At the heart of the matter is a sense that “things are not going very well” with regard to normal ego functions. Our identity is slipping away from us and/or our problems aren’t being successfully solved. While we might want to somehow avoid confronting this failure on our part, the anxiety-filled, nightmarish dream is telling us that we can’t run away from the challenge, for our dreams will keep chasing us and wake us up, shaken and (hopefully) ready to “get brave” and face the challenge.
Synthesizing: if signaling is a primitive form of ego-functioning, the capacity to synthesize is one of the most advanced of our ego functions. Many ego-psychologists focus on the creation of schemata or cognitive/affective templates when describing the capacity of our ego to synthesize information. Building on the concepts offered by Frederick Bartlett (1995) and Jean Piaget (1923/2001), psychologists such as I. H. Paul (Paul, 1959; Paul, 1966) have studied the formation and extended use of schemata to not just foster remembering (Bartlett) and the assimilation of new information (Piaget), but also the connecting and extension of diverse experiences and bodies of information.
We find schemata operating not just in our waking life, but also in our dreams. Often these schemata are deeply embedded and perhaps, as the Jungians suggest, inherited, as collective archetypes, from one’s culture (as I shall describe regarding introverted dreams). Even without pushing to the boundaries of Jungian inheritance, we can describe the synthesizing function of dreams. In alignment with the Jungians, we can identify dreams that are filled with symbols or imagery that is multi-tiered. As Sigmund Freud (1900/2010) proposed many years ago, a dream holds the capacity to convey several meanings in a single word or in a single symbol.
I noted in an earlier essay (Bergquist, 2023a) that one of the participants in our sleep lab produced a dream in which the word “bridge” was applied to the dreamer’s nose, the game of cards she was playing, and the structure over which she was rolling in a wheelchair. In another of my essays, I suggested that the act of flying could symbolize several different emotional conditions—both a disguised sexual desire and a feeling of competency (Bergquist, 2024). Deeply felt emotional challenges, as well as internal and external conflicts, are represented via symbols. Symbols and images are engaged in the dream because the emotions, situations, or conflicts are often too complex or filled with too many contradictions to be represented in verbal form or via action. Complex (and even contradictory) emotions, situations, and conflicts are artfully packed together and synthesized.
