Consciousness

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)

(a) Waking

(b) NREM sleep

(cf waking)

(c) REM (cf waking)

Posterior

cingulate

Dorsolateral

prefrontal

cortex

Posterior

cingulate Dorsolateral

prefrontal

cortex

Posterior

cingulate

Parahippocampal

cortex

Dorsolateral

prefrontal

cortex

Anterior cingulate

Amygdala

Pontine tegmentum

Activated

Deactivated

FIGURE 15.2 • Summary of PET study evidence

of brain region activation in

NREM and REM sleep. Compared

with the blood flow distribution in

waking (a), the global decreases

observed in NREM sleep (b)

suggest widespread deactivation

consistent with the greatly

diminished conscious experience

early in the night. In REM sleep

(c), many regions are activated

about their levels in waking

(dark blue), while others are

deactivated (light blue; Hobson,

2002, p. 112).