In the first essay, I noted that our dreams are often recurrent. This is in part because we don’t seem to have learned an important transaction lesson the first time around. We might instead (or in addition) not have learned this important lesson because it is transformational in nature. And transformative learning is difficult. We are easily overwhelmed by the strong challenge of fundamental, transformative self-insight and self-change.
Most importantly, this change might not be attended by equally strong support (Sanford, 1980). It is to dreams that specifically provide transformative challenges that I turn, followed by dreams that provide support and safe venues for meeting these challenges constructively and creatively. I then turn to the differences between dreams that ultimately look outward (extraversion) and those that primarily look inward (introversion).
Dream Themes II: Challenging vs. Supportive
While dreams can sometimes be benign and affectively neutral (especially early night dreams), they are more often filled with images and narratives that are colorful, imaginative, and bizarre. They get our nighttime attention. Dreams can also be comforting, protective and fulfilling of our most important desires (even those that are “forbidden”). Many of our most memorable dreams, from which we can learn and address our long-term pressing issues (French and Fromm’s “focal conflicts”) (French and Fromm, 1964) arrive at night with a balance between challenge and support. As Nevitt Sanford (1980) has observed, it is at these moments of balance that we are most likely to engage in significant learning when we are awake. Perhaps, this is also the case when we are asleep and producing dreams.
If dreams do offer this balance, then we might find that the experiences of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), we find when rock-climbing, dancing, playing chess, or working on a crossword puzzle, are also to be found in our “many splendored” dreams. I propose that there may be such a thing as Dream Flow. It occurs when challenge and support partner in a dream. To make sense of this potential partnership, I consider both the dynamics operating when a dream is challenging, and when it is supportive.
