Ready for the next mini discussion about constructive theories of dreaming? I have a lot to fit in before I leave so it will be pretty condensed. (Plus, I didn't really do the reading for this one so I'm simply referring to my notes lol).
Fiss's essential point is that "dreams are the theatre of subliminal unconscious stimuli." Fiss says that throughout our waking life, we pick up unconscious stimuli in addition to conscious stimuli. Stimuli meaning neural effects from external and internal cues. The conscious stimuli we process immediately and react to it in waking life.
Dreams process the unconscious stimuli that we get throughout the day. For example, say you meet someone you haven't seen for a while. She smiles and you talk and say how long it's been, "We should hang out sometime", etc. That night, you have a dream with that same person in it. But in the dream, she isn't happy to see you and in fact tries to run you over with her car or something. According to Fiss, your dream is revealing what your unconscious mind picked up that your conscious mind didn't: she wasn't really happy to see you and even maybe dislikes you very much. Your ucs mind could have picked this up from small clues such as a facial twinge or some body language that you didn't pick up on.
Your mind processing the unconscious data is what creates dreams. Dreams transform the unconsciously gathered data and put it into a symbolic message. In our example, the woman wanting to run you over in her car symbolizes her hatred towards you.
In this way, dreams are especially capable of bringing to our awareness facts about ourselves and the world that we normally don't notice. Dreams bring low level stimuli to our attention. This part of Fiss's theory is pretty well supported with scientific research. Some people in a test (I know this is terribly vague but I didn't write down the study so I can't reference it! Bad Ali!) were shown images faster than the eye could recognize. The test subjects were not able to describe in detail what they had seen but their dreams recorded the next morning contained details that were strikingly similar to the images that they had not consciously been able to process.
The question our class discussed here was, "Are any of the unconscious stimuli important?" What would our unconscious minds pick out as important and choose to lay out in a dream? It doesn't seem likely that we review every single unconscious stimuli throughout the day, there would be too much, so it seems likely there is a filter on what stimuli we explore in dreams. We thought perhaps emotion has something to do with emotion or cognitive significance of events, but feel free to think about that yourselves and comment if you have ideas.
Another cool thing that Fiss talks about is that unconscious stimuli can also come from within ourselves. He gave examples of dreamers who were able to diagnose illness through dreams. Some members of our class had personal experiences that supported this hypothesis. Kind of cool huh? In fact there were ancient practices were people used dreams to heal themselves and there are modern followers of that idea as well.
When doing dream work with Fiss's theory, ask yourself what you might have subliminally picked up on. Ask what your dream is trying to tell yourself about external or internal unconscious data.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Philosophy of Dreaming: Fiss
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Philosophy of Dreaming: Freud
So I have been horrible at blogging while I attend class so I will have to play catch up on my classes as they ended last week. For the Philosophy of Dreaming, I thought posting a review of the constructive theories would be the easiest way to get to the meat of our discussions.
- The base part, the "Id" is comprised of our innate drives (especially biological ones). He suggests some drives such as aggression, sexuality, the drive for food, etc. These drives are largely unconscious (abbreviated as UCS) meaning that we sometimes are not consciously aware of them, they exist without our knowing.
- Next is our "Ego" which is our self concept or your 'conscious 'I''. Basically it is how you perceive yourself.
- The "Superego" is above the Ego, it judges the Ego and makes it conform to consciously and UCS-ly learned social norms. It can also be described as our conscious (the Jimminy Cricket variety, not the conscious (abbreviated as CS) v. UCS type).
- Representation is pretty straightforward. Our dreams are forms of pictorial representations and elements in our dreams represent other things. Event the sequence of images can be important representation.
- Condensation means that one symbol or element in our dreams can stand for multiple meanings. It also means that one meaning can be reinforced by multiple symbols. In one example, a man dreams of a woman wearing two bathing suits. The interpretation is that the woman represents two people, the man's wife and mother.
- Displacement confuses the Ego by transferring meanings onto neutral or trivial objects. i.e. clutching a teddy bear in a dream where the teddy bear might symbolize a loved one. One form of displacement is reversal which makes every thing its opposite. You might dream you are at a large party but the dream is actually disguising loneliness. Symbol is a set of universal symbols that represent the collective human experience.
- Symbols that Freud favored were pointy objects representing a penis and any vessel representing a vagina. Emerging from water might represent birth, round containers a womb, etc. Things that every human being experiences.
- Secondary Revision takes place when you wake up. It is your editing of your dream experience, where your mind might try to make the dream images more narrative or logical. This can cloud out the meaning of dream images and place too much importance on dream narratives according to Freud.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Philosophy of Dreaming
I have also talked to people interested in my dreaming class. Although it will be slightly more difficult to talk about what we learn in this class (it is based in philosophy and dreams which are both sometimes difficult to decipher), I thought I would share some basics.
The readings we have for this class are Dream Reader and Lucid Dreams in 30 Days and Dream Reader. The first book is very helpful for helping you remember your dreams and becomming lucid in your dreams. I normally never remember my dreams but since doing the excercises and keeping a dream journal, I have been remembering at least one every night.
Some basics I would recommend if you don't want to buy the book are keeping a journal and telling yourself you will remember your dreams in the morning. It is also very helpful if you can wake up without the use of an alarm. The author suggests setting a stereo to wake you up gently with classical music if you need to get up at a certain time. When you wake up, give yourself a moment to relax and let the dream come to you. Immediately write in your journal the setting, characters, props/objects, feelings, etc. that were in your dream. Then leave some space to record anything else you might remember later or for musings on your dream's relation to daily life.
Throughout your day, think things like Everyone has dreams and think about it for a second then let the thought go. Also ask yourself periodically if you are dreaming, especially when you encounter dream like circumstances. Consider the question seriously. Most of the time you will come to the conclusion that you are in the waking state but one time, you might just find yourself in a dreaming state, and then you will be lucid.
The first day, we talked about stages of sleep and their relation to dreams (ie. NREM and REM). The next day, we discussed purely physiological theories about dreaming. These are the reductive theories of dreaming. We just spent one day on these theories because the class is geared to looking for meaning in dreams although we must keep in mind that the reductionists may be right.
The first constructive theory of dreaming we talked about was Freud. Then we discussed Fiss, Jung, and Alder. I'll fill you in on these theories in later posts with some examples of possible dream interpretations.
