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 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1993

The impact of dream interpretation using psychological kinesiology on the frequency of recurring dreams.

Subjects reporting a recurring dream at least 4 times a month for a year or more were assigned to a dream recording control group and an experimental group which used muscle testing to guide dream interpretation. Dream frequency was recorded prior to and following a dream interpretation intervention (experimental subjects) or dream reporting session (control subjects). Dream frequency declined in the experimental group, suggesting that recurring dream frequency is a useful dependent variable, and that psychological kinesiology dream interpretation is a powerful intervention.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Last night I had the strangest dream: Varieties of rational thought processes in dream reports.

From the neurophysiological perspective, thinking in dreaming and the quality of dream thought have been considered hallucinatory, bizarre, illogical, improbable, or even impossible. This empirical phenomenological research concentrates on testing whether dream thought can be defined as rational in the sense of an intervening mental process between sensory perception and the creation of meaning, leading to a conclusion or to taking action. From 10 individual dream journals of male participants aged 22-59 years and female participants aged 25-49 years, we delimited four dreams per journal and randomly selected five thought units from each dream for scoring. The units provided a base for testing a hypothesis that the thought processes of dream construction are rational. The results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that eight fundamental rational thought processes can be applied to the dreaming process.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Shame conflicts as dream instigators: wish fulfillment and the ego ideal in dream dynamics.

Understanding of the instigatory dynamics of the dream is essential to the understanding of the dream as a fulfilled wish. Both the meaning and the function of the dream can be understood only in relation to the instigating disruption that drives the dream into being. It is the instigator of the dream that connects the working of the inner world with events in the external world. The literature on the process of dream instigation is scant, still deriving from Freud's metaphor of "capitalist and entrepreneur." Hidden shame conflicts that react to the dreamer's anticipation of danger of exposure and shame are significant factors in the instigation of the dream. Clinical material in support of this view is presented in the form of a verbatim session that included a dream.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Immediate and delayed incorporations of events into dreams: further replication and implications for dream function.

The incorporation of memories into dreams is characterized by two types of temporal effects: the day-residue effect, involving immediate incorporations of events from the preceding day, and the dream-lag effect, involving incorporations delayed by about a week. This study was designed to replicate these two effects while controlling several prior methodological problems and to provide preliminary information about potential functions of delayed event incorporations. Introductory Psychology students were asked to recall dreams at home for 1 week. Subsequently, they were instructed to select a single dream and to retrieve past events related to it that arose from one of seven randomly determined days prior to the dream (days 1-7). They then rated both their confidence in recall of events and the extent of correspondence between events and dreams. Judges evaluated qualities of the reported events using scales derived from theories about the function of delayed incorporations. Average ratings of correspondences between dreams and events were high for predream days 1 and 2, low for days 3 and 4 and high again for days 5-7, but only for participants who rated their confidence in recall of events as high and only for females. Delayed incorporations were more likely than immediate incorporations to refer to events characterized by interpersonal interactions, spatial locations, resolved problems and positive emotions. The findings are consistent with the possibility that processes with circaseptan (about 7 days) morphology underlie dream incorporation and that these processes subserve the functions of socio-emotional adaptation and memory consolidation.

Adult↗
PubMed1977

The brain as a dream state generator: an activation-synthesis hypothesis of the dream process.

Recent research in the neurobiology of dreaming sleep provides new evidence for possible structural and functional substrates of formal aspects of the dream process. The data suggest that dreaming sleep is physiologically determined and shaped by a brain stem neuronal mechanism that can be modeled physiologically and mathematically. Formal features of the generator processes with strong implications for dream theory include periodicity and automaticity of forebrain activation, suggesting a preprogrammed neural basis for dream mentation in sleep; intense and sporadic activation of brain stem sensorimotor circuits including reticular, oculomotor, and vestibular neurons, possibly determining spatiotemporal aspects of dream imagery; and shifts in transmitter ratios, possibly accounting for dream amnesia. The authors suggest that the automatically activated forebrain synthesizes the dream by comparing information generated in specific brain stem circuits with information stored in memory.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Perverse dreams and dreams of perversion.

This paper (1) posits the occurrence of perverse dreams as a type of mental phenomenon in the constellation of perverse processes; (2) considers manifest dreams of frank perversion as a type of perverse dream within the class of perverse dreams as a whole; (3) relates the subtype of perverse dreams without manifest perversions to the occurrence of perverse defenses and the development of a perverse transference; and (4) suggests that consideration to perverse dreams in the psychoanalytic process finds application in identifying and differentiating perverse defenses from neurotic and other characterologic patterns; in identifying and tracing the vicissitudes of difficult perverse transference-countertransference constellations; and in furthering perverse patients' recognition and understanding of particularly troublesome and seemingly intractable issues in their psychic makeup. Clinical material illustrates perverse dreams and their usefulness in the often arduous process of analyzing perverse defenses.

Countertransference↗
PubMed1996

Dreaming away depression: the role of REM sleep and dreaming in affective disorders.

REM sleep and dreaming may play a crucial role in the processing of affect. In a recent study, we demonstrated that dream content is related to prevailing mood state and that certain types of dream precede upward mood changes in bipolar disorder (manic-depression). To replicate and extend initial findings, we monitored sleep, dream content and mood, in both bipolar and unipolar patients hospitalized for depression. All patients (n = 24) were recruited in a depressed state. During this trial, subjects reported their dreams and rated their mood each morning. They also had their sleep recorded intermittently using the Nightcap, a compact computerized home sleep monitoring device. We found that: (i) REM latency tends to increase as the mood improves in bipolars but is stable (and even decreases with mood improvements) in unipolar depressives; (ii) dream content continues to systematically relate to prevailing mood state, but the patterns seen are different in unipolars and bipolars; (iii) dreams of death are frequent in bipolar disorder and mark the transition of a mood shift upward.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Affect and cognition in dreams: a critique of the cognitive role in adaptive dream functioning and support for associative models.

Dream affect and cognition are examined in a 4-month longitudinal study of depressed, recently divorced subjects. Several measures of cognition in dream reports were used to determine whether remitting subjects were more likely to utilize certain cognitive strategies than nonremitters. No differences were found in the cognition between those who were remitting and nonremitting subjects. Levels of cognition in dreaming were directly related to the emotional intensity of the dreams across all subjects. In subjects with higher depression scores (Beck Depression Inventory > 20), depression levels were inversely related to both dream affect and cognition. It is argued that cognition plays a secondary role in dream production. A modification of David Foulkes's model of dreaming is proposed, in which emotional intensity drives associative processes, which in turn require more elaborate cognitive devices to relate diverse activated mnemonic units.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1985

The common mirror dream, dreamer, and the dream mirror.

From the widely diverse category of so-called mirror dreams, we have differentiated the most frequent, which we have designated the common mirror dream (CMD). It is one in which the dreamer at some point looks into a mirror and reports seeing himself, a part of himself or a distorted though recognizable version of himself. Mirror dreams, including CMDs, are distinctly uncommon. Every dreamer of CMDs in our series had felt enjoined by the mother (in most cases with the father's collusion) not to see and regard her clearly and not to be an accurately reflecting mirror for her. The intensity with which the maternal injunction against accurate visual perception and evaluation was feared was an important distinguishing feature in our patients with CMDs. The essence of the CMD has been hypothesized to be a reciprocal, reverberating, visual-exhibitionistic dyad representative of the mother-child relationship. The dream mirror may represent the wish that the analyst-mother counter a feared parental injunction against accurate visual perception and evaluation so as to correct the distorted perceptions of self and objects and provide visual affirmation of the value and integrity of the self-representation. For some patients, defense against the dangers of castration and loss of maternal love was accomplished by the mirror mechanisms of magically transforming images in the mirror, the ease of creating illusion in the mirror, and a fetishistic mechanism of visually reintrojecting a phallic symbol from the mirror. Our data failed to confirm many of the hypotheses of previous contributors as to specific symbolic meanings of the dream mirror. More relevant than the symbolism of the dream mirror are the many functions of the dream mirror for the dreamer. These are analyzed and discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

'Dreams that turn over a page'. Integration dreams with paradoxical regressive content.

The subject of this paper is 'dreams that turn over a page', whose primitive anxiety-inducing content frightens the dreamer, although the psychoanalyst sees them as a sign of progress in psychic integration despite their regressive appearance. This thesis is illustrated by clinical examples. Because such anxiety dreams typically occur at a time of integration, the author considers that the analyst must interpret them as showing that the patient is now able to accept hitherto unrepresentable parts of himself, while the dream content proper should be interpreted at a second stage once the anxiety has subsided. The author postulates that these seemingly regressive dreams are a token of progress because they occur at privileged points in the transference when projective identification is giving way to introjection. The reintegration of previously expelled fragments causes anxiety but also gives the dreamer a sense of inner cohesion, while at the same time accounting for the particular clarity and coherence of these dreams. The author compares his concept of dreams that turn over a page with similar notions in the literature and contends that such dreams retrospectively illuminate changes in the dreamer's intrapsychic conflicts on a more elementary level of unconscious fantasy than the classical approach would suggest.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

[Dream interpretation and experimental dream research: a comparison].

Since the discovery of REM sleep, many experimental studies have focused on dream recall, dream function and dream analysis in the sleep laboratory. The present article gives an overview of the results of experimental dream research and tries to evaluate the relevance of these results for psychoanalytical dream theory. Two theories originating from psychophysiological dream research are discussed in detail and compared with formulations stemming from psychoanalytical oriented dream theory.

Cerebral Cortex↗
PubMed1986

[Castration attempts in the dream. Psychophysiologic research of dreams and psychoanalysis].

The author gives a brief survey on psychophysiological correlational dream studies since 1953. Early optimism of physiologists and psychoanalysts on the possibility of building bridges between psyche and soma that could further the understanding of the dream over and above the psychoanalytic contributions has largely given way to more sober considerations. The subjective side of dreams and their importance for therapeutic and maturational processes has never been the subject of psychophysiologic investigation. Its objectives did not go beyond mere correlational studies of physiological events and dream content categories. Reductionist theories of certain neurophysiologists that conceive of the dream as an epiphenomenon of physiologic arousal were followed by some psychoanalysts' reconceptualization of oniric understanding. Psychological and physiological levels of interpretation must, for lack of a superordinate framework, be strictly kept apart. Psychophysiologic dream studies have, on the whole, added little to the understanding of the dream as a significant mental product of clinical importance.

Arousal↗
PubMed2005

Nested ideation and the problem of reality: dreams and works of art in dreams.

This study uses seven well-analyzed dreams to establish three empirical generalizations about dreams and works of art nested in dreams: (1) Those dreams attempt to deny a painful reality in some way depicted in the nested element; (2) they present an antithetical view of that reality (both denying and affirming); and (3) they are consistently associated with the problem of reality (the problem of deciding what is real or true). The explanation of these empirical generalizations is based on a hypothesis derived from Freud's 1911 formulation of the dream within a dream.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Broken dreams: a study of the effects of divorce and depression on dream content.

To investigate the dream characteristics associated with a major life change, 29 women (ages 30-55) undergoing divorce were studied six nights in a sleep laboratory. The group was stratified on a self-report depression scale (the Beck Depression Inventory) into a depressed (N = 19, mean = 23.2) and nondepressed (N = 10, mean = 8.2) group and compared to a nondepressed married group who had never considered divorce. The dreams of those divorcing without major mood upset were longer and dealt with a wider time frame than those of the other two groups. They also dealt with marital status issues which were absent in the dreams of the depressed group. On follow-up those who had been depressed showed positive dream changes in mood, dreamlike quality, and identification of dream self with the marital role. The study suggests that some dream characteristics respond adaptively during life changes but that this is delayed when subjects are depressed. This raises the possibility of a corrective intervention for such persons.

Adult↗