FOUR WAYS TO UNDERSTAND DREAMS

by  Fonya Lord Helm, Ph.D., ABPP

Dream Images

The first way is to start with the dream images, just like Freud did in 1900. He had a hard time remembering his dreams, so he slept on a hard bed, so he wouldn’t sleep so deeply, and put out paper and pencil next to his bed, so he could write down his dreams.  He recommended getting associations to the different images in the dream, and he knew that eventually the associations would lead to the most important recent event and memories from both the recent past and the distant past of childhood.  The associations are not always easy to get, though, and I have had experiences working as a psychologist when some important associations came years after the dream occurred. Freud emphasized the recovery of memories in the form of wishes.

Dream images can come both from the current life context and from past experiences.  Current problems are matched through imagery with unresolved problems from the past (Reiser, 1997: Winson, 1985).

When a person is in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, the therapist or analyst is a very important part of a person’s life and often will be a part of the dream, usually in the associations but often enough represented in the images of the dream. The therapist may not look like herself, though, but instead becomes part of a condensation made up from several different people. Objects from the office setting may be included.  The therapy or analysis itself functions as a creative project, and a creative project of any kind can be the most important current event.

Personality

The second way to understand dreams is to look for a part of the personality.  It often can be easier to see in a dream than someone tells you about it (Goldberger, 1989).  Here is an example of the dream of a Protestant minister, who was going to lead a therapy group and felt good about how he was going to do it, when another minister came and said it was time for services. Associations to the dream indicated that the minister felt reluctant to be competitive with his analyst. The minister said that he was good at group work, which was not his analyst’s specialty, and suddenly he remembered another part of the dream. “Just before the other minister came and I was still involved with the group, someone was pushing me from one side. It was crowded, and it seemed as if it might somehow come to a confrontation. But I moved and walked all around to the other side and sat where there was plenty of room”(p. ). This dream gave his analyst, Goldberger, a chance to show him his characteristic defense that appeared in his physical activity in the dream: his tendency to be indirect. She wrote about his habitual defense–to go around the issue–which usually operated reflexively and silently, and how it could vividly be brought to his awareness because he saw it dramatized in his behavior of going around the room in his dream(p. ). She also notes the common dream phenomenon of representing yourself in two or more people. It also may be helpful to focus on what it is about the other person in the dream that seems so shameful or prohibited, and in that way discover what is frightening or unacceptable to yourself.

How You Are Feeling or Self States

Self state dreams illustrate vividly the psychological situation of the dreamer. How you feel about yourself is shown in the dream metaphorically. Ella Freeman Sharpe, a renowned psychoanalyst, gives an example of a dream of one of her patients, a professional woman who was experiencing lassitude and lack of interest in her work. The dream was: “I took up my watch to look at the time and found the face of the watch so covered over with strips of paper that I could not see what the time was”. Soon after this dream, the woman experienced a week’s insomnia, took a leave of absence from work and began psychoanalysis. During her analysis, after she had improved, she had another dream: “I wanted to see what time it was and turned to look at my watch and it was not there. I then remembered I had put it on a shelf. I took it down and the face was quite clear so I could read the time”(1937). Her psychological state was much improved.

Here is another self state dream: “Inside a rickety house or structure–of corrugated iron. There was a ladder in the middle–wobbly; it looked like it would soon collapse, too, just like the house or structure”(Ornstein, 1987). In his associations, Dr. Ornstein’s patient stated that he lived emotionally in a rickety house that was about to collapse, and that the house represented himself, the way he felt, and the way he had always felt. Ornstein believed that the dream portrayed a fear of internal collapse, as well as an attempt to ward off collapse by not using the wobbly ladder. Ornstein also said that no other associations were available, except for the larger clinical-therapeutic context, which was an up-coming interruption of the analysis. This interruption was triggering the patient’s feeling of potential severe disorganization.

 

Reluctance to Know More About the Inner Life

A fourth way to understand a dream is to look for expressions of reluctance to know more about your inner life.  Dreams often appear during the session to regulate feelings of discomfort.  Gray points out that where the dream appears in the hour indicates a move away from ideas that are expressing aggression or sexual material too directly to be comfortable.  The dream also may continue the same theme, expressed in a different way.  The dream offers opportunities for many associations.

Here is the memory of and telling of a dream that functions as a way of expressing reluctance.  Often, as the therapy progresses, a person tells a dream when he formerly would have felt sleepy or would have used another less communicative defense like falling silent.  Telling the dream in the hour is an example of the use of the context of the past because it involves a memory of the dream and displaces the analytic focus away from the present situation in the session to a different time and place.  Gray (1992) gives an example of a patient who was speaking about his mother in a critical way, with his voice becoming angrier, who suddenly became quieter, and began to tell a dream.  In the dream, he had on a black robe, like a judge, and people were listening to him.  Then he was in a white robe, feeling embarrassed because he hadn’t shaved, and the crowd got restless, and was muttering against him.  His mother was in the crowd and it looked as though she might be crushed.  Gray begins by saying that in the description of the dream, the patient picked up on the problem he was up against just before telling the dream.  When the patient agreed and remembered speaking about his mother, Gray said that he sounded as if he had been hesitant to speak critically about his mother, and then the dream interrupted.  When the patient remembered that, Gray said that maybe it had become unsafe to show him the critical feeling about his mother.  After the patient then said that he did not want to seem unfair to his mother, Gray used the manifest content again, saying that in his memory of the dream the patient first pictured himself as a judge, but then took that away by making a white-robed unshaven figure of himself.

Gray shows the patient his reluctance in a very acceptable way, first by telling the patient that his reporting of the dream continues the theme of the hour and then telling him that the report of the dream interrupted critical thoughts of his mother.  Gray makes sure that his patient is working with him in a conscious way before he mentions continuing with critical thoughts about the mother.  This kind of approach is more positive than many interpretations of the reluctance to discover more about one’s aggression and sexual ideas.  Such interventions are usually heard as critical.  It is necessary to be particularly careful with interventions that show the telling of the dream as expressing reluctance, because when these interventions are heard as too critical, people will report fewer dreams.

 

References:

Breger, L, Hunter, I. & Lane, R.W. (1971).  The Effect of Stress on Dreams. New York: International Universities Press, Inc.

Freud, S. (1895). Studies on Hysteria. The Case of Frau Emmy von N. Standard Edition, 2: 48-105.

—– (1908). Letter to K. Abraham. In A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1926, H. Abraham & E. Freud, eds. New York: Basic Books, 1965.

Gais, S., Plihal, W., Wagner, U., & Born, J.  (2000).  Early sleep triggers memory for early visual discrimination skills.  Nature Neuroscience 3: 1335-1339.

Goldberger, M.  1989).  On the analysis of defenses in dreams.  Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 58:  396-418.

Gray, P.  (1992).  Memory as resistance, and the telling of a dream.  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 40:  307-326.

Kohut, H.  (1971).  The Analysis of the Self.  New York:  International Universities Press.

Ornstein, P.H.  (1987).  On self-state dreams in the psychoanalytic treatment process. In A. Rothstein, ed., The Interpretations of Dreams in Clinical Work.  Madison, CT:  International Universities Press, Inc., pp.  87-104.

Reiser, M. (1997). The art and science of dream interpretation: Isakower revisited. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 45: 891-905.

Sharpe, E.F.  (1937).  Dream Analysis.  London:  Hogarth Press. Reprint, New York:  Brunner/Mazel, (1978).  Chapter II.  Mechanisms of dream formation, pp. 40-65.

Winson, J. (1986). Brain and Psyche. New York: Vintage Books.