Dreaming and psychosis.

          The dreaming mind shares an erratic mode of logic with the psychotic mind.  That is to say that both dreams and waking psychotic moments have a degree of cognitive bizarreness.  In this context the word bizarre has a paradoxically well-defined definition in psychology. It refers not to hallucinations, but to illogical jumps (known as disjunctive cognition) in a train of thought.  A schizophrenic’s waking fantasies, like a dreamer’s dreams, involve impossible plots, characters and actions, like flying, or seeing an animal which has half dog and half sheep. There is also a discontinuity or uncertainty about time and place as in rowing a boat in a lake which becomes an ocean or jumping into the past.

          Normal people don’t experience bizarre cognition while awake, but their dreams are as bizarre as a schizophrenic’s waking

Why we sleep

          We understand the mechanisms that cause sleep; the hypothalamus stops producing histamines, which normally keep you awake (think about getting drowsy on antihistamines). It stops producing histamines in response to your circadian clock, which is kept by another part of the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which sits atop the optic chiasm, and keeps track of how much light you’re exposed to. Other areas of the brain influence the hypothalamus and cortex, including the ascending reticular activating system and, of course, your conscious mind.  Worry or anticipation can keep you awake. We don’t know the causal reason for thoughts regulating histamine output, but they do.

          Once you are asleep the thalamus, which is the central switching station through which all sensory information has to pass

Lucid dreaming and alter egos

          Lucid dreaming is often described as being aware of the fact that one is dreaming.  The dreamer can have a full recollection of his or her daily life and can act voluntarily.  Some people think that reading in a dream is an indication of conscious awareness. Lucid dreams are often distinguished by enhanced, intense sensory imagery as well. Hugh Calloway wrote in 1902 of dreaming lucidly:

  Instantly the vividness of life increased a hundred-fold.  Never had the sea and sky and trees shone with such glamorous beauty; even the commonplace houses seemed alive and mystically beautiful. Never had I felt so absolutely well, so clear-brained, so absolutely free!

          What I find interesting about that passage is that it could easily have been describing an experience with hallucinogenic drugs. Or a near-death experience. For that

Nightmares

Two types of dreams are commonly called nightmares: REM anxiety dreams and night terrors.  An REM anxiety dream is one with anxiety producing content during REM sleep.  The dream is more likely to occur during the latter part of the sleep cycle, and the dreamer has good recall of the content.  The night terror, on the other hand, occurs during the first two hours of sleep, is associated with Stage 4 sleep, and is difficult to recall.  A scream typically precedes awakening, and the subject may be disoriented for the next 10-20 minutes.

Night terrors are less dreams and more a cognitive effort to

gender differences in dreaming

In a study male and female dreamers were rated according to femininity scores on standard psychological tests for sex-role orientation.  It was found that more of the subjects with sex-role orientations contrary to their gender had more unpleasant dreams compared to those with sex-role orientations congruent with their gender.  This relation only held for dreams involving some form of aggression.  When the analysis was limited to only those subjects whose dreams included aggression, 75% of the role-gender mismatched had unpleasant dreams while 25% of the role-gender matches had unpleasant dreams.

The greater the fraternal influence on a female dreamer, the more males appear in her dreams. Last born women have fewer babies and children in their dreams than women in older birth positions. Dream researchers, in tallying pleasant and unpleasant emotions or events in dreams, find that two-thirds of all dreams are unpleasant. That’s a lot. It doesn’t jibe with my personal experience.

physiology of dreams

Studies of nocturnal erections in men (duh) showed that men with a physical basis for impotence such as severe diabetes or nerve damage showed no erections during sleep, while those with psycological problems that interfere with waking erections did.  Erections during sleep mostly occur during REM stages, and average from 100-190 minutes per night depending on age. Tumescence in sleep is not necessarily related to erotic dreams, though anxiety or agression in dreams is associated with partial or absent erections.  Efforts to study female arousal in sleep include employing a vaginal photoplethysmograph, an intravaginal probe that directs

bibliography

The notes in this section are lifted from my notebooks. Often I will copy whole paragraphs from a text I’m reading into my notebooks because they were either very cogently written, or I needed to slow down my mind by writing the words down so that I could understand the point more completely. Not intending this blog to be anything scholarly, pecuniary, or influential in any way, I don’t see any reason to provide footnotes. I wouldn’t know where to put them, since I generally have no idea which sentences are mine and which are not. But in case you want to read more, here are some of the books I’ve consulted in my pursuit of understanding dreams.

 Koch, Christof; The Quest for Consciousness

Van de Castle, Robert L: Our Dreaming Minds

Smolin, Lee; Quantum Gravity

Halpern, Paul; The Pursuit of Destiny

notes on what Freud had to say

For Freud, dreams had the simple function of ensuring sleep, but they also create clues to repressed emotional problems. He observed that dreams “really mean what they say and have undergone no distortion from censorship. They are an expression of immoral, incestuous and perverse impulses or of murderous and sadistic lusts.”  Another function of the dream was to allow repressed impulses to be gratified via the imagination.

The unfulfilled wishes that motivate dreamas can have four sources: 1) consciously remembered wishes that were aroused

notes on what Jung had to say

What Jung meant by “the collective unconscious” was an earlier stratum of evolutionary mental awareness; prehistoric mental aspects of personality which functioned far below the level of the individual unconscious.

He proposed the existence of a class of “archetypes”, which are the psychic structural components of the collective unconscious that parallel the physical components of our common human bodily structure. Jung’s theory of personality development and dream expression are teleological in nature: the human psyche inexorably moves toward the goal of

William Saletan (slate magazine) on sex dreams

A study confirmed differences between male and female sex dreams. Findings: 1) 8 percent of reported dreams were erotic. 2) Contrary to studies done in the 1960s, women had as many sexual dreams as men did. 3) Current and previous lovers “turned up in 20 percent of the women’s dreams but only 14 percent of the men’s.” 4) Men “reported dreams featuring multiple sex partners twice as often” as women did. “Men tend to visualize themselves making love to unknown women or with multiple partners in public settings.” 5) Women “were twice as likely to have dream scenarios featuring celebrities.” Theories: 1) Over the last half-century, empowerment has made women more likely to have erotic dreams. 2) Empowerment has made them more likely to report their erotic dreams. 3) Women’s empowerment has made men less likely to report dreams involving multiple partners and public settings. (To discuss male-female differences in sexual psychology, click here.)