Content and Continuity
Dreaming can be defined as "a sequence of perceptions, thoughts and emotions during sleep that is experienced as a series of actual events. The nature of these events, the dream content, can be known to the interviewers only in the form of a verbal or written report." Dream content seems to be evolved simultaneously with cognitive and emotional development during childhood. However, when adulthood is reached, only few differences emerge concerning the dream content. The most apparent variability in dream content seems to deal with the emergence of aggression, which additionally diverges greatly due to age, as it has been demonstrated through a majority of studies. Despite the originality and creativity that is exhibited in the cognitive construction of dreams, and even given the aspects of dream content that are not understood, most dreams are more realistic and based on everyday life than is proposed by previous traditional dream theories. Furthermore, much dream content seems more evident than might be expected when reviewing clinical theories which emphasize disguise and/or symbolism in understanding dreams.
Ernest Hartmann was one of the theorists that envisioned dreams as contextualizing the dominant emotion, expressing it through a pictorial representation. This pattern is found most clearly in dreams of people that are experiencing an intense emotion (such as in general stressful situations) and not major traumas. Even if there is no dominant emotion, and several lower intensity emotions are present, such pattern, although less clear, is still present. Thus, Hartmann and his collaborators have published numerous studies demonstrating the importance of emotion in dreams, and demonstrating that the power of the central image of the dream is related to the power of the underlying emotion.
More recent developments suggest that dreams are more similar than different because they dramatize people's conceptions and concerns in relation to personal issues, which probably does not vary much from country to country as culture does. In particular, the continuity hypothesis postulates that the content of everyday dreams reflects the dreamer's waking states and concerns. In other words, elements from people's dreams can be related to corresponding waking or psychological variables. Research findings have revealed that the occurrence of recurrent dreams, nightmares and unpleasant everyday dreams is related to one's psychological well-being. Further data demonstrates that the dream reports of people suffering from certain psychopathologies can differ from those of normal control subjects (Kramer, 2000; Schredl & Engelhardt, 2001), and that certain personality dimensions such as extroversion, neuroticism, and psychological boundaries are extensively associated to dream content.
In addition, dreams have considerable consistency across time and countries because they express personal interests, worries and emotional preoccupations about family, friends, social life, recreational interests, and relationships at work. Within the context of the emphasis on personal concerns, there are sometimes distortions in settings, sudden scene changes, or unusual aspects to familiar characters, but dreams are in general a reasonable simulation of the dreamer's conception of his waking reality in terms of characters, social interactions, activities and settings.
Read more about this topic: Psychoanalytic Dream Interpretation
Famous quotes containing the words content and/or continuity:
“Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory—the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)