RITSE is truly an extraordinary capacity of the human psyche. We can move backward in personal and collective history to explore alternative portrayals of reality and to be selective regarding how best to guard against the massive intrusion of anxiety-producing memories, impulses or existential concerns. Someone like Carl Jung could plunge for a short while each day into “madness” as he chisels on granite blocks and as he prepared the visual illustrations and the narrative (written in beautiful old Gothic script) in his Red Book (Jung, 2009).
An artist such as Edvard Munch, can enter his Oslo Norward studio and create a series of deeply troubling painting of anguish and despair without slipping into deep depression himself. Thomas Wolfe (1929/2006) retains his sanity while write “madly” on tablets about his troubled childhood in North Carolina and about his inability to ever “go home again.” We protect ourselves and find support inside ourselves for insightful and creative endeavors, while pushing the boundaries of emotional regulation.
This protection and support are particularly evident in our dreams. They provide us, as dreamers, with the capacity to be both controlled and uncontrolled (the dream serving as an independent entity). Our dreams provide a temporary “insanity” while addressing some of the most important and “sane” issues that we confront during our waking hours. Our ego ensures that the dream’s regression is brief and reversible upon awakening. Like other forms of regression in the service of the ego, dreams provide access to primary process material, including illogical, symbolic, and often childlike thinking.
At the same time, dreams provide the mechanism for integration into secondary process. While most dreams are not recalled when we wake up, some are recalled. Furthermore, it is likely that the unrecalled dreams still linger in some capacity in our unconscious life (possibly hitching a ride on our ideational train). Furthermore, as I have suggested throughout this essay and other essays in this series, our dreams, like other RITSE processes, serve a constructive purpose. In a supportive RITSE environment, dreams often suggest novel ideas, provide images that can later be portrayed in paintings and novels, or yield important psychological insights.
Self-Efficacy: We can also move to the perspectives offered by Albert Bandura (1997) who views dreams not from a psychoanalytic perspective, but rather from a cognitive/behavioral viewpoint. Specifically, he looks to the ways in which dreams help to support Self efficacy. For Bandura, this state of self-efficacy centers on the belief in one’s ability to execute behaviors necessary to achieve specific outcomes. In the context of dreaming, several Bandura-oriented practitioners offer the concept of dream self-efficacy (DSE), which refers to one’s belief in their ability to influence or control dream content (Miller, Davis and Balliett, 2014; Rousseau, Dube-Frenette, Belleville, 2018).
In many ways, DSE is the ultimate expression of a belief among those oriented toward a cognitive-behavioral perspective that we can control our actions—even when asleep. From this viewpoint, dreams not only can provide guidance and support in our facing the challenge of self-efficacy, this efficacy, can, in turn, assist in the determination of how this support for efficacy is achieved. When successful, DSE is a self-reinforcing process.
Specifically, a technique called Targeted Dream Incubation (TDI) can be engaged (Horowitz, et al., 2020). Prior to falling asleep, individuals set intentions regarding what they hope to achieve in their dreams. A “seed is planted.” The intentions (“seeds”) are typically introduced during the hypnogogic transition between the state of being awake and falling asleep. The recorded intentions are typically accompanied by sounds, music, or scents that are intended to guide the dream content.
