Dream Why people dream

Dreams - The training of evolution
"Dreams give us access to the deepest layers of human experience, so they can promote our health and personal development, and make us more aware of what it means to be alive." Anthony Stevens

contents

• dream research
• The individual and the evolution
• Archetypal pattern
• Traumbilder
• The REM phase
• Why do we forget dreams??
• Lucid dreams
• children's dreams
• Sexual dreams
• Creative dreams
• Dreams and mental illnesses
• Active imagination
• dream work
• Diagnostic dreams
• Looking ahead dreams?

dream research

For thousands of years, Hindus have been differentiating between wakefulness, dream sleep and dreamless sleep, and shamans are looking for much longer dream experiences than essential communication between humans and the world.

Why we dream: Until today not fully explored. Image: Ljupco Smokovski - fotolia

The meaning of dreams is hotly debated, at least since Aristotle doubted they were inspirations of the gods. Freudians against Jungians, nativists against empiricists, neurobiologists against social psychologists - that was the name of some of the hostile camps in modern times.

The romance glorified the dream and explored it in all its facets. It was explicitly directed against the rigid forms of classicism and the absoluteness of logic in the thinking of René Descartes. So who disputed about dreams, argued for the way to live.

The core conflict always revolved around whether dreams spin around as meaningless memories in the brain, or whether they convey important messages. Artists of all ages, psychoanalysts and shamans considered dreams to be significant, but some neuroscientists viewed them merely as a product of brain metabolism.

The neurophysiologist Mc Carley, for example, saw dreams as an attempt of the cerebral cortex somehow to organize surplus information. Crick even denounced the dream as a strategy to "remove parasitic phenomena".

J. Allan Hobson, one of the most important dream researchers of contemporary history, however, considers dreams to be clear statements and reflects them daily to determine his inner state.

Dementia, who discovered REM sleep, not only believed in the transformative power of dreams, he even stopped smoking after dreaming of lung cancer.

Such dreams are the exact opposite of information trash; rather they correct self-destructive habits of ego-consciousness.

The individual and the evolution

"Each night, in our dreams, we become involved in a biological ritual that infuses our personal life experience with the 'eternal experience' of our species," writes Anthony Stevens.

The complexes are bridges between the individual and the collective psyche. According to Stevens, we are all multiple personalities in the dream, and innate predispositions are associated with personal development.

To date, the analysis of dream images is at the beginning, and what Darwin's evolutionary theory has done for biology is still missing in dream research.

However, we know that certain topics are recurrent, all over the world. Anxiety dreams are omnipresent, for example. They warn us of dangers and motivate us to overcome them.

Classic warning rooms appear, for example, in the form of exams. Especially when we let the study go, a dream in which we spoil the final exam reminds us to discipline ourselves.

Fear is accompanied by alertness, in the inner as well as the outer world; she prepares us for fight or flight. All stages of fear, alertness, fear, panic, and horror occur in fear and nightmares.

The Alp was in popular belief a demon who sat down at night on the chest and caused bad dreams. The horror of the nightmare seems so real to us that we are even afraid to fall asleep.

The nightmare is about survival issues: do I drown in a torrent, am I locked up without any chance of escaping, do I get lost in the dark? Do you predator me? Am I being attacked by strangers? All classic nightmares are also situations of our evolutionary adaptation, in which we had to be real vigilant.

The evolutionary heritage is demonstrated by people who are deaf-blind from birth. They dream the same fear figures.

Archetypal pattern

"Dreaming is one way in which the life of the individual is grafted onto the life of the species. It has the purpose of promoting growth and awareness. "Anthony Stevens

In the dreams of humans, the four brain layers, which we can roughly describe as reptilian brain, early mammalian brain, late mammalian brain and human brain, are combined.

In the older stories in the middle and intermediate brain, the organism probably produces the archetypal impulses: foraging, struggle, flight and mating.

The brain trains this vital behavior in sleep, allowing the individual to access it in day-to-day reality.

Consciousness can be understood as an interpretive instance of the brain that organizes a plethora of signals and explores their meaning. Our nature does not come without meaning: dreams, remembering and consciousness are thus necessities of our evolution.

Jung called the original patterns of the human psyche archetypes. In linguistics, Noam Khomsky's deep structures of language, in anthropology, the infrastructures of Lévi-Strauss, in sociobiology genetically transmitted behavioral structures, and in cognitive science the Darwinian algorithms.

Archetypal patterns of mythology that Joseph Campbell recognized across the cultures of the world can be found in his dream:

- The wonderful birth and childhood of the hero.
- From poverty to wealth, fighting the monster and winning the kingdom.
- The youth meets the maid.
- Fight between light and darkness.
- From wealth to poverty. The return of darkness (hell, underworld etc.)

These episodes of the dream and myth reflect real life, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and aging, leaving home, passing exams, breaking away from ties with parents and siblings, growing up through trials, proving oneself in the world and being to conquer his position, to overcome the mother complex (to defeat the dragon) - this is particularly clear when the monster devours the hero, and this cuts free from the belly. Only then he saves the princess, so he can find his partner, take her to wife and found a family.

For example, archetypes are mountains, rivers, oceans, trees or flowers, the mother, the dark antagonist, the child, the hero's entanglement, the hero's rebirth. Tricksters, robbers, kings and gods are original patterns.

Traumbilder

Personalize dreams, exaggerate them to clarify, and compare them: My neighbor, who is constantly lending things without giving them back, appears in the dream as a rat; a "mountain of tasks", which I have to do, shows itself in the dream as a real mountain, in front of which I stand, and which I must climb.

The REM phase

"Dreaming is a selective information processing technique that continuously monitors new impressions and (...) evaluates in the central nervous system." Anthony Stevens

In 1953 Eugene Aserinsky discovered that deep sleep (Rapid Eye Movement / REM) is accompanied by intense dreams. These REM phases are not determined by external stimuli, but occur several times during each sleep period.

When we fall asleep, impressions of the waking state mix with fragmentary images and dramatic events of the dream world.

Then follows the non-REM phase, where the eyes remain calm. At this stage, too, we dream, but dreams are more thoughts; they are strongly influenced by the immediate experience of everyday life. There is a lack of lucid dreams, hallucinations and the epic stories of the REM phase reminiscent of fantasy novels. This first "light sleep phase" lasts about ninety minutes.

On the other hand, we recognize the REM phases in lucid dreams in which we know that we are dreaming, in the exciting battles with monsters, in the dreams in which we fly, fall, and meet talking animals. The first of these phases lasts for ten minutes, the second and third are significantly longer, while the non-REM phases shorten.

After the third REM phase, we usually wake up, and the dreams we remember come from this time.

According to Stevens, REM sleep developed about 130 million years ago when the mammals gave birth to living young. Young mammals were much more vulnerable than the embryos in the eggs of birds and reptiles. REM sleep probably served to help them learn.

Cats dream to catch the prey, dogs hunt in the dream, rabbits flee and rats search their surroundings. Only in a dream, the brain of these animals can train these actions, because in the waking state, the animal must react in the outside world.

REM sleep was, according to Stevens, the solution of nature to form a complex brain with a limited body size.

The human dream is less tied to the phylogenetic survival functions than the dreams of other mammals. We developed our culture, our symbols and the language. The information in the here and now coupled with humans much closer to the personal experience, and yet we meet in the REM dreams on the archetypal patterns of our evolution.

Moreover, according to Stevens, "dreams can compensate for one-sided attitudes of the conscious ego by mobilizing archetypal components from the collective unconscious to further the individual's better adaptation to life."

The REM phase condenses elements of memory into a meaningful story. It picks up the past, brings it into analogy with the present, integrates and compares both.

The REM dream reinterprets old themes, it is the play of the psyche. He organizes memories, he invents, he upends and creates. He changes us when we work with him.

The REM dream is also a game, it is very similar to the games of small children. He goes beyond satisfying primary needs and opens up new ways to shape life.

Why do we forget dreams??

Healthy adults distinguish between dream events and everyday reality. Mentally ill, children and probably animals do not do that.

Mystic dreams. Image: boscorelli - fotolia

It would be fatal for children and animals to fully remember dreams and maintain them 1 to 1 in the material world. If, according to Stevens, a rabbit who dreams of coming out of the burrow and being eaten, fully remembered, would not dare to go outside and starve to death. Toddlers would live in a world of monsters, and no good persuasion could help them.

According to Stevens, therefore, only the message of the unconscious from the dream remains in consciousness, in the case of the rabbit: be vigilant.

Lucid dreams

Lifelines are dreams in which we know that we are dreaming; We often intervene in the dream act and consciously decide what actions our dream self undertakes.

The Klartraum connects the inner world of the dream with the outer world, which we perceive awake. He mediates between the perceptions of the conscious and the unconscious.

Clear dreams, shamanic journeys, active imagination and psychosis are similar. All are threshold states in which conscious and unconscious systems interact.

In dream therapy, lucid dreaming accelerates the healing process. The dreamers perceive their inner experiences much more intense.

Those who are familiar with their dreams, for example, by keeping a dream diary, can dream much better than untrained ones.

You can also train for lucid dreaming by asking yourself several times a day, especially when falling asleep and waking up, if we are dreaming. For example, if we notice that thoughts are leaving, we can ask aloud, "Do I dream?"

Or we pay attention to when we realize that we are not "more in the thing", whether the impossible happens: sliding our hands? Are we hovering above the ground? Do objects change their color? We can also perform such actions and see if we are in a threshold state.

Who performs such simple exercises, usually in the next few weeks, the first lucid dream.

The exercise is to make the body fall asleep and keep the mind awake. We do this, for example, when we count at night and say, "I'm dreaming." At some point, we really dream.

As you fall asleep, focusing on the thoughts that are in your mind is also conducive to making your dreams more aware.

Most lucid dreams occur at lunchtime when the wakeful state slides directly into the REM state.

Auto-suggestion also helps with lucid dreaming, so for example, during the daytime, saying "today I have lucid dreams", or imagining lucid dreams while awake.

Neither are dreams only insignificant fragments of experiences, nor is our conscious perception in the waking state objective. Rather, she designs a story of needs, thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

The "western thinking" of modernity sharply separated dream and waking state. Buddhists, shamans and today's neuropsychologists doubt that. The lucid dream proves that the states of waking state and dreams are not separate, but merge into each other.

children's dreams

"If you want to do something, then you have to dream it first, so you know what to do." Alvin, 7 years old

Infants up to the age of three years do not distinguish between the sleeping room and the waking state. So it does not help to tell them that the monsters in the closet do not exist. Just reassuring them that no monster is really sitting in the closet calms them down.

At the age of four to six, the child recognizes the difference between inside and outside. Although it distinguishes between the reality of the day and the dream, it does not yet understand that the dream lives only in it. Magic figures that influence the dream have their place in the universe of a six-year-old, and contemporaries now discuss whether Santa Claus really exists.

Between six and eight years, children recognize dreams as adults as a purely internal process. The mythical themes are steadily decreasing.

Children's dreams are often disturbing, in contrast to Freud's thesis, which considered dreams as imaginary wish-fulfillments - and they are archetypal.

Children in postmodern societies dream the same images of fear as children of hunters and gatherers in the early human environment: they are abandoned, kidnapped, hunting and eating animals.

Even figures in childhood dreams such as witches and evil spirits are among the cultural images of hunters and gatherers.

Evolutionarily speaking, this is no coincidence, because children are and were more directly exposed to the archetypal threats of the human species than adults: a toddler without the protection of the father quickly fell victim to a hyena, a stranger could carry it off easier than an adult man.

Children in Tokyo, New York and London dream of animals with big mouths that devour them, even though the real dangers are completely different and even if they have never seen such an animal.

Sexual dreams

Freud's thesis of the hidden phallus and vagina symbols in the dream long ago ignored a respectful treatment of the complexity of the symbols. In a prudish society, Freud made the mistake of sexualizing dream symbols; Sexual dreams are usually very direct.

At least today, hardly anyone dreams of sex by penises appear in the form of walking sticks or house entrances as vaginas. Elongated objects may be in the dream for the phallus, but they do not have to.

Creative dreams

Freud wiped away the creative potential of dreams and mocked the artists who found their inspiration in dreams as superstitious. We know today that Freud was wrong.

Creative solutions are often unplanned "flashes of inspiration," preceded by a long, unconscious, preoccupation with a topic. All at once the answer is there, in the waking state as in the dream. The dream usually presents the solution to problems as metaphors, which the dreaming immediately understands and feels that they are right.

Just waiting for the solution in the dream does not work. Again and again, composers, writers, and scientists report on creative solutions they dreamed of, such as falling asleep at the desk after hours of wasted effort.

This indicates that the unconscious mind processes what we consciously occupy ourselves with and, the more we delve into a subject, the more we work on a solution.

Dreams and mental illnesses

Dreams, according to Stevens, can be described as sleep-allowed insanity and are similar to the states that experience the mentally ill while awake. Why should a process that resembles a mental disorder have a creative potential in it??

If we exclude mental illnesses as abnormal, dreaming would probably not be a creative activity. But if we consider psychiatric symptoms as sensible strategies of the brain, shocking their proximity to the dream no longer, but is a guidepost.

For example, Karsakoff's syndrome, in which alcoholics firstly forget their memories, and secondarily fill those missing memories with fantasies, resemble dreams in which we hardly remember the waking state, and our unconscious designs dramatic stories instead. The brain does not bear emptiness and fills it with new contents of the conscious and the unconscious.

A woman suffering from paranoid schizophrenia runs screaming through the street. In addition she gives out strangers. She roars, "Your black magician is giving way." She thinks black magicians, who have been mischievous since Egyptian antiquity, have bewitched them, have magically ensconced themselves in their bodies, and have also lost Angela Merkel and the New World Order Control. Sometimes the black magicians are with vampires in the bunch, sometimes with zombies and werewolves.

The characters of their delusion are archetypal, and the same characters appear in nightmares. Just as the dream combines experiences of everyday life with these master patterns, the schizophrenic is awake.

A manic megalomania coincides with our dreams of killing dragons, flying into space and living in golden palaces; the mood of a depressive overlaps with nightmares in which we are trapped or cuffed, in which weights crush us, or in which we walk alone through a dead world.

Active imagination

Dreams are, according to Stevens, symbolic dramas of the unconscious, rituals symbolic acts in consciousness. Active Imagination refers to techniques to create unconscious fantasies, that is to say, dreams, that is, to contemplate the event of the dream and to relate to its characters.

The characters in the dreams are real parts of ourselves, and we learn to value each other if we take them seriously.

Active Imagination reaches a threshold state between wakefulness and sleep. We call up figures from our dreams and let them unfold. We ask them questions: how old are you? Are you married? Do you have children? What do you want from me? Why are you appearing in my dream? Soon we feel which answers are the right ones, and often the characters start talking to us.

Many writers work like this: They sketch figures and see how they develop themselves. Like the dream diary, we also write down the active imagination as it happens.

It does not matter if we like the dream figures. The "monsters" show our darkest and weakest aspects. Therefore, these are the images with the greatest potential for growth, because integrating the shadow enables developments.

dream work

"In dreams, we have a resource that we can only neglect at considerable personal cost." Anthony Stevens

There are three versions of each dream: the dream I dream, the dream I remember, and the dream I tell somebody else. The second and third versions are already dream work. I design a harmonious setting.

In a dream book, we can both write down the dreams, as well as paint symbols and images that come to mind. We should write down all the details that come to mind. Every interpretation must be avoided.

Then we read the associations sprout, all of them. Whether they are right or wrong, our intuition tells us.

When gods, demons, witches, and saints appear in our dreams, we explore the library and the Internet for their cultural background and archetypal significance. Art, literature, religious studies and mythology help us to examine their symbolic meaning in all its facets.

Interpretation is never about right or wrong, but about the meaning that is most important to our self-knowledge. If several interpretations force themselves on, and that happens frequently, then we let them stand that way. Most of the time we understand what they mean and how they hang together.

To amplify the message of a dream, we can develop our own rituals, we write down what the dream means for our lives, we can paint and draw it, or model and treat the most important symbols in tone.

We can directly apply the lessons of the dream, such as reporting to an old friend we dreamed of, or working on in a psychic role play, Gestalt therapy, music or theater.

We can always summon the dream image in the fantasy, when the situation is there, which the dream draws attention to: If I am afraid of a conversation with my boss, I think about how I tamed the tiger in a dream.

Sometimes we dream of something we have never done in the awake life: parachuting, traveling to Africa or learning Japanese. Not everything has to be symbolic. Maybe it's something we've always wanted to do - and then we should do it.

To interpret a dream is hard work. We test ourselves how we respond to the dream's setting, and we go through it point by point like a writer's work, namely:

- Location, landscape and situation of the plot
- The characters, their skills, their history, their attitudes.
- The behavior of the figures
- Diving up animals that could symbolize symbolic qualities (clever foxes, gossiping magpies ...)?
- What objects appear, what do they serve, what do they symbolically mean (clothes, carriages, jewelery, bottles ...)?
- What moods does the dream create? How is the atmosphere (hedonistic, agonistic, depressive, aggressive, funny)??
- Colors, numbers and patterns that can have a symbolic meaning?

In general, according to Stevens, the image is the teacher, and we should be careful with interpretations and not interpret the unknown, because that is precisely where the undiscovered aspects of ourselves lie.

Diagnostic dreams

Diagnostic dreams have nothing to do with supernatural beings and esoteric necromancy, but they are, of course, natural.

Our unconscious often recognizes dangers before consciously reflecting them. It chooses matching symbols - the language of the dream is the language of metaphors and transmissions.

We often dream of organic diseases that we are not yet aware of. Healers experienced in dream work see metaphorical pictures of illnesses also with people other than themselves, children dream of diseases of their parents and siblings.

Stevens mentions a patient who dreamed of a Balinese disease demon who put her on a blazing hot heater and felt a burning pain in her leg while sleeping. When she woke up, the pain was over.

The dream repeated itself twice, and after the third time, she also felt the pain real. Added to this was dizziness. She went to see a doctor who recognized a bladder and kidney infection.

Looking ahead dreams?

Dreams point to future possibilities. Religions claim that dreams of the prophets foretold the future.

That can not be a dream. Simply put, the older part of our brain learns from experience and stores that experience in the unconscious. The forebrain, on the other hand, estimates and plans, and in the dream both parts act together.

First, there are the dreams that are reminiscent of horoscopes. Her pictures are so vast that they always somehow apply. For example, if I dream of a ship going down, and next week I read that a freighter was sinking off New Guinea, the chance coincidence of inner and outer events is so likely that the supposed prophecy itself will be fulfilled.

On the other hand, there are dreams that actually seem to apply just as well. One of the most famous is that of Abraham Lincoln, who dreamed of being shot by an assassin - and shot dead by an assassin.

Another example is Sitting Bull, who performed a sun dance before the Battle of Little Big Horn until he collapsed after massive blood loss. In the dream he then saw how the Sioux won a victory over the US Army. At the same time the dream contained the warning not to take anything from the whites.

A few days later, the Indian warriors destroyed Custer's regiment. They celebrated in high spirits and took the rifles of the American soldiers to themselves. But in the next few months, the US Army put one Sioux group after another, forcing them into reservations.

Both dreams seem to prove a higher inspiration, but to be more precise, they show the waking spirit of the dreaming: Lincoln had abolished slavery, won the war and countless enemies against him. He had to expect an attack.

Sitting Bull was surrounded in Little Bighorn by the largest force the Confederate tribes ever had, led by the military genius Crazy Horse. At the same time, he knew all too well the superiority of white America and knew that the Lakota were not allowed to weigh themselves down.

What appears to be prophetic dreams, then, was the work of the unconscious of two great thinkers, whose analysis in the dream condensed into images.

Far more common are dreams in which we only think they were true, or that we had previously dreamed an event. This is where a dream diary helps us to see if we really had that dream.

However, those who dream dreams of foal throw away a substantial part of what it means to be a human being and refrain from getting to know themselves and shaping their lives according to their needs. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)