Dreams in therapy

DREAMS: WHY DON’T PSYCHOLOGISTS TAKE THEM MORE SERIOUSLY?

One of the most common questions I get asked as a psychotherapist is “will you be interested in my dreams?” I wanted to take this opportunity to outline some of the theoretical strengths and weaknesses in dream work in therapy.

• Case studies are the main sources of information; they have not been methodologically controlled.
• They are so different from waking experience that they were seen as not being valid material for cognitive research.
• They are so personal and subjective that you can’t apply scientific methods to the study of dreams.
• It is inconvenient and expensive to collect data.
• Nightmares don’t occur in lab conditions.

However, some therapists believe:

• We can ‘incorporate our dream material into our waking lives both to increase our self awareness and to extend our creativity.’ (Cushway and Sewell, 1992)

THE DREAMING PROCESS

• Everybody dreams
• There are five stages of dreaming. Dreams during REM are more vivid and easier to remember.
• About 25% of adult sleep is in REM – it decreases as we get older
• Most REM sleep is near morning.
• Dreams occur in real time
• If deprived of REM sleep, people will make it up if given the opportunity
• There’s no consensus about why we dream:

o   The brainstem generates random impulses that the cortex tries to make sense of

o   Memory re-organisation and the collection of unwanted memories

Information processing

DREAM HISTORY

Ancient Civilisations

• Two methods of interpretation

o   The whole dream as a symbol for another context

o   Each symbol was looked up in a dream book

• Egyptians believed dreams were messages from the gods.
• Native Americans had dream friends
• Many other cultures practised dream incubation – people would ask for a message from the gods to be sent in a dream as an answer to a problem or illness.

20^th Century

• Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) marks a turning point in dreamwork
• Jung and Perls both contributed to dream study

• The concept of Lucid Dreaming has been recently explored as a therapeutic tool.

FREUD AND DREAMS

• Dreams were neurotic symptoms and wish fulfilments rooted in infantile sexuality and repressed by the superego
• The latent content is disguised to protect our anxiety if we wake
• Dreams are therefore a safety valve and the guardians of sleep
• Dreamwork translates the latent from the manifest through free association of each element. It undoes the work of the censor and unscrambles the code.
• His theories were seminal

LIMITATIONS

• There’s little evidence that dreams are repressed wishes (animals/foetuses etc)
• Some dreams are sexual or aggressive and people sleep through them
• The symbols may be reductionist, especially the sexual element
• They change according to culture, circumstance etc
• The opposite of Freud’s protection theory may be true – a function of sleep may be to allow dreaming
• The patriarchal nature of Freudian thinking may lead to women’s dreams being misunderstood.

JUNG AND DREAMS

• Jung extended Freud’s thoughts.
• Dreams have a teleological function
• He thought dreams were normal and creative, not a disturbance.
• Their purpose is to restore psychological homeostasis and individuation.
• He was more focused on the current experience of the dreamer and about the issues of existence
• Each aspect of the dream shows something personal about the dreamer
• Dreams were an ucs drive to health; the cs can be involved

• Encouraged the exploration of symbols as personal and transcendent, not formulaic
• Focused on manifest content: symbols had power of their own and could reveal rather than hide thoughts/wishes
• ‘the dream is its own interpretation’ and ‘dreams are the direct expression of the unconscious’ (CW 7)
• Less interpretation. Amplification and imagination are more therapeutic.
• Didn’t use free association but wanted to focus on the story of the dream/s
• Used myths and legends to find significant symbols – they showed a layer of the mind common to the whole universe: the collective ucs
• Archetypes are symbols that show the common and pervasive interests of mankind.
• Dreams are creative and helpful rather than shameful
• They compensate, using symbols, for the limitations of consciousness – we can ask ‘what conscious attitude does it compensate?’ (CW 7)

LIMITATIONS

• Not enough emphasis on body or sexuality

• allusions may be too high-brow for most people

disguised, – recovered through free association.

PERLS AND DREAMS

• Developed Jung’s dream theories
• Focused on here and now rather than Freudian ucs
• Felt dreams were the ‘royal road to integration.’
• Existential message rather than wishful thinking
• Dreams help resolve unfinished business
• Each object is a projected part of ourselves – we need to re-own them  (cf Jung’s idea of repressed parts of personality as dream objects)
• Re-tell dream in 1^st person; present tense; speak as each object and create a dialogue; may integrate by having dialogue between topdog and underdog.
• The repressed parts are brought into awareness by acting out characters/objects – turning ‘it into I’

LIMITATIONS

• It may be difficult to act out all the parts in a dream
• It may distract the client from the story