(unpublished essay)
Dreaming is a form of conscious activity. The conventional idea that a sleeping person is "unconscious" is incorrect--we remember dreams precisely because they are experiences. But while sleeping, our ability to think about our experiences over time is so narrowed, there is only a present experience. Without an opportunity to place dream events into perspective with our past life and identity, the images and ideas of dreams are transitory and easily forgotten. Indeed, dream experience somewhat resembles the life of Oliver Sacks' patient, Mr. T, who lives only in a sequence of scenes, shifting his identity from moment to moment, with a disinhibited sense of consistency.
Dreaming is a special kind of consciousness, perhaps something like the experience of cats or birds. A "higher-order" capability to compare ideas in a sequence is missing because neural processes that allow holding ideas active, so they can be compared, are not operating when we are asleep. New findings in neurobiology help us to understand not only the logic of dreams, but how consciousness works in everyday life.
Dreaming as a story construction process
For many years, psychologists viewed memory as a kind of storage place where ideas were written down and indexed, like letters sorted in an office mail box. In an otherwise insightful book about the brain and evolution, Sagan presented this view:
I have many times experienced dreams in which the dénouement or critical "plot surprise" was possibly only because of clues--apparently unimportant--inserted much earlier in the dream content. The entire plot development of the dream must have been in my mind at the time the dream began. (p. 178)
Similarly, Freud refers to a "precomposed phantasy which had been stored up ready-made in his memory for many years" (p. 534) to explain how a long dream story could be planned and dreamt in a short time.
How does one dream idea follow from the next? Dreams are logically constructed, but not by following a preconceived plan and not by the rationality of awake, reflective thought.
Consider this example: While dreaming, I experience dogs growling and see their sharp claws. Upon awakening, I say to myself, "Dogs can hurt their claws if they get over excited." Just as I say "claws," I know that I should say instead "strong points." Simultaneously, I realize that this was what the dream was about--my strong points. (Dogs are self-defenders, strong and tough, powerful, capable beasts. Even such animals can hurt themselves if they react too strongly or unnecessarily.) In describing the imagery of claws, I remembered an idea about myself that was forming during the dream and partly organizing it. The choice of the phrase "strong points" articulates this conceptualization; it expresses the meaning in words.
In my analysis here, I am not concerned with the overarching psychiatric interpretation of a dream, that is, how it relates to my broader life experience. Rather, I am looking at the dream narrowly: What explains the discoordination between the verbal statement of the meaning ("strong points") and the experienced image ("claws")? My claim is that the meaning is not disguised or censored, as Freud suggested, but has a neurophysiological explanation--consciousness is operating in a different way.
The relation between images, sounds, and words in a dream reveals a particular--and peculiar--kind of conceptualizing. In some dreams, as in the "claws" example, an implicit verbal conceptualization organizes the images, such that the meaning can be stated as a single sentence. Freud recognized this pattern when he compared a dream to a rebus puzzle. But he didn't study the physical process by which words and images are formed, as a cognitive or neuroscientist might today.
The phrase, "strong points," simultaneously describes both the dream content ("claws") and the dream thought or meaning of the dream ("my capabilities"). Obviously, the meaning of "strong points" changes in these two contexts. What relates these two contexts is, as strange as it may seem, the sound of the phrase, "strong points." A pun has been constructed by taking the sound in one context (the meaning of the dream) and applying it in another (the experienced image). But given the nature of consciousness during the dream, the sleeping person does not realize that he has made a pun--no inconsistency is experienced. Another common example of this process occurs when an external sound, such as loud running water, is conceived in the dream as people cheering. While dreaming, experience across sensory modalities and over time cannot be coordinated in the normal way.
The fact that an inconsistency isn't realized by the person while dreaming is a crucial clue about the kind of consciousness occurring in dreaming. Consider the sequential process of dreaming: As conceptualization of meaning occurs, imagery is experienced. The dreaming person conceives a story; but organizing of the plot is occurring thematically by another tacit, "deeper" conceptualization (the dream thought, Figure 1). The dreaming person is trying to see what's there, trying to understand and visualize an experience. Indeed, dreaming is not so much a hiding from oneself, as a striving to make sense of fleeting images and ideas. Looking in the dream scene, the dreamer may perceive an object or event ("claws") that has the same name as something meaningful ("strong points"). Indeed, these two ideas may arise together. The claws in the image and the idea of strong points now each may organize the next scene of images and dream experience. The dreaming brain operates on different conceptual planes at once, relating them, but the person is only experiencing the sensory, visual, and emotional content of the dream story.
Figure 1. Verbal conceptualizations give rise to images that suggest further elaboration of themes, which feeds back to produce further conceptualizations.
A dream presents a "sound point of view" because, although the dreaming brain can coordinate verbal and auditory categories in a particular scene, it apparently cannot coordinate both ongoing verbal and visual organizing in the montage of one scene leading to the next. Auditory processing is getting the sound right, relative to the verbal conceptualization of meaning. Visual organizers are influenced by the sound, but not the meaning of the verbalization. Both verbal and visual organizers are constructing a story of "what I am doing now," but they are coordinated only by sound. From the perspective of the meaning, the image story doesn't matter. From the perspective of the story, the verbal statement of the meaning doesn't matter.
The finding that a conceptualization may form and organize experience without being realized (becoming an experience) is fundamental for understanding the nature of conceptualization, language, and consciousness--indeed it provides a way of bringing Freud's notion of the subconscious into modern cognitive science. An interpretation of dream experience may form during the dream, but not be experienced as a statement; that is, it isn't uttered or expressed. We only conceive the dream story on one level, as images, sounds, and dialogue. Something prevents us from "making" the statement of meaning while we are sleep. The process is not censorship, but a physical inability to coordinate ideas.
What's missing in dream consciousness?
Dreaming resembles conscious experience in both the superficial awareness of events and the sense-making process. But something is missing in how we are coordinating the sense-making process over time--we are "comprehending," but only momentarily, without relating our comprehensions to each other. In everyday life, being conscious is thinking about what you are doing, having a sense of the self that persists over time. Dreams reveal why awake life appears meaningful and coherent--we create an ongoing story about what we are doing that fits what just happened a few minutes ago and what we plan to do next. This ability to relate experiences over time is missing from dream consciousness.
The presence of dream puns reveals that multiple conceptualizations simultaneously organize a dream. Recollecting the dream experience, we can get back to the meaningful thought that formed the apparently nonsensical image. For example, consider the dream description on waking: "I'm trying to run, but there are obstacles in my way." The running in the dream was jogging. The obstacles were big trees getting in my way. The choice of the word "obstacles" is critical for understanding how the dream was constructed, because the trees are just metaphorical, standing for meetings that prevented my jogging in the afternoon. But, given my interest in exercise, "running" should not be taken metaphorically; that's what the dream is about. Of course, we can say that running is a metaphor for my attitude towards life or my ambitions, but that wasn't the dream thought that was organizing the dream. Interpreting the dream's meaning beyond the phrase that constitutes the pun is perhaps insightful about me, but secondary for understanding how the dream content was formed.
Tacit verbal conceptualizations that organize dreams are usually short well-known phrases and clichés, not complex new statements about life. For example, in a dream I am sitting in a railway car in the middle of a complex of tracks. My articulation of the dream thought is "Not sure if I am on the wrong track." Literally (dream content), I was concerned about getting knocked over by passing trains. The conception of other people coming and going was difficult to recover at first. I kept seeing the trains coming and going around me. I wasn't sure if I was in the way or not. When I recollected the phrase, "on the wrong track," I realized that the dream was a pun, and hence realized the simultaneous thought that organized the dream's content. Such phrases are stated directly, reactivated from the dream memory. In contrast, writing a difficult sentence when awake may require many rewordings, reorganizations and cross outs--I am creating a new conceptualization, not reactivating a previous one.
It may be true that, were we awake, we would prefer to repress the meaning of the dream. But in dreaming are doing our best to make sense of the experience. There is no dream censoring agency, as Freud supposed. Indeed, conceptualizations (dream thought) are forming, which are not directly experienced or described, for that is how the dream is being organized. But because of the lack of coordination between the modes of representing, and because possibly in our everyday life we have not yet articulated the conceptualization, it is not experienced in the dream. Freud's mistake is to assume that we are "speaking in allusions" (p. 176) because we prefer to. But visualizing a "course" in life as a "track" might just be an association, for which only the sensory categorization of sound (the sound of the word, "track") is available to the visualizing process. Freud's term, "condensation," also gets the direction wrong. Multiple conceptualizations simultaneously organize the dream; one part of the brain is not first proposing a script that another part edits. Dream stories develop from a preponderance of possible associations between concepts, names, and images. The chain is not premeditated by some agent, it is cumulative and assembled piecemeal, whose final form resembles a film montage.
Freud did not have a theory of the process of understanding, so he postulated different agencies with purposes. This talk of "agencies" can be replaced today with a theory about the dynamic relation of modes of conceptualizing. Freud says that Agency 1 has a wish and can't express it (like a person refusing to speak). Agency 2 has the privilege of disguising it. (p. 177). Under Freud's homunculus approach these agencies are communicating, reflecting, and reasoning--precisely what a sleeping person cannot do!
If there is no censoring process, why don't we simply express dream thoughts directly? Such a verbalization would require a kind of coordination that is not possible when we are asleep. As Freud says, "Falling asleep at once involves the loss of one of our mental activities, namely our power of giving intentional guidance to the sequence of our ideas." Verbalizations that occur in dreams are names, ways of framing situations, pithy statements (e.g., in a dream I'm taping pictures together and say, "I'm trying to fix my position," meaning "I'm trying to fix my job, my role at work"). Ironically, Freud, who so well articulated aspects of consciousness, attributed to the sleeping person the capabilities of someone awake, characterizing the confusion of dreams as "misunderstanding" (p. 538).
What dreams reveal about the brain and consciousness
In terms of neurobiological function, dreaming is probably a means of relinquishing intentional control of sensorimotor systems, loosening the role of specializations formed during the day, and reestablishing potential for new constructions. With the shutdown of certain neurons (called "REM-off"), the reticular system is disinhibited, contributing to the fantastic cross-modal activations of dreams, in which language, sounds, and images are freely associated. Attentional coordination across systems is lost, certainly facilitated by the lack of feedback from sensorimotor interactions in the world. But more broadly, the grid that apparently coordinates sensorimotor activity is shut down, causing paralysis during REM sleep.
Two mechanisms of higher-order consciousness appear to be missing in dreams: conceiving the overarching character of a sequence of scenes ("Oh, I'm not dreaming very well now, I might as well be doing something else") and coordinating across modalities from scene to scene. Both are explained to a certain degree by the neurobiological evidence. The cross-modality discoordination changes the normal function of primary consciousness in creating scenes, and the temporal discoordination changes the normal function of secondary consciousness in comparing scenes. (Indeed, without these capabilities, we can only create or "read" text phrases in isolation while dreaming.) Thus, sense-making in dreaming is not the primary consciousness of animals, but another, third form of coordination, which might be characterized as "hallucinated primary consciousness."
Psychologically, dream experience in people is an understanding process, creating a story organized by scenes, narratives, or verbal conceptions, with co-organization and feedback between different modalities. Dream interpretation, when we are awake, is a form of story-telling that higher-order consciousness allows, in which contradictions, identities, and self-conception in the dream are articulated and related.
Dream themes reveal to the analyst how a person's understanding is dominated by conceptions of the self in various roles. Despite the loss of higher-order consciousness, a dream reveals the concerns of a self-aware person. That is, dream content reveals that our most general sense-making organizers are socially-situated conceptions of activity, choreographies of time, place, and concern. For example, I might be dreaming that I'm at a meeting and waiting for someone. These common activities in everyday life, blending and persisting during five or even thirty minutes during a dream, give the impression of a "plot." But for the dreamer, past scenes in the story do not exist--there is no ability to hold aside two events and relate them causally, and hence no ability while asleep to narrate the experience of dreaming itself. Consequently, the strongest organizers of dreams are previously conceived activities, spatial relations, and emotions. Dreams therefore have a continuity of place and feeling, which persists from scene to scene.
In understanding dreaming, we must avoid reductionism (Hobson: it's all neurophysiological; we don't need psychiatric explanations to understand dreaming), as well as over-generalization (Freud: all dreams are wishes; all dreams are censored). With dreams we are confronted with a wealth of "abnormal" behavior that every human experiences (and perhaps gladly forgets) multiple times a day. From the broadened perspective on the nature of conceptualization promoted by new theories of memory and cognition, dreams become revealing clues about how everyday understanding proceeds. And thanks to contributions from neurophysiology, such clues provide an enticing glimpse of how mental processes are organized. Indeed, we are now posed to better understand the varieties of consciousness and how symbolic relations are constructed in art, science, and in the experience of other conscious animals.
References
Clancey, W.J. 1997. Situated Cognition. New York: Cambridge University press.
Crick, F., and Mitchison, G. 1983. The Function of Dream Sleep. Nature, 304(14, July): 111-115.
Freud, S. [1900]1965. The Interpretation of Dreams . New York: Avon Books.
Hobson, J. A. 1988. The Dreaming Brain . New York: Basic Books.
Kitchner, P. 1992. Freud's Dream: A complete interdisciplinary science of mind . Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rosenfield, I. 1992. The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sacks, O. 1987. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat . New York: Harper & Row.
Sagan, C. 1977. The Dragons of Eden . New York: Ballantine Books.