Now on to the diverse themes that are represented in these many splendored things called dreams. In this essay, I consider dreams that are convened to address present-day issues (transactional) and those convened to help us prepare for the future (transformational)
Dream Themes I: Transactional vs. Transformational
The temporal perspective of our dreams strongly influences the content of our dreams, as well as the influence our dreams may have over our waking life. Some of our dreams tend to focus on the present and on the transactions in which we are currently engaged. Conversely, other dreams tend to focus on the future and the transformations we are now seeking or hope to seek in our sense of self as we prepare for the life that we will be living in years to come.
Transactional Dreams tend to provide the dreamer with still-life portraits of events, people, and ideas that currently exist or have existed in the past. Transactional dreams also tend to be reactive, providing diverse responses to these events, people, and ideas. By contrast, Transformational dreams move us into the future. As the dreamer, we are being proactive and in search of something new (transformational) in our sense of self or the world in which we live when awake.
Transactional Dreams
In some cases, we find that the theme of a dream is based on reactions to and transactions with specific daytime events. We can call on a traditional psychodynamic entity that Freud called the “ego” to help us navigate this type of theme. As portrayed by the ego psychologists (who expanded on and moved a bit away from the theories of Dr. Freud), the ego serves as an adaptive mediator between external and internal realities. In a dream, this mediation can take on many forms, ranging from the exploration of alternative perspectives of external reality to the resolution of focal conflicts arising from the external world (a process I described in one of the first essays in this series: Bergquist, 2023a).
Assuming an ego psychological perspective, I wish to introduce many of the ego-related, transactional themes to be found in dreams. I find that transactional dream themes can be distilled into five fundamental ego psychological functions: (1) identity formation, (2) signaling, (3) synthesizing, (4) problem-solving, and (5) savoring and expanding.
Identity-Formation: one of the most noted of the ego psychologists, Erik Erikson (1980) devotes a considerable amount of attention to the formation of identity in his eight-stage theory of human development. While he considers one of the stages to be specifically focused on identity-related issues, the matter of identity is related to all of his stages, ranging from creating a trusting relationship with one’s world to the discovery of ego-integrity at the end of one’s life.
