62 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
Solms argued that dreaming and REM are not one and the same. First, in about
5% to 30% of the wakings during REM sleep, patients report no dreams, and
during about 5% to 10% of non-REM wakings patients do report dreaming. So
there is no one-to-one correspondence between REM and dreaming. Second,
lesions (due to injury or surgery) to the brain stem do not completely eliminate
dreaming, whereas lesions to the forebrain regions (in the frontal lobes and
parietal- temporal-occipital juncture) have eliminated dreaming and yet preserved
REM sleep.
In addition, as Freud argued, dreams appear not to be random in content.
Several empirical studies have confirmed Freud’s claim in Interpretation of Dreams
that “wishes suppressed during the day assert themselves in dreams” (1900/1953,
p. 590). This has come to be known in the empirical literature as the “dream
rebound effect,” wherein attempts to suppress unwanted thoughts prior to sleep
lead to increased dreaming about that very target (e.g., Schmidt & Gendolla, 2008;
Taylor & Bryant, 2007; Wegner, Wenzlaff, & Kozak, 2004). For example, insom-
nia patients report having insomnia-related dreams after trying to suppress their
worry about getting enough sleep prior to falling asleep (Riemann et al., 2012).
Furthermore, those who score high on the trait of thought-suppression (e.g., “Some-
times I really wish I could stop thinking so much”) report dreaming more waking-
life emotions than those who are not habitual active thought suppressors
(Malinowski, 2015).
The first study to demonstrate this “rebound” of suppressed thoughts in
dreams was conducted by Daniel Wegner and colleagues (2004). In the study, 300
college students were instructed to think right before going to sleep of two people:
one whom they had a “crush” on, and one whom they were “fond of” but did not
have a crush on. Next, participants were assigned to one of three conditions: sup-
pression, expression, and mention. Students asked to suppress were instructed not
to think of a target person (either the “crush” or the “fond of”) for five minutes.
Expression participants were told to think about one target person or the other for
five minutes. In the mention condition, participants were told to think about any-
thing at all for five minutes after mentioning the target person’s initials. Results
showed, consistent with Freud’s view, that students dreamed more about the sup-
pressed targets than the nonsuppressed targets. They also dreamed more about
suppressed targets than suppressed nontargets. In other words, students were more
likely to dream about people they spend some time thinking about (targets), but
especially those targets they actively try not to think about.
Kröner-Borowik and colleagues (2013) confirmed and extended Wegner and
colleagues’ work on the dream-rebound effect in two interesting ways. They asked
participants to identify a unique distressing intrusive thought (defined as a thought
that one does not intend to think about, but which “pops up” sometimes without
one wanting it to). Then they were assigned randomly to either the suppression or
control group, and read their instructions, just as in the Wegner et al. (2004) study,
immediately prior to going to sleep. They followed these instructions not just for
one night, but every evening for a week. Suppression condition participants were
told to focus their minds deliberately on the intrusive thought they had previously
identified, along with its associated negative feelings. Then, for the next five min-
utes, they were told to think about anything but the intrusive thought. The instructions