The listener might instead transform into a person (such as our long-deceased father) who offers an interpret of what we have said from their own perspective. I often had dreams earlier in my adulthood, when I would be conversing with my mother (who had passed away five to ten years earlier). In real life, I would talk with her as a child while she was engaged in ironing the family cloths (those were the days when ironed clothes were a social requirement). Now, in my dreams, she would listen to what I had to say and then serve both as a cheerleader and critique—offering me some gentle encouragement as well as cautionary wisdom. It is wonderful when a dream can enable us to retain the special relationship that we had with one of our parents—long after they passed away.
Autotelia (Just for Enjoyment): Before we move on to the final function, I must acknowledge that some of our planning in dreams is being done just for the enjoyment of imagining a fanciful event. Planning joins with wish-fulfillment to welcome in our psyche’s often-ignored creativity. I recently was read an autobiography written by Mel Brooks, who is not only the author of many hilarious movies and a successful Broadway show but was also one of the writers of the Show of Shows (a the now legendary television show starring Sid Caesar and Imogine Coca). An episode from Brook’s biography seems to have crept into one of my dreams: I was part of a team of writers in my dream who were give the task of coming up with a new comedy show.
In my dream, some unusual characters were invited to join this team. One of them was a veterinarian. This made sense because the show was to be about people who brought in strange pets to their Vet that don’t behave. It would be a bit like the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, when pets ran around the stage or tried to bite Johnny. The show would include some very large snakes and perhaps a lion or tiger. Furthermore, as in the movie “Best of Show” the pet owners would look quite a bit like their pets. In our show, the pet owners would not just look like their dogs but also like their snake or their house-trained lion. I was truly enjoying the envisioning of this television series – and know that it would be as successful and hilarious as Brooks’ own TV show and movies! We can plan “just for the hell of it.”
Psychologists call this autotelic (self-goal) behavior and Csikszentmihalyi would probably describe this as “flow” if it occurred during our waking life. It seems that autotelia and flow are to be found in our dreams—and the outcomes of these flow-related dreams are spectacular. Matthew Walker (2017, p. 228) is certainly an admirer:
More than simply melding information together in creative ways, REM-sleep dreaming can take things a step further. REM sleep is capable of creating abstract overarching knowledge and super ordinate concepts out of sets of information. Think of an experienced physician who is able to seemingly intuit a diagnosis from the many tens of varied, subtle symptoms she observes in a patient. While this kind of abstractive skill can come after years of hard-earned experience, it is also the very same accurate gist extraction that we have observed REM sleep accomplishing within just one night.
I join with Walker in concluding that dreams not only serve important cognitive (thinking) and affective (emotions) functions. They do so in a manner that pushes the frontier of human achievement. Perhaps, as the Jungians would suggest, dreams enact this function with the assistance of unconscious processes and a deep archive of collective memories, images, stories and myths.
