Das Traumgenerierungsmodell von Ulrich Moser und die Codierung von Traumprozessen

Under the conditions of sleeping, mental activity creates a psychic microworld “dream” experienced as the present, running predominantly in a pictorial and sensual way in a sequence of situations and sometimes containing verbal relations and cognitive processes. Together with Ilka von Zeppelin, Ulrich Moser has developed a model of the emergence of sleep dreams with the aim to reconstruct the dreaming process, which is normally concealed under the verbal structure of the dream report and to explain this sequence as the result of a cognitive affective regulatory process. In accordance with the theory of French, dreaming is seen as an attempt to cope in a simulative mode with unresolved neurotic conflicts and traumatic experiences. To make this process visible, the authors developed a very differentiated model-guided coding system, a form of operationalization of the “dream work” that records and describes all cognitive elements and all interactive behavior in the dream. This analysis provides the formal and structural characteristics of the dream that precede every interpretation of content or biographical meaning. In this way, dream series in a single person, as well as dreams in different groups, can be objectively studied and compared. A presentation of the dream model is followed by an introduction into the basic principles of the coding system. This dream process coding and the interpretation based on it are demonstrated on a specimen dream. This dream is Freud’s “Dream of Irma’s injection”, which he selected himself to demonstrate his method of dream interpretation in Die Traumdeutung and which was also used by Erikson to illustrate his “configurational analysis”.