Chapter Outline
SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
Chapter 1: The Dream Frontier
There are several dream frontiers. Dreams are on the frontier of new human experience. In our dreams, we are freed from the need to communicate our thoughts to another person, and so we can create new words, objects, people, and situations. Dreams are on the frontier of self-knowledge. They are our most private experiences and can open awareness about our concerns, desires, and motivations. Dreams are also on the frontier of our knowledge about the brain, teaching us how psychology and neurology interact.
SECTION II: NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT DREAMS
Chapter 2: The Analysis and Creation of Dream Meaning
Instead of interpreting dreams, I propose that we find the context in which the dream’s meaning becomes obvious. Dreams provide the answer, to which the question must be discovered. I analyze a dream of Allan Hobson, the dream researcher, from this perspective. Dreams allow extraliniguistic thoughts that are not constrained by the usual rules of language. They produce new objects that do not exist in the real world, interobjects, such as “something between a paint-frozen hinge and a lock.” Dreams can also create new metaphors.
Chapter 3: Secondary Revision, Tertiary Revision, and Beyond
Dream meaning continues to be created after the experience of dreaming. We revise the dreamtext when we wake up and remember the dream (secondary revision) as well as when we tell the dream to another person (tertiary revision). Those changes may not be distortions, but rather expansions of the meaning of the dream that reveal much about the dreamer’s psychology. Examples are given, including one from the Bible.
Chapter 4: Who Creates, Has, Remembers, Tells, and Interprets the Dream?
A dream is a story I tell myself. Dreams lead us to reconsider how we think of the different parts of ourselves. This suggests a more complex formulation of the mind, with many kinds of awareness and consciousness.
Chapter 5: We Never Lie in Our Dreams
Freud proposed that the manifest dream disguises the underlying (“latent”) dream thought, which would be too disturbing. I propose that we never lie in our dreams. The manifest dream is not distorted but truer than our conscious thoughts. I propose that the most disturbing but accurate meaning of a dream comes not from looking below the surface of the dream, but by looking as deeply as possible at the surface. Dreamers often prefer more fanciful, metaphoric interpretations of the dream because they miss the meaning that evokes the most anxiety.
Chapter 6: Condensation and Interobjects
The essence of dreaming is condensation. I expand Freud’s work on condensation, dividing it according to whether words, forms or ideas are condensed (lexical, formal, and ideational condensation). I also separate condensations depending on the nature of the final product – whether it is a unitary object that already exists (“simple condensation”), a new object not known before (“creative condensation), or an object “between” two things — an interobject (“partial condensation”). Creative and partial condensation are usually not acceptable in waking life, and can be considered a sign of psychosis, but we accept them as normal in our dreamlife. In dreams, we can violate some waking rules of category formation, but not all of them. I describe the condensation game, in which I ask people “What is halfway between a tree and a horse?”
Chapter 7: Oneiric Darwinism
We dream at least five times per night, but we usually are not aware of most of these dreams. Do they have a function anyway? Dreams produce “thought mutations” of which we select those that are most fit for waking life. When especially useful, an individual’s dream can be adopted by a culture as a universal myth. Several scientific and literary creations have been developed from dream material.
Chapter 8: Dreams and the Language of Thought
What is the language of thought? Does the brain use something like the machine language of computers, based on a few numbers? Does the brain work more with images and emotion than with words? Are dreams a reflection of this underlying language of thought? Are dreams themselves an example of this underlying thought? I propose that dreams are meaningful without being communicable — an idea related to Vygotsky’s notion of “inner speech.” Dreams are “subjectless predicates” — thoughts in which an element, like the subject of a sentence, is eliminated, since it is already understood.
SECTION III. CLINICAL WORK WITH DREAMS
Chapter 9: Vectors of Dream Interpretation
Since dreams condense so much information, it is up to the dream interpreter to pick out which kinds of information to extract from the dream. These can include: the most prominent psychological issue for the dreamer; the main desire of the dreamer; the bodily experience of the dreamer; past traumas; and many other things.
Chapter 10: How to Analyze Dreams: Fundamental Principles
The first task in analyzing dreams is to overcome oneirophobia, which is the fear of dreams. I propose several ways to become comfortable with your dreams. I also discuss many other processes for analyzing dreams. You can collect your waking associations to each element of the dream, as Freud did. You can “distill” the meaning of a dream, by considering it to be a newspaper story and writing a headline for it. How does the dream’s meaning change if you consider all people in the dream as an aspect of the dreamer? Or if you consider, as Gestalt therapists do, that physical objects in the dream represent aspects of the dreamer?
Chapter 11: How to Analyze Dreams: Special Topics
I reconsider many traditional “rules” of dream interpretation, some of which have merit while others do not.
Chapter 12: Homonyms and Other Word Play in Dreams
Dreams often bring in multiple meanings of words and phrases, by changing their context. I give the example of the familiar nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb” which is changed dramatically when you add a phrase: “Mary had a little lamb/ And Jane a little pork.” Puns and other wordplay often provide a key to a dream’s meaning.
Chapter 13: Dream Acts
How a dreamer tells a dream to another person is often related to the meaning of the dream. This can include forgetting the dream as you are about to tell it.
Chapter 14: Dream Symbols
Symbol translation is the easiest part of dream interpretation, but good symbol translation is the hardest part. Dream symbolism touches on the fundamental question: How does our mind organize the world? Symbols can be related to what is symbolized by a similarity of shape or form, a linguistic connection, or by a standard cultural reference. In Freudian psychology, snakes often stand for penises, but in a South American tribe, a penis in a dream can stand for a snake. After analyzing a symbol, one should ask, as Jung did, why was that particular symbol chosen and not another?
Chapter 15: Kleinian Positions and Dreams
I review the three psychological positions, of Melanie Klein and her school, as ways of experiencing the world: The autistic-contiguous position, which shows are experience as physical objects in a physical world; the paranoid-schizoid position, which shows our relation to other people primarily for how reflect back on us; and the depressive position, in which other people are recognized as individuals in their own right. Most dreams are primarily in the paranoid-schizoid position, but it is useful to consider each dream from all three positions.
Chapter 16: The Patient’s Dreams and the Countertransference
When a patient tells a dream in psychotherapy, the dream may reflect not only the dreamer’s issues, but also the psychotherapist’s issues. The psychotherapist can use the patient’s dream as supervision, to suggest new ways of interacting with the patient or to bring up problems of the therapist that are interfering with the treatment.
Chapter 17: Dreams as Supervision, Dreams in Supervision
This chapter extends the previous one, and describes how a supervisor of psychotherapy can work with the dreams of the patient and the psychotherapist.
Chapter 18: The Clinical Use of Countertransference Dreams
Sometimes a psychotherapist will have dreams about his or her patient. There are ways to study these dreams that may improve the therapist’s approach. In some cases, the therapist may tell the patient the dream and engage in an open, mutual analysis of the dream. Sometimes, the patient will answer the therapist’s dream with another dream, and there can be a dialogue of dreams. The psychotherapist can also learn a great deal from the images evoked while hearing the patient’s dream.
Chapter 19: The Re-Allocation of Madness
Patients who are psychotic often have dreams that don’t sound like dreams; they sound more like matter-of-fact reports. This was observed in 1866 by Dostoyevsky and has been rediscovered over and over by psychoanalysts and then forgotten. When such patients get better in psychological treatment, their dreams tend to become more dream-like. This has important implications for the nature of the unconscious and psychosis; good treatment may “reallocate” mad types of thinking to dreams, where they belong.
SECTION IV: KNOWLEDGE, DREAMS, AND THE BRAIN
Chapter 20: Knowing What We Know in Waking and Dreaming
The study of dreams brings us to some of the central questions of modern cognitive neuroscience – what do we know, and how do we know that we know it? How do we keep track of reality? How can we tell whether something really happened to us or whether we imagined or dreamt it? Can dreams show that we know something that we consciously don’t think we know? Dreams can register emotions that we consciously suppress in waking life, and this can help with many problems, especially panic attacks.
Chapter 21: What Dreams Can Tell Us About the Brain
There are special kinds of cognition in dreams that can help us understand the brain. For example, in disjunctive cognitions, which are common in dreams, a person’s appearance may not match her identity. A person may dream, “It didn’t look like my mother, but I knew it was her.” This is connected with two neurological misidentification syndromes, Capgras’, in which familiar people are thought to be impostors, and Fregoli’s, in which strangers are thought to be someone familiar. A study of the neurobiology of these phenomena and parallel dream phenomena may clarify how the brain differentiates or integrates what someone looks like and who they are. This suggests a neurobiological understanding of “transference” in psychoanalytic treatment.
Chapter 22: Endoneuropsychic Perception
Disjunctive cognitions may lead us to understand where in the brain different aspects of our experience are processed. Some dream experiences, like being paralyzed or “glued to the spot” may be related to the brain’s altered functioning during dream sleep. Other neurological syndromes, like blindsight, pain asymbolia, and achromatopsia may reflect parallel brain functioning in certain kinds of dreams. The connection between dreams, psychopathology, and neuropathology is the dream frontier that has been least explored. Studying them together may yield new insights about neuroanatomy and psychological experience.