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Q: It has been suggested that dreams are therapeutic—therapeutic in that dreams help solve emotional conflicts. How does this work? Jerry Gifford, Murfreesboro, Tennessee Stickgold: There are two versions of this question. From a psychoanalytic (e.g., Freudian) perspective, the act of remembering dreams in the morning, and then trying to understand the emotional issues that seem connected to them, can help you understand emotional conflicts better. From this perspective, you are using the dream sort of like a personalized Rorschach test, helping you identify emotional conflicts that you might not have been aware of consciously. From a more cognitive neuroscience perspective, emotional conflicts are simply one of the realms of memories that are processed while we sleep and dream, largely outside of intent or conscious awareness. From this perspective, sleep permits a time when the brain can search for and identify useful associations between recently formed emotional memories and older ones, helping to place them in a more useful context, from which their resolution may become more readily apparent. Jerry: Enough with Freud already. As Stickgold stated earlier Freud was probably 50 percent right and 100 percent wrong! Other than that I agree with his response. By understanding an emotional conflict would naturally suggest a therapeutic value in dreams. Q: People say that dreams are just reflections of what we think about the most during the day. Is that true? Stickgold: No. Dreams seem to be more about what the brain calculates as most important. Arguably, this can be what you spent most of the day thinking about, but it need not. A simple example would be an unexpected but very emotional event occurring shortly before you go to bed. You're much more likely to dream about that than the four hours you spent, say, weeding the lawn. Now you could argue that you are thinking about more important things while weeding, but that brings it back to being about what's important. Having said that, it's also undoubtedly true that anything you spend a lot of time thinking about during the day will be likely to be interpreted by your brain as important simply because you spent so much time thinking about it. But I suspect it's something like the importance multiplied by the time spent on it that determines what we dream about. Jerry: The last part of his answer I mostly agree with. Those daily pressures will be a part of our dreams, one level of the dream addressing recent emotional conflicts. I am not clear about his response about the 'importance multiplied by the time spent on it'. If he speaking about 'conscious' time spend during waking hours, that of course would fit with conflicts that would be addressed by our dreams. But we have to remember that even while we are consciously engaged in time and space our unconscious is taking that in and yet creating associations that may appear in dreams to reflect deeper emotional conflicts from our past. Q: Would documenting one's dreams help one better manage their real life? Paula, San Jose, California Stickgold: Maybe. But only insofar as they give you a sense of what kinds of issues and concerns repeatedly show up. It's probably better than reading your horoscope in the paper. Jerry: I think Stickgold avoided an answer rather than provide a clearer response. Perhaps a lack of Jungian study on his part. Documenting one's dreams, and taking time to analyze them can be an excellent tool in managing one's life because a person with a true interest in their dreams will discover so much more about themself. What is unconscious will be revealed when the dream is interpreted. 'Knowing' what the emotional conflicts that are unconsciously stored are will provide answers to why a person is who they are and why they act as they do. Q: I, and people I have asked, used to dream about flying (being able to lift off the ground, etc.) quite often, but don't seem to have those types of dreams any more. Is there a scientific explanation for "flying dreams" and their frequency of occurrence? Jess Porter Abate, Boston, Massachusetts Stickgold: Allan Hobson has suggested that this is an example of the brain trying to figure out what's going on. In our dreams, we are almost always "in motion." But in reality, our bodies are lying in bed, motionless. At the same time that the dreaming brain is constructing the illusion of movement, it's also getting feedback from the body that we're not, in fact, moving any muscles. Flying might be one way that the brain can put this together—we're moving, but our limbs aren't bending and moving. Jerry: Now we are getting to the heart of Stckgold's problem in his assessment of dreams. He doesn't use words symbols and metaphor. His answer seems to be purely a neurological response and less a psychological one. Flying would be a symbolic reference to some aspect of the dreamer's emotions, associations to a conflict the dream is trying to help resolve. To say flying is strictly a physical response to the condition of sleep {not moving any muscles} again dismisses Jung's contention about the use of symbol and metaphor in dreams. Q: I recently asked Dr. William Dement at Stanford University why dream memories fade almost as soon as we stop dreaming. He said that research hasn't answered this question yet, but his best guess was that if we were to remember all our dreams, we might not be able to easily distinguish dreams from memories, and that might impede our functioning in waking life. This makes sense to me, but I was wondering if there were other hypotheses or any current research on this topic? Terry Ehret, Petaluma, California Stickgold: I suspect that you and Dr. Dement were using different meanings of the word "why." Dement likely was talking about why we might have evolved to not remember them, and I'd tend to agree with him. We probably dream, in one form or another, for six out of eight hours each night. I'd hate to have all of those memories hanging around! But the other "why" has to do with the memory systems that either actively cause us to forget our dreams or, more likely, that fail to effectively store them. One theory is that the shutting off of noradrenaline release during REM sleep may, in turn, shut down systems that normally encode memories. When we wake up, our most recent dream appears to be held in some sort of short-term buffer; since noradrenaline release turns back on when we wake up, if we rehearse that dream in our mind after waking, it may then become more effectively stored with the help of the newly activated noradrenergic system. There is, however, another possibility, which is that memories of our dreams are formed, but that we don't know how to "find" them. We usually access recent memories by remembering, for example, what happened before it, or where we were or who we were with, but we don't have those cues for recalling dreams. The reason I take this possibility seriously is because almost everyone has had the experience of having something happen during the day—a cat running out into the street, for example—and then suddenly remembering a dream from the night before involving a cat. It thus appears that at least some dreams are stored without our ever realizing it. Jerry: These are areas that I have too little knowledge to give a firm response. I agree with some of his statements but there are some generalities in his response that need clarification to access whether they are correct. The cat running out into the street could prompt memories from the past but it would likely have been an experience that of more important significance in the dreamer's life than just a cat running into the street. The experience could be focusing on a past event that was associated with an experience that possessed enough 'psyche' energy to be important. It could, the cat running into the street, be purely symbolic. More later. The act of dreaming is physical. The contents of dreams are psychological Jerry  
Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 61 Murfreesboro, Tn. Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes Jun 23rd, 2011 - 6:45 PM
Here is the conclusion to the Q & A session. Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 61 Murfreesboro, Tn. Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes Jun 26th, 2011 - 5:27 PM
Just finished watching the PBS program 'What Are Dreams'. It dealt with all aspects of dreaming except one. The symbolic representation and metaphorical application of those symbols to the individuals waking life. Because the program was about dreams and dreaming and with very little on the interpretation of dreams this is to be expected. I was a little disappointed but I did learn of important new studies {the program was originally a BBC program first telecast in Britain in 1998}. Overall a fascinating program despite the lack of more info on dream interpretation. Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 61 Murfreesboro, Tn. Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes Jun 29th, 2011 - 9:13 PM
Hey Sam, Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 61 Murfreesboro, Tn. Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes Jul 2nd, 2011 - 8:09 PM
Sam, Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 61 Murfreesboro, Tn. Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes Jul 4th, 2011 - 6:10 AM
If you missed the last showing of this program you can still view on the PBS.org website. The link is here What Are Dreams. Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 61 Murfreesboro, Tn. Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes Jul 4th, 2011 - 6:44 PM
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A related page to Nova's What Are Dreams Program was a Q & A session with Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School as well as director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition. I want to take the questions and Stickgold's responses and add my thoughts and comments. Much of his commentary fits with Jungain psyche yet there is no mention of Jung in his responses. Freud gets some attention but not Jung. I may not post full responses to all questions, just the relevant commentary to save space. Because there are so many questions I will respond in segments. In Stickgold's comments I have highlited in blue responses I agree with. Responses I have a problem with or dsiagree with are highlited in a light red color. These I will try to address in my comments.