Authentic Counselling Training
Dreams and Dreamwork 1
[Under development: 28 June 2005 ]
The nature of dreams – Some questions
1. What is a dream?
2. In what way do dreams differ from waking experiences?
3. In what way do dreams resemble waking experiences?
4. In what ways do night-time dreams differ from daydreams?
5. In what ways do dreams differ from nightmares?
6. What can I learn from my dreams?
The nature of dreams – Some answers
7. What is a dream?
A dream is a sequence of information. Expressed in terms of information technology, whilst waking experiences involve direct external input (like input from a keyboard, mouse, bar-code reader or a thermostat), dreams are virtual (like a scene created in a video game). My dreams are generated by my internal world.
8. In what way do dreams differ from waking experiences?
My experience of dreaming is not the same as my experience of being awake. When I am awake, my senses of sight, hearing, touch, temperature, smell and taste are alert and active. My waking experiences are being constantly modified by my senses. When I am dreaming, my senses are all-but switched off. For example, I might be hard to rouse, even were my name called. Whilst, when I am dreaming, I believe that what I am seeing and hearing comes from my senses, the experience is misleading. Dreams are generated by my internal world. When I dream, I am unlikely to be doing what I believe myself to be doing (for which I am sometimes heartily relieved when I wake), whereas when I am awake, I am likely to be doing what I believe I am doing. During a dream, my ability to reason is likely to be impaired, my memory is poor, my competence may or may not relate to waking ability, along with dexterity. The juxtaposition of dream material is more akin to the construction of a verbal sentence than to a path of cause and effect in the waking world. The dream world is a kind of natural language.
9. In what way do dreams resemble waking experiences?
During a dream, I have experiences that appear real. The person I recognise as myself in my dreams is a person with whom I am familiar in my waking life. The characters who inhabit my dreams are mostly people who we know, or have known. The spaces and locations I frequent in my dreams are usually places with which I have some familiarity. The activities in which I engage in my dreams are generally commonplace activities. Although my dreams are generated by my own internal world, they are likely to be based on elements familiar in some respect in my waking world. For example, I do not recall my dream experience as an infant including committee meetings or using a laptop computer, both of which have figured in my adult dreams. When I learned to drive a car, I dreamt about car driving. When I am sad or upset, my dreams tend to reflect this in their own way.
10. In what ways do night-time dreams differ from daydreams?
Daydreams belong to a twilight world between waking and sleeping, in which I have reduced my awareness of external stimuli, and increased my awareness of my internal world. Daydreams can be little more than thoughts and wishes, and involve almost no detachment from the waking world. I can easily imagine myself cooking pancakes, restricting my fantasy to the cooking utensils I have in my kitchen, and using only ingredients I am likely to use. On the other hand, daydreams can involve a temporary total detachment from the waking world, and be indistinguishable from night-time dreams. For example, I recently experienced two people entering my living room, only to realise, somewhat disconcertingly, that I had been alone in the house for hours. Compared with night-time dreams, the logic and rationality of my daydreams are more likely to be subject to scrutiny. My daydreams can contain conscious wish-fulfilment, whereas night-time dreams are (sadly) less susceptible to my conscious thoughts and desires (not for want of trying). I usually enter a daydream from a waking state, and exit the daydream to a waking state. On the other hand, with the exception of nightmares or end-of-night dreams from which I awaken, I rarely have any recollection of the start or end of my night-time dreams.
11. In what ways do dreams differ from nightmares?
Nightmares are dreams. However, my nightmares are typically accompanied by deeply unpleasant emotions, such as terror, horror, rage or grief. As well as causing my body to behave in ways typically associated with specific feelings (for example, I might wake up in a sweat, with my heart racing), nightmares can also be generated by physiological processes, such as the spontaneous physiological production of adrenaline in the case of a person suffering from acute anxiety. It is possible that incubus attacks and night terrors may be of this kind.
12. What can I learn from my dreams?
a. Discover some of my wishes and desires
b. Discover some of my drives
c. Discover what is currently making me anxious, fearful, angry
d. Recognise something of my mental health / wellbeing
e. Discover what remains unprocessed in my mind, particularly trauma
f. Recognise truths about myself that I deny
g. Recognise the falseness of some beliefs I have about myself
h. Discover parts (aspects, subpersonalities) of myself of which I am unaware
i. Discover creative solutions to problems
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