Mack brings in a second important insight offered by Sigmund Freud. Freud (1936/1990) wrote about something he called “signal anxiety.” As adults, we become anxious when something in our life touches on a wish in our unconscious self that is unacceptable. Mack (1970, p. 211) puts it this way:
“. . . small amount of anxiety under the control of the ego may act as a signal to prevent the development of a traumatic situation, in which there occurs anxiety of overwhelming proportions. . . This signal or sample anxiety given the ego the opportunity to avoid the danger situation or to bring into play judgment, reality-testing, and various psychological defense that may help to prevent anxiety of overwhelming intensity from arising.”
I like to say that anxiety is a splash of cold water on our face that is telling us to somehow avoid or get out of a situation where a “forbidden” impulse is lurking around or seeping up through our unconscious. As I have already noted, a process of peremptory ideation will be provided a little later in this essay that could account at least in part for the lurking or seeping source of threat. It may be that this signal anxiety is operating when we have a nightmare. Something unacceptable is threatening to appear while we are “unguarded” by our ego while we are asleep and inclined to offer dreams that, as Freud suggests, are directed toward the satisfaction of often primitive wishes.
We might even speculate that nightmares occur in non-REM sleep as a precursor to an emerging dream that contains content that is unacceptable. The non-REM nightmare “signals” the dreamer that adjustments should be made in the impending dream or it should be cancelled all together. While this speculation might be giving too much credit to ego functioning that could be monitoring dream production and content, it is also possible that this signal functioning is working during the night, given (as Freud suggests) that it is operating when we are awake.
We are left once again with an intriguing proposition: the processes of ego defense, symbolization, story creation, and anticipation may be operating both when we are awake and when we are asleep. The barrier that is often placed between waking and sleeping life might not exist. We now know that we are processing daytime memories when we are asleep (e.g. Luborsky and Shevrin, 1956); we might also be engaged in quite complex cognitive and affective processes while we are asleep. Along with this mature ego-functioning, we might be regressing cognitively and affectively in our dreams. Much as many ego psychologists write about regression in the service of the ego that occurs when we are being creative (Kris, 1953), our regression while dreaming might also ultimately be constructive, especially if monitored by the threat of nightmares, if the regression “gets out of hand”.
Pain and Growth
There is some further evidence of this potential regression in the service of the ego. The pain that is experienced in the dream can also lead us to new insights into our own needs, assumptions and fears, and to resulting growth and maturation of our psyche. I offer one of my own dreams as illustrative of this potential interplay between pain and growth:
“I have had a long late-night dream in which I am teaching a course regarding personality theory – a course that I have actually often taught. In the middle of the course, which I was co-teaching, we broke into two groups. I took one of the groups and we began to share some of our personal life stories. The session went on for a long period of time, extending late into the evening. For some reason, in the middle of this extended session, my group got up and crossed a bridge. On the other side of the bridge, the session continued and got very intense. It took on the quality of a Black church service, with call and response.
