Consciousness

• seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
  In these ways, the various physiological states of
  sleep can be recognised and studied, but what
  about the experience? Approximately 14% of
  people report dreaming every night, 25% report
  dreaming frequently, and 6% never, and dream
  recall decreases with age (Blagrove, 2009). The
  emphasis here is on recall rather than dreaming
  itself because most dreams are never recalled.
  This was discovered in the 1950s when EEG
  studies first revealed the stages of sleep and
  people could be woken selectively at different
  stages.
  When woken from non-REM sleep, people
  typically say either that nothing was going on
  in their mind or that they were thinking. As a
  simple example: ‘I was asleep. I wasn’t thinking
  about anything or dreaming about anything.’
  Or ‘I was thinking about my nephew. It’s his
  birthday soon and I  must send him a card’.
  Non-REM reports are usually short and lacking
  in detail.
  By contrast, when woken from REM sleep, people typically report that they were
  having complex, much longer, and often bizarre dreams; sometimes very bizarre,
  as in this excerpt:

I was at a conference and trying to get breakfast but the food and the

people in line kept changing. My legs didn’t work properly and I found it

a great effort to hold my tray up. Then I realised why. My body was rotting

away, and liquid was oozing from it. I thought I might be completely

rotted before the end of the conference, but I thought I should still get

some coffee if I had the strength.

We cannot say that this is a typical dream, for there is probably no such thing, but

it has familiar elements that most people will probably recognise, especially the

matter-of-fact response to profound bizarreness. The contents of dreams have

been thoroughly studied using questionnaires and interviews, and by analysing

reports using a scoring system originally developed in the 1960s by Calvin Hall

and Robert van de Castle (1966; Domhoff, 1996). This counts such elements as set-

tings, characters, emotions, social interactions, and misfortunes, all of which show

remarkable consistency across times and cultures, with reliable sex differences,

and reliable differences between the dreams of adults and children (Domhoff,

1996, Ch. 4).

For example, men dream more about other men than women do, and have more

aggressive interactions. Children, by contrast, dream more often about animals,

suffer more dream misfortunes, and are more often the victim of aggression than

its initiator. Specific emotions or moods occur in about three quarters of dreams

and are roughly equally positive and negative. Joy is the most common emotion

reported, followed by anger and fear. Events in waking life often play a role in

Behaviour

Awake

Polygraph

EMG

EEG

EOG

Sensation and

perception

Thought

Movement

WAKE NREM SLEEP REM SLEEP

Stages REM

Vivid,

externally

generated

Dull or absent

Vivid,

internally

generated

Logical

progressive

Logical

perseverative

Illogical

bizarre

Continuous

voluntary

Episodic

involuntary

Commanded

but inhibited

II

III

IV

I

dreams, including dreams about such life events

as surgery, psychotherapy, or marriage and

divorce, as well as trivial events of the previous

day.

If we wake up with a memory of dreaming, we are

likely to try to make sense of what we dreamed;

indeed, the sense-making process is part of the

remembering. The natural tendency to attribute

significance to dreams (perhaps even more than

to events in waking life; Morewedge and Norton,

2009) was encouraged by Freud’s (1900/1999)

psychoanalytic approach to dream interpreta-

tion, which treats them as forms of wish fulfilment

in which the real (or ‘latent’) content, deriving

from the unconscious, is disguised in the super-

ficial ‘manifest’ content of the dream scenarios.

Jung (e.g. 1934–1936/1968) adapted these ideas

to emphasise the role of basic archetypes that

represent unconscious attitudes, and can be

manifested in various dream symbols and figures

which take dynamic forms depending on the

dreamer and the dream context. Neither of these

theories has stood the test of time. Although

dream interpretation books and websites offer-

ing readymade templates for meaning-making

are popular and many people believe their

dreams give insight into unconscious beliefs and

desires, there is no good reason to think that they

do more than reflect current worries or hopes.

There are problems with generalising about

dream content because of the effects of the

method of collecting reports. For example, some

researchers have asked people to keep dream

diaries with dreams collected over long periods,

while others ask just for the most recent dream. Selective reporting can be a prob-

lem with all collection methods, however, and the selection may take place at

several stages: only some dreams are recalled on waking, some fade faster from

memory after waking, and further selection can occur when people are asked to

write a report or describe their dreams. In consequence, the occurrence of bizarre

or interesting dreams may be exaggerated. Certainly many dreams are bizarre,

but in studies that try to avoid selection problems, bizarreness is found in only

about 10% of dreams.

This bizarreness takes different forms. Allan Hobson (1999) suggested three cat-

egories: incongruity involves the mismatching of features of characters, objects,

actions, or settings; discontinuity involves sudden changes in these elements;

uncertainty involves explicit vagueness. Research from his group suggested that

the way characters and objects are transformed in dreams follows certain rules

but that changes of scene and plot do not. Perhaps the strangest thing about

‘As for dreams – they’re

the “B-movies” of the

mind – entertaining, but

best forgotten’

(Horne, 2009, p. 709)

FIGURE 15.1 • Behavioural states in humans.
States of waking, NREM sleep,
and REM sleep have behavioural,
polygraphic, and psychological
manifestations. The sequence of
these stages is represented in
the polygraph channel. Sample
tracings of three variables used
to distinguish state are also
shown: electromyogram (EMG),
which is highest in waking,
intermediate in NREM sleep, and
lowest in REM sleep; and the
electroencephalogram (EEG) and
electro-oculogram (EOG), which
are both activated in waking
and REM sleep and inactivated
in NREM sleep. Each sample
is approximately 20 seconds
(Hobson 2002, Figure 2;
Hobson, 2009, p. 805).