals or script identified in a metaphoric problem space. The sequence of scenes from the script determines the skeletal structure of the dream, and the emotion of humiliation, decomposed into embarrassment and anger, largely determines the choice of dream goals. Much of the dream content itself is the instantiation of an inference rule for restoring social esteem. Finally, it is argued that the kind and quantity of mechanisms that are postulated by Mueller for human daydreaming are also necessary to account for basic processes of night dream construction.

Computer Simulation↗
PubMed1982

The life-context of the dreamer and the setting of dreaming.

This paper highlights the critical role played by the 'life-context' of the dreamer and the 'setting' of dreaming in the formation and interpretation of dreams. It suggests that we dream not to express our repressed childhood wishes, but to experience the repressed (or the ego-dystonic) aspects of currently active developmental conflicts (i.e. the life-context). Elements of the repressed childhood experiences are present in dreams, but they are there for having played a critical role in causing and maintaining current conflicts. The framework within which dreaming, remembering and reporting occurs (i.e. the setting) is seen to exercise an influence on dreams. For example, the dreams reported by an analysand and a laboratory subject differ not only because of their individual differences, but also because of the differential effects of the two settings. Finally, using these two concepts, an attempt is made to clarify the presence of day-residues in dreaming, and the probable basis of the so-called 'intuitive' interpretation of dreams.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Freud's 'lost' dream and the schism with Wilhelm Fliess.

Although there was only one specimen dream in the first draft of 'The Interpretation of Dreams' that Freud would describe as fully analysed, he removed his dream from the text on the insistence of his friend, Wilhelm Fliess. The content of this 'lost dream' has been one of the great mysteries in psychoanalytic history. In this paper the author, working from clues in Freud's letters to Fliess and elsewhere, demonstrates that Freud's submission to Fliess caused him great anguish. The author contends that rather than discarding the lost dream as it has been assumed he did, Freud dismembered, disguised and resurrected it, along with the entire dream analysis, in the essay 'Screen memories'. A reconstruction of the lost dream and Freud's analysis as it appeared in the first draft of 'The Interpretation of Dreams', is attempted. The fate of the lost dream was the catalysing element in the dissolution of Freud's relationship with Fliess, it is maintained. Along with the transferential aspects of his relationship with Fliess, Freud's personal circumstances and the realities of the historical moment in Vienna are considered as contributing to his state of mind at the time.

Dreams↗