Human time and dreaming

One characteristic of massive trauma is a persistent feeling that time is frozen, i.e., an experience impossible to integrate into a psychic reality. In this paper, the author sets out to explore the dimension of time in the psychoanalytical situation in an effort to shed light on this question. The infant acquires an immediate sense of time through the rhythm of frustration and satisfaction, and out of these encounters, a fundamental dialogue evolves. This primary dialogue is internalised and is regarded as an indispensable structure for psychic life. The child's existence is impregnated by unconscious desires or beliefs of the adult world—enigmatic messages that will constitute an unconscious source of the child's own psychic reality. Timeless desires and enigmatic messages urge on a dreaming in attempts to carry over the psychical sense of time and the implacable time of existence. When we infuse a time dimension through our dreaming and our narratives, we give shape to our timeless wishes. The psychoanalytic situation arouses the primary dialogue and an elementary experience of time. Traumatic experiences are tantamount to the absence of the primary object and thereby the death of time. Dreaming becomes an endeavour to create a psychic space, the aim of which is to restore the primary dialogue. If circumstances obliterate all hope of re-establishing the bond to the primary object, the sense of time is destroyed as well. The author concludes that the experience of time and elaboration of traumatic experiences are closely connected.     

Transcending the caesura: Reverie,dreaming and counter‐dreaming

The author reflects about our capacity to get in touch with primitive, irrepresentable, seemingly unreachable parts of the Self and with the unrepressed unconscious. It is suggested that when the patient's dreaming comes to a halt, or encounters a caesura, the analyst dreams that which the patient cannot. Getting in touch with such primitive mental states and with the origin of the Self is aspired to, not so much for discovering historical truth or recovering unconscious content, as for generating motion between different parts of the psyche. The movement itself is what expands the mind and facilitates psychic growth. Bion's brave and daring notion of ‘caesura’, suggesting a link between mature emotions and thinking and intra‐uterine life, serves as a model for bridging seemingly unbridgeable states of mind. Bion inspires us to ‘dream’ creatively, to let our minds roam freely, stressing the analyst's speculative imagination and intuition often bordering on hallucination. However, being on the seam between conscious and unconscious, dreaming subverts the psychic equilibrium and poses a threat of catastrophe as a result of the confusion it affords between the psychotic and the non‐psychotic parts of the personality. Hence there is a tendency to try and evade it through a more saturated mode of thinking, often relying on external reality. The analyst's dreaming and intuition, perhaps a remnant of intra‐uterine life, is elaborated as means of penetrating and transcending the caesura, thus facilitating patient and analyst to bear unbearable states of mind and the painful awareness of the unknowability of the emotional experience. This is illustrated clinically.     

Sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming

Lucid dreaming—the phenomenon of experiencing waking levels of self-reflection within one’s dreams—is associated with more wake-like levels of neural activation in prefrontal brain regions. In addition, alternating periods of wakefulness and sleep might increase the likelihood of experiencing a lucid dream. Here we investigate the association between sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming, with a multi-centre study encompassing four different investigations into subjective and objective measures of sleep fragmentation, nocturnal awakenings, sleep quality and polyphasic sleep schedules. Results across these four studies provide a more nuanced picture into the purported connection between sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming: While self-assessed numbers of awakenings, polyphasic sleep and physiologically validated wake-REM sleep transitions were associated with lucid dreaming, neither self-assessed sleep quality, nor physiologically validated numbers of awakenings were. We discuss these results, and their underlying neural mechanisms, within the general question of whether sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming share a causal link.     

Attributional style, dreaming and depression

The relationship between attributional style, depression and dreaming was explored by analysing dream reports from 80 subjects for evidence of attributional style using the Content Analysis of Verbatim Material (CAVE) technique. These scores were then compared with a waking measure of attributional style—the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire (EASQ) and with levels of depression as measured by the BDI. Contrary to expectations, dream attributional style did not correlate with waking attributional style, nor was there a significant correlation between internal, global and stable attributional style in dreams and level of depression. Results did support previous research that an internal, stable and global waking attributional style correlates with depression.     

Pavlovian theory of dreaming

Pavlovian theory provides a conceptual scheme for the examination of recent empirical data on dreaming. Consistencies are examined between these data and Pavlovian theory of the general properties of the nervous system. An equation is made between Pavlov’s excitation-inhibition continuum, the REM-NREM cycle, and the basic rest-activity cycle. Speculations, based on this equation, are made about the inter-relation between waking and sleeping behaviors. Testable hypotheses are suggested throughout the paper.     

The laterality of dreaming

The cortical locus of dream generation could be lateralized to the right or left hemisphere, or be bilaterally represented with either equal or unequal contributions from each hemisphere. In this paper we review the neurological literature for cases of loss or alteration of dream report after brain damage. The distribution of lesion sites is used to test the various hypotheses concerning the laterality of dreaming. The hypothesis receiving best support is that dreaming is lateralized to the left hemisphere in individuals with typical neurologic organization.     

Analytic process and dreaming about analysis

Dreams about the analytic session feature a manifest content in which the analytic setting is subject to distortion while the analyst appears undisguised. Such dreams are a consistent yet infrequent occurrence in most analyses. Their specificity consists in never reproducing the material conditions of the analysis as such. This paper puts forward the following hypothesis: dreams about the session relate to some aspects of the analyst's activity. In this sense, such dreams are indicative of the transference neurosis, prefiguring transference resistances to the analytic elaboration of key conflicts. The parts taken by the patient and by the analyst are discussed in terms of their ability to signal a deepening of the analysis.     

Connectivity and condensation in dreaming.

Converging developments in the cognitive- and neurosciences have brought Freud's hope of a bridge between psychoanalysis and psychophysiology nearer to hand. This paper concerns the relation between dream construction and memory in terms of these new developments. The neural network architecture of memory structures in the brain is described and illustrated with simple examples. We see how a network is connected and how connection weights vary with experience. The distributed representation stored by the network and its crucial properties for mental functioning are discussed. These concepts are used to explain how particular memories of past events are selected for inclusion in the dream. The properties of the neural network suggest that images of distinct past events are conflated at times during the selection process. The appearance of these conflated images may complicate the matching of day residues with representations of past events in the dream itself. Some likely implications for psychoanalytic theory are explored.     

Affect integration in dreams and dreaming

The processes by which dreaming aids in the ongoing integration of affects into the mind are approached here from complementary psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic perspectives. One relevant notion is that the dream provides a psychological space wherein overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex affects that under waking conditions are subject to dissociation, splitting, or disavowal may be brought together for observation by the dreaming ego. This process serves the need for psychological balance and equilibrium. A brief discussion of how the mind processes information during dreaming is followed by a consideration of four component aspects of the integrative process: the nature and use of the dream-space, the oscillating "me / not me" quality of the dream, the apparent reality of the dream, and the use of nonpathological projective identification in dreaming. Three clinical illustrations are offered and discussed.     

Associative dreaming: reverie and active imagination

The idea of countertransference has expanded beyond its original meaning of a neurotic reaction to include all reactions of the therapist: affective, bodily, and imaginal. Additionally, Jung's fundamental insight in 'The psychology of the transference' was that a 'third thing' is created in the analysis, but he failed to demonstrate how this third is experienced and utilized in analysis. This 'analytic third', as Ogden names it, is co-created by analyst and analysand in depth work and becomes the object of analysis. Reverie, as developed by Bion and clinically utilized by Ogden, provides a means of access to the unconscious nature of this third. Reverie will be placed on a continuum of contents of mind, ranging from indirect to direct associative forms described as associative dreaming. Active imagination, as developed by Jung, provides the paradigm for a mode of interaction with these contents within the analytic encounter itself. Whether the analyst speaks from or about these contents depends on the capacity of the patient to dream. Classical amplification can be understood as an instance of speaking about inner contents. As the ego of the analyst, the conscious component, relates to unconscious contents emerging from the analytic third, micro-activations of the transcendent function constellate creating an analytic compass.     

Muslims dreaming of Christians,Christians dreaming of Muslims: Images from Medieval dream interpretation

Medieval Muslims attached great importance to learning the hidden meanings of dreams which, they believed, might disclose the true character of the dreamer and others or predict the future. The popularity of dream interpretation in the Islamic Middle East is reflected in the large number of manuals devoted to the subject. They provide a valuable picture of common information, misinformation and social attitudes on a wide range of topics, including Christianity and Christians. By contrast, Christian dream interpreters were frequently regarded with suspicion in the Byzantine Empire and very little of their work has survived. The present study looks at views of each other's faith in the work of two major interpreters, one Muslim and one Christian, from the tenth to eleventh centuries, an influential period in a very conservative tradition where interpretations would commonly be repeated for centuries in many different compilations.