Dreams // Current TV

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams Do Have Meaning

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious... more

unimatrix0
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2 years ago
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Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams — and, more so, sleep — are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotion.

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest — specifically, rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep — influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, either following a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions such as happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe — a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion — was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: "If it's getting food, if it's getting some kind of reward, finding a wife, those things are pretty good to pick up on."

Our daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab, and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives."Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious... more

singrrr
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2 years ago
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United Kingdom Talk Video Thursday 21st May 2009

Thursday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch or listen to the show... more

ChrisReardon
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3 years ago
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LAST DAY DREAM... (short video)

Beautiful short video of an entire life in the blink of an eye. Very dramatic score... more

sophisticatedyouth
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3 years ago
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20 comments

The road less traveled

I decided to move from Jackson, Mississippi to Los Angeles, California to seek... more

Jsoutullo
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3 years ago
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2 comments

A Growing Number of Actors Influenced by Jung

"While preparing for her role as Addison Montgomery Shepherd, or the villainous... more

St_Alia_10191
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3 years ago
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1 comment

Earth's magnetic field holds the secret to sweet dreams

New research suggests you can blame the Earth's magnetic field for your weird... more

SW2
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3 years ago
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Scientists develop 'dream recorder'

A bunch of Japanese scientists are moving a step closer to developing technologies... more

mattbrawn
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3 years ago
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United Kingdom Talk Video Saturday 21st March 2009

Saturday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show here on... more

ChrisReardon
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3 years ago
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What do your sex dreams reveal?

Everybody has them (unless you're one of those people who doesn't dream...... more

abbym0308
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3 years ago
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14 comments

Rocket Girl

Art video of a painting I did on an old video arcade glass panel from the 80's. I... more

WindwalkerArt
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3 years ago
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Dream Pop

The Eyes are the doorway to the soul, in this case to a dream. An abstract video... more

WindwalkerArt
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3 years ago
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Lucid Dream Dos and Dont's: Waking Up

The Dreamcatcher 100,000, great model.

joshuaheller
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3 years ago
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What Do Dreams Mean? Whatever You Want!

"Psychologists asked college students in three countries — India, South Korea and the United States — how much significance they attached to dreams. Relatively few students believed in modern theories that dreaming is simply the brain’s response to random impulses, or that it’s a mechanism for sorting and discarding information. Instead, the majority in all three countries believed, along with Freud, that dreams reveal important unconscious emotions.

These instinctive Freudians also considered dreams to be valuable omens, as demonstrated in a study asking them to imagine they were about to take a plane trip. If, on the eve of the flight, they dreamed of the plane’s crashing, they were more likely to cancel the trip than if they saw news of an actual plane crash on their route.

But when the researchers asked people to interpret dreams, some suspiciously convenient correlations turned up. When asked to recall their own dreams, they attached more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and they gave correspondingly more weight to a positive dream if it was about a friend.

A similar bias showed up when people were asked to imagine that they had had various dreams starring a friend or a deity. People rated a dream about a friend protecting them against attackers as being more “meaningful” than a dream about their own romantic partner faithlessly kissing that same friend. People who believed in God were more likely than agnostics to be swayed by divine apparitions.

But even the nonbelievers showed a weakness for certain heavenly dreams, like one in which God commanded them to take a year off to travel the world. Agnostics rated that dream as significantly more meaningful than the dream of God commanding them to spend a year working in a leper colony. (Incidentally, although the preferred term for leprosy is now Hansen’s disease, the deity in the experiment used the old-fashioned term from the Bible.)

Dreamers’ self-serving bias is tactfully defined as a “motivated approach to dream interpretation” by Dr. Morewedge and Dr. Norton in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. When asked if this “motivated approach” might also affect dream researchers, Dr. Morewedge pointed to Freud’s tendency to find what he was looking for — sex — in his “Interpretation of Dreams.”

“Freud himself suggested that dreams of flying revealed thoughts of sexual desire,” Dr. Morewedge noted. “Interestingly, in the same text, Freud also suggested that dreams about the absence of the ability to fly — i.e., falling — also indicate succumbing to sexual desire. One might interpret this as evidence that scientists are just as self-serving as laypeople when interpreting their dreams.”

Once you see how flexible dream interpretation can be, you can appreciate why it has always been such a popular tool for decision-making. Relying on your dreams for guidance is like the political ritual of appointing an “independent blue-ribbon panel” to resolve an issue. You can duck any personal responsibility for action while pretending to rely on an impartial process, even though you’ve stacked the panel with your own friends and will ignore any advice that conflicts with your desires. Charity work, no; margaritas, sí.""Psychologists asked college students in three countries — India, South... more