Home Personal Psychology Sleeping/Dreaming The Nature and Function of Dreams I. An Overview

The Nature and Function of Dreams I. An Overview

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With the collective shadow, Jung moves well beyond Freud and taps into the profoundly disturbing history of human cruelty and violence—the “dark history” in which humans take one step forward toward collective individuation and then one step backward (or perhaps two steps backward over the past century or two). Primitive fears – the terrors of the night that our ancestors experienced living as weak and slow animals on the savannah—blend with more recent collective memories of societal plagues and massive starvation. If Jung is accurate in his portrayal of the collective shadow, then the sense of awe-fullness and dread-fullness (numinous) is indeed something to jar us in our dreams—and usually wake us up in a cold sweat.

Downer dreams

There are “lousy” dreams that portray us not doing much in a difficult situation. We find ourselves as dreamers in a dysfunctional state. We are unable to successful complete some act—which is the conditions in awake life that produces trauma (Levine and Frederick, 2009) None of the functions that can be served by a dream are being met. The dreamer is often caught in a repetitive cycle with the same images or vignetter repeating itself.

Chaos theorist would suggest that a “strange attractor” is engages, with some distracting theme, image or dream character pulling in all of the energy and attention. The strange attractor often is associated with some major source of potentially anxiety. In avoiding this anxiety, the dreamer “decides” to abandon any attempt to fulfill any functions. The dream might not be anxiety producing and does not evolve into a nightmare. However, the dream does produce one new source of anxiety associated with the resultant sense of helplessness and hopelessness (Seligman, 1992): we can’t even succeed in our dreams.

Frequently, the dream displays rigidity (what psychologists called the einstellung effect). An obvious pathway to resolution is ignored and creativity of any sort has abandoned the dreamer. We know that this rigidity is common when we are anxious and when we are pressed for time. If the task we are facing is new, complex, unexpected and ill-defined, the einstellung effect is most likely to appear. Given that the “tasks” undertaking in our dreams often are new, complex, unexpected and ill-defined, it is not surprising that this rigidity might emerge. It might indeed be surprising that our dreams are so often quite creative given these conditions.

Boring dreams

The same old thing. Can’t I ever solve this (French and Fromm). This is just the old dream that used to scare me (falling off the cliff), but now is just like watching the same old movie for the 20th time. In my own dream life, I have often created a scenario where I am wandering around an urban slum with great fear of being attacked. I found this dream scenario to be terrifying for a long period of time. Carl Jung (1963) recounts having a similar dream in his autobiography (Memories, Dreams and Reflections).
In keeping with one Jungian perspective, the slum would represent an aspect of myself. Jung (1963, p. 198) arrived at the same conclusion regarding his dream: “This dream represent4ed my situation at the time. . . . Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque—just as I felt then.” I suspect that a Jungian would ask me how I was feeling during the period when I was having this recurrent dream. Like Jung, I would have to say this was a dark time in my life—and my anxiety experienced in the slum would relate directly to the anxiety I was feeling about my life.

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