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The article analyzes Vladimir Besleaga’s dream diary, an original manuscript, unknown to the wide public, which can be consulted at the National Museum of Romanian Literature “Mihail Kogalniceanu”, the collection of “Manuscripts”. The manuscript was offered by the author to the researcher, PhD in philology Ana Ghilas and the undersigned, in order to explore the depths of the creative imaginary of the nonagenarian Bessarabian writer. Thus, in the diary we will recognize some recurring images impregnated in the literary creation of Vladimir Besleaga – village, house, mother, water, father etc. The usual area and childhood experiences are for the author of this diary (with the title of manuscript Dreams of night and day (diary ante- anti- octogenate)) an endless source of miracles that helps him to renew his creative impulses and to put in order his ordinary, profane human condition with sacred elements from the abyss of being.

“Muslims were not the first in the Near East to interpret dreams. This type of divination had a long history, and Muslims were not ignorant of that history.” The interest of early Arab Islamic cultures in dreams can be proved by the vast literature on dreams and their interpretation as well as dream accounts written in diverse historical texts. The Ottoman Empire was no different in that it also shared this culture of dream interpretation and narration. Unlike past scholarship that ignored the significance of dreams, the number of studies addressing the subject has increased in the recent decades, thanks to the growing tendency of scholars to see dreams as potential sources for cultural history. However, as Peter Burke has stated, scholars and historians in particular must bear in mind the fact that “they do not have access to the dream itself but at best to a written record, modified by the preconscious or conscious mind in the course of recollection and writing.” Historians must be aware of the fact that dream accounts might be recorded by dreamers who recounted how they wanted to remember them. The “reality” of the dream, in a sense, may be distorted. However, dream accounts, distorted or not, can provide a ground for historical analysis because they may reveal the most intimate sentiments, aspirations, and anxieties of the dreamer. Such self-narratives can provide the historian with information necessary to map the mindset of a historical personage, because “such ‘secondary elaboration’ probably reveals the character and problems of the dreamer as clearly as the dream itself does.” This paper focuses on a sampling of dreams related in an 18th-century Ottoman self-narrative to provide insight into the life and mind of an Ottoman governor. I will try to demonstrate how the author of the narrative made meaning of those dreams and revealed his aspirations.

REM periods with lucid dreaming show increased brain activation, especially in the prefrontal cortex, compared to REM periods without lucid dreaming and, thus, the question of whether lucid dreaming interferes with the recovery function of sleep arises. Cross-sectional studies found a negative relationship between sleep quality and lucid dreaming frequency, but this relationship was explained by nightmare frequency. The present study included 149 participants keeping a dream diary for five weeks though the course of a lucid dream induction study. The results clearly indicate that there is no negative effect of having a lucid dream on the feeling of being refreshed in the morning compared to nights with the recall of a non-lucid dream; on the contrary, the feeling of being refreshed was higher after a night with a lucid dream. Future studies should be carried out to elicit tiredness and sleepiness during the day using objective and subjective measurement methods.

Summary The present study reports about the frequency, content and emotional tone of erotic dreams based on dream diary reports of a German college student sample. Four hundred and twenty-five students provided 1612 dreams, of which about 6% contained erotic themes, a figure which is in line with previous research. As for the dream content, kissing was the most frequent erotic activity, followed by intercourse and explicit sexual foreplay. Openness to experience is positively related to the frequency of erotic dreams; neuroticism and conscientiousness are associated with a rather negative emotional tone of such dreams. This supports the continuity hypothesis stating that erotic dreaming experience reflects waking life sexual activity, which is likely to be influenced by these personality dispositions. Further research should extend the knowledge of the aspects and emotional intensity of waking life sexual activity and their reflection in erotic dream content, i.e., whether experiencing unwanted and negatively perceived sexual events are associated with the emotional tone of erotic dreams. To investigate the causality of the relation between waking and dreaming sexual activity and the emotions related to it, an experimental study would be a necessary approach.

Validated instruments for the analysis of dream contents are still scarce. Therefore, the aim of this study was to validate the Dreamland Questionnaire (DL-Q) by comparing its results to those of the Hall and van de Castle Coding System (HVDC). Twenty-two participants voluntarily filled in a written dream report as well as our DL-Q questionnaire, in total 30 dreams were collected with both measures. Written reports were analyzed with the HVDC and results of the two instruments were compared using Pearson correlations. Results showed that correlations were high for dominant characters, pleasantness of dream content, and body-related experiences. However, some DL-Q items showed low correlations and others could not be compared directly, as the HVDC did not include the same set of items. The DL-Q showed satisfactory validity and reliability as a measure of dream criteria and may serve as an effective tool for diagnosis and evaluation and facilitate future clinical and research studies. Nevertheless, some items could not be compared as part of this study and should be validated in future investigations.

Nightmares are intensely negative dreams that awaken the dreamer. Frequent nightmares are thought to reflect an executive deficit in regulating arousal. Within a diathesis-stress framework, this arousal is specific to negative contexts, though a differential susceptibility framework predicts elevated arousal in response to both negative and positive contexts. The current study tested these predictions by assessing subjective arousal and changes in frontal oxyhemoglobin (oxyHB) concentrations during negative and positive picture-viewing in nightmare sufferers (NM) and control subjects (CTL). 27 NM and 27 CTL subjects aged 18-35 rated subjective arousal on a 1-9 scale following sequences of negative, neutral and positive images; changes in oxyHB were measured by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) using a 2 × 4 template on the frontal pole. Participants also completed the Highly Sensitive Person Scale, a trait marker for differential susceptibility; and completed a dream diary reporting negative and positive dream emotionality. The NM group had higher trait sensitivity, yet higher ratings of negative but not positive emotion in diary dreams. NM compared to CTL subjects reported higher subjective arousal in response to picture-viewing regardless of valence. Dysphoric dream distress, measured prospectively, was negatively associated with frontal activation when viewing negative pictures. Results suggest NM sufferers are highly sensitive to images regardless of valence according to subjective measures, and that there is a neural basis to level of trait and prospective nightmare distress. Future longitudinal or intervention studies should further explore positive emotion sensitivity and imagery in NM sufferers.

This study aimed to explore relationships between personality type variables and dream structure variables. In the questionnaire experiment (N = 410), we investigated associations between different personality variables in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire (MBTI) and various aspects of dreams in the Mannheim Dream questionnaire (MADRE). The MBTI has four dimensions. In the Extroversion/Introversion (E/I) dimension, I types dreamt more of emotional intensity and passive emotions than E types. In addition, I types may become more distressed in nightmares than E types. E types more frequently shared their dreams with others. In the Sensation/Intuition (S/N) dimension, N types had a more positive attitude toward dreams and can get more novel ideas and help from their dreams than S types. In the dream diary experiment (N = 47), we investigated whether the S/N dimension may influence waking events’ incorporation into dreams. External judges decoded paired waking events and dream reports. N types had more metaphorical incorporation than S types. More specifically, N types had more metaphorical expressions in their dreams than S types. This result may be due to the different characteristics between S types and N types. It may provide support for the dream continuity hypothesis.

Cross-sectional studies suggest a correlation between alterations in dream content reports and executive dysfunction tests in Parkinson's disease (PD), but this has not been assessed in longitudinal studies. Our objective was to assess the predictive value of dream content for progression of cognitive dysfunction in PD. We prospectively addressed all consecutive, non-demented patients with PD attending an outpatient clinic during a 1-year period. Dream reports were collected at baseline by means of a dream diary and analysed according to the Hall and Van de Castle system. Patients were assessed at baseline for rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder, motor stage, mood disorder and psychosis. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) was applied at baseline and 4 years later. Linear regression analysis was used to the test the relation between each dream index (predictors), demographic and other motor and non-motor variables (covariates), and change in MoCA scores (dependent variable). In all, 58 patients were assessed at both time points and 23 reported at least one dream (range 1-27, total 148). Aggression, physical activities, and negatively toned content predominated in dream reports. The MoCA scores decreased significantly from baseline to follow-up. In the multivariate model, negative emotion index was the strongest predictor of cognitive decline. We found a significant positive association between negative emotions in dreams at baseline and subsequent reduction in MoCA scores. These findings suggest that some dream content in patients with PD could be considered a predictor of cognitive decline, independent of other factors known to influence either dream content or cognitive deterioration.

Lucid dreaming is a unique phenomenon with potential applications for therapeutic interventions. Few studies have investigated the effects of lucidity on an individual's waking mood, which could have valuable implications for improving psychological wellbeing. The current experiment aims to investigate whether the experience of lucidity enhances positive waking mood, and whether lucidity is associated with dream emotional content and subjective sleep quality. 20 participants were asked to complete lucid dream induction techniques along with an online dream diary for one week, which featured a 19-item lucidity questionnaire, and subjective ratings of sleep quality, dream emotional content, and waking mood. Results indicated that higher lucidity was associated with more positive dream content and elevated positive waking mood the next day, although there was no relationship with sleep quality. The results of the research and suggestions for future investigations, such as the need for longitudinal studies of lucidity and mood, are discussed.

This chapter argues that Larkin’s ‘Dream Diaries’ are interesting for two reasons. Firstly, they offer us an opportunity to decode the nexus of images that haunt Larkin’s arguably most diffuse collection, The North Ship. Secondly, the diaries themselves are of considerable critical interest given their attempt to depict space and place through maps and diagrammatic sketches. Often geometric in nature, the dream sketches become a kind of ‘assembly instruction’ for the poems that follow, while also enacting an anticipation of the space poetics later popularised in the works of Bachelard and Blanchot.

Most studies looking into the relationship between lucid dream frequency and personality were based on questionnaire measures of lucid dream frequency. Thus, the aim was to investigate the effect of keeping a dream diary on lucid dream frequency and the correlates of the frequency of lucid dreams in the diary with the Big Five personality factors. The study included 1,612 dreams reported by 425 persons. The present findings showed that lucid dreams are quite rare (1.36%) in an unselected student sample. The frequency of lucid dream in the 2-week diary period was lower than the retrospectively estimated lucid dream frequency. Whereas the negative association between lucid dream frequency and agreeableness was reported previously, the negative correlation between lucid dream frequency and neuroticism is a new finding. Furthermore, the exploratory analysis showed that a considerable number of lucid dreams did not include some form of dream control. Furthermore, it would be very interesting to study the relationship between personality, especially neuroticism and agreeableness, and lucid dreaming in a more detailed way.

A dream may offer a unique pathway to a person’s inner world. This article begins by examining the combination of dreams, creative writing, and poetry therapy. The case study gives an idea of a creative writing process combined with the thought of Jungian self-analysis and poetry therapy experienced in Finland in 2011. With the perspective of poetry therapy, this study has its focus in dreams, depicted by words and by metaphors in the images of dreams. The research outlines the possibilities to study one’s inner world and gain insight, by having a dream diary. Dreams are commonly used in the contexts of bibliotherapy, and creative writing, but the topic of this three-dimensional combination has been studied relatively little considering what a popular everyday phenomenon a dream is. This qualitative study provides an example of a fascinating area of research in the field of fine arts activities and therapies. Writing dreams creatively in the context of poetry therapy, can be described as a possibi...

Gholam Hussein SA'edi is one of the greatest Iranian writers of short stories in the present era. SA'edi’s stories are based on the existence of fanciful and dreamlike settings in which he attempts to establish the endings of the stories to be the direct result of the characters' psychological reaction against their dreams. The linguistic and psychological analyses of the stories show that dreams have an essential part to play in his short stories, and that fanciful atmosphere, place, time setting, and psychotic characters create a context for the existence of dreams. In this study, dreams have been studied in his short stories on the basis of Freud's and Jung's ideas. In SA'edi's collection of The Mourners of Bayal, dreams are formed when psychotic characters react to archetypes, and the archetypes are specified through the analysis of the dreams when identifying the characters of the stories and their mental action. However, in his story of Two Brothers and The Beggar in the collection of Anonymous Fears, dream is the centerpiece of fictional events, and the events of the story coincide with the dream of the characters. Key words: Dream, Jung, Freud, SA'edi, the mourners of Bayal, anonymous fears.

The “Dream Book” provides a subjectively extensive and humane approach to understanding dreams. The Talmudic dream is prophetic in nature so it is future oriented while the Freudian dream is past oriented toward childhood. In addition, there is the need to understand the dream experience. Dream meaning is not in the text but in the interpretation. The dream experience is over-determined. Word play is used by the Rabbis and modern interpreters. The Rabbis felt the dream experience reflected the psychology of the dreamer. Dreams of everyday men and women are presented, not just dreams of royalty. Good and bad dreams reflect the moral nature of the dreamer. And if it is a bad dream there is a method to prevent its fulfillment. Further, if one does not recall a dream, there is also a method for dealing with it in the daily prayers and asking the Lord to make it a good dream. Concern about false dream interpreters is expressed. Dreams with a sexual meaning are represented symbolically. Precursors of many of our modern views of dreaming are present in the “Dream Book”.

The dream exists as an experience extended in time which can be captured in the dream report as an excellent approximation of the experience. Dreams can be adequately collected and reliably measured. Dream reports are both stable and variable across time. Dream reports show meaningful content differences in group and individual situations, where psychological differences are known to exist. Dreams and waking life are linked and dreams are responsive to the immediate emotional concern of the dreamer. The dream is sufficiently orderly that the search for its meaning is justified. Methods exist to establish the meaning of the dream experience working with the dreamer through associations or amplification. A method “Dream Translation” is described in which the meaning of the dream report is explored using the associations of the translator rather than the dreamers. The translation approach could be used by the clinician to assess whether the patient has improved and to establish the immediate current emotional concern of the patient at the initial contact or at points of block in the therapy. Although the dream report has the necessary characteristics to establish a meaning from it and a method exists to establish the meaning, this does not address the possible functional significance of dreaming. We have explored the dream function question in a monograph on the subject (Moffitt et al., The functions of dreaming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

Dreams have produced art, music, novels, films, mathematical proofs, designs for architecture, telescopes, and computers. Dreaming is essentially our brain thinking in another neurophysiologic state-and therefore it is likely to solve some problems on which our waking minds have become stuck. This neurophysiologic state is characterized by high activity in brain areas associated with imagery, so problems requiring vivid visualization are also more likely to get help from dreaming. This article reviews great historical dreams and modern laboratory research to suggest how dreams can aid creativity and problem-solving.

Where do our dreams originate from, and what do they tell us? Is there a universal set of symbols that are common to all dreams, regardless of a person's ethnicity or culture? What does dreaming reveal about the unconscious? Why do some dreams remain etched in our memories, whereas others are almost instantly forgotten? Some scientists have adopted the position that dreams are little more than noise in the brain, without any substantive purpose or function. Yet, such a stance seemingly runs counter to the experience of many people who reflect upon and even analyze their dreams, often in search of clues to their daily lives or insights into their deeper selves. Similarly, in virtually all wisdom traditions, dreams are invoked as an important source of revelation or prophecy. Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, moderated a discussion that included psychologist Deirdre Barrett, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley, and psychologist and sleep/dream medicine specialist Rubin Naiman; they examined dreams from a variety of perspectives to answer these questions.

Introduction In everyday conversation dream telling occurs seldom: Bergmann (2000) found in his data of many hours of audio recorded family conversations in natural surroundings not a single dream narration. He assumes that psychotherapy should make dream telling more relevant. In our Conversation Analysis of Empathy in Psychotherapy Process Research (CEMPP) project [1] data of 45 audio recorded and transcribed psychotherapy sessions from psychoanalysis, psychodynamic and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) we only find four dream mentioning and three dream telling. Surprisingly, none of these occur in psychoanalysis. The function of dream telling in psychoanalysis has been summarized and analysed by Mathys (2011). This paper will focus on one dream-telling sequence from a CBT session. Nevertheless, this sequence is of high relevance for psychoanalysis because it supports the idea that dreams can be understood as an allusion to the therapeutic relationship. In this brief paper I would like to demonstrate how a dream can serve as an allusion to a contaminated talk and a disappointment in the therapist. It might be for the first time that this is shown on the basis of empirical data. [1] Sponsored by Kohler-Stiftung

Warning dreams prior to the onset of symptoms have been reported in a previous survey of self-selected women with breast cancer. There is no available data on how many women with suspected breast cancer have such dreams, so anonymous surveys were offered to women who came for biopsy at a university breast imaging center over a period of 3 months. 163 women completed the survey reporting that 64% usually remember their dreams, 41% have had dreams that came true, and 5% keep a dream diary. 5.5% reported dreaming the word "cancer," but only one woman was prompted to have a breast evaluation because of a dream. This pilot data will be used in planning a future study with pathological correlation.

Although central to any exhaustive theory of human subjectivity, the relationship between dream and waking consciousness remains uncertain. Some findings suggest that dream consciousness can be influenced by severe disorders of thought content. The suppression of unwanted thoughts has been shown to influence dream content in healthy individuals. In order to better define this phenomenon, we evaluated the persistence of obsessive/compulsive themes across the dream and waking cognition of OCD patients and in a control group of healthy subjects. Participants were administered a shortened version of the Thematic Apperception Test to produce a waking fantasy narration, and were trained to keep a dream diary. Dream and waking narrative contents were analyzed in order to recognize obsessive/compulsive themes, and to calculate Mean Dream Obsession/Compulsion (MDO, MDC) and Mean TAT Obsession/Compulsion (MTO, MTC) parameters. No differences were found between the two populations in terms of MDO, MDC, MTO, nor MTC. Density of obsessive and compulsive themes were significantly higher in dream reports than in waking narratives for both groups. No correlation was observed between MDO/MDC scores and Y-BOCS obsession/compulsion scores in the OCD group. These findings strengthen the discontinuity hypothesis, suggesting that ruminative aspects of cognition are somehow interrupted during dream activity.

Although dreams are very private experiences, they are often shared with others. The findings of the present study ( N = 1,375) indicate that sharing dreams is indeed very common and that dream sharing frequency is related to gender (only in adolescents, with girls sharing dreams more often than boys), extraversion, dream recall frequency, and nightmare frequency. Future studies should study the dream sharing process in more detail—with whom dreams are shared—and possible beneficial effects of dream sharing.

I have been following my dreams since I was a child. Jung says that a single dream may give the dreamer a lot of information; however, a series of dreams over time will show where the dreamer needs to do additional work, where and how the dreamer's life may be headed, and how the dreamer is dealing with this knowledge that comes from a realm of wisdom that is both numinous and mysterious. In my life, spirit has become a profound partner by pointing me in directions that were not conscious to me. I have had a wonderful opportunity to work with a fellow dream worker for the past ten years. We use active imagination and amplification until the meaning of the dream becomes clearer. Often our dreams produce parallel images, feelings, and actions, which to my eye confirms the deeper psychic connection we all have with one another. I have used images to capture the impact of the dreams on my psyche, and poetry to confirm and augment the deeper level of wisdom that unfolds in our dreams. Dream interpretation can ...

The unique approach to dreams of Swiss psychoanalyst Fritz Morgenthaler (1919-1984) is presented and discussed. Although rarely discussed in the English-speaking psychoanalytic world, this approach is very alive in German-speaking countries. Focusing on the distinction between the remembered hallucinatory experience of dreamers and the event of telling dreams within psychoanalytic sessions, Morgenthaler made two major innovations: first, he proposed a new understanding and handling of associations to dreams, and second, he offered what he called dream diagnostics as an instrument with which to integrate both resistance and transference into clinical work with dreams.

Children in late latency through early adolescence can join in a partnership with their analyst to explore their dreams as important communications about themselves. The child is the bearer of the dream, the analyst the receiver, and their shared attention to something new presenting itself to each of them offers a unique opportunity to seek meaning together. This article provides clinical illustrations of work with the dreams of children in different phases of analysis and during developmental transitions. Technical approaches that invite a child’s interest in dreams are demonstrated.

Dream speech is an understudied area of dream research worthy of attention for its potential to shed light on the nature of the interactions between the dream-self and dream-others, the patterns of discourse that occur among dream characters, and the structure and content of dream speech itself. The history of the study of dream speech is surveyed. Investigation of the structure and content of dream speech points to interesting similarities and differences in waking, imagined, and dreamed speech. Dream speech data support recent evidence that higher-order cognitive activity is a feature of dreaming no less than of waking thought. The study of dream speech offers a window on understanding dream structure and content more broadly.

This article describes the future prospects of scientific dream research. Three frontiers of investigation hold special promise: neuroscientific studies of the brain-mind system's activities during sleep (such as during lucid dreaming); systematic analyses of large collections of dream reports from diverse populations of people; and psychotherapeutic explorations of the multiple dimensions of personal and collective meaning woven into the dream experiences of each individual. Several helpful books on the science of sleep and dreaming are mentioned for further study.

Objectives The aim of the present exploratory clinical study was to evaluate LD as an add-on therapy for treating nightmares. Methods Thirty-two subjects having nightmares (ICD-10: F51.5) at least twice a week participated. Subjects were randomly assigned to group: A) Gestalt therapy group (= GTG), or B) Gestalt and lucid dreaming group therapy (= LDG). Each group lasted ten weeks. Participants kept a sleep/dream diary over the treatment. Examinations with respect to nightmare frequency and sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index) were carried out at the beginning, after five and ten weeks and at a follow-up three months later. Results Concerning nightmare frequency, a significant reduction was found in both groups after the ten-week-study and at the follow-up (Wilcoxon test: P ≤ 0.05). Significant reduction in dream recall frequency could only be observed in the GTG (Wilcoxon test: P ≤ 0.05). For subjects having succeeded in learning lucid dreaming, reduction was sooner and higher. Sleep quality improved for both groups at the follow-up (P ≤ 0.05, Wilcoxon test). Only the LDG showed significant improvement at the end of therapy (P ≤ 0.05). Conclusion Lucid dreaming, in combination with Gestalt therapy, is a potent technique to reduce nightmare frequency and improve the subjective quality of sleep.

Previous studies confirmed the correlation between dream and creativity. If we can make good use of our dreams, they may bring our big breakthrough through non-logic thinking state of brain. This study is aim to develop a dream journal or dream recording device that for recording ideas in dreams. Through analyzing the participants’ writing habits of dream reports to define the criteria of dream journal design. First this study implemented one week dream report experiment to observe the recording behaviors of participants. In the focus group method, this study collected about 77 dream journal design key words from both the interview and the participants’ advices. After that, using KJ technique to organize the key words and come out 5 design criteria in result. Base on the criteria and the result that discussed with the participants, this study presented a dream journal prototype. It uses the voice to record users’ creative dreams. The sensor on pillow controls the power of the dream journal device and adjusts its projection. Users make the dream image board with voice input and edit contents with gestures. After finishing recording dreams, the dream journal device shows dream image lights. Users can print out the dream journal or share them to others. If users run out of inspirations, they can take a look at dream journal to help them come out with some new ideas.

Posthumus’ dream in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is significant in that it is a striking example of dream as performance. As he lies sleeping, Posthumus’ dream is fully enacted onstage so that the audience participates in the dreaming spectacle and is affected by, simultaneously with him, the instructive wonder of the experience. For Posthumus, the dream has a physical reality, for when he wakes, a tablet, given to him by Jupiter in his vision, has materialised. A cryptic inscription on the tablet marks the waking as a continuation of the dream process into the world of verifiable sensation. This article will consider the interaction of dream and performance, focusing especially on the role the senses play in describing and determining the experiential nature of the episode. It will also reference the Dreaming of Australian Aborigines as a means of interpreting the dream of Posthumus and examine the dramatic significance of the dream action in the course of the denouement of the play. Le rêve de Posthumus dans Cymbeline de Shakespeare est significatif dans la mesure où il s’agit d’un exemple frappant de rêve comme performance. Alors qu’il est endormi, on joue sur scène le rêve de Posthumus, de sorte que les spectateurs participent au spectacle du rêve et sont affectés et instruits, en même temps que lui, par l’expérience merveilleuse. Pour Posthumus, le rêve a une réalité physique, puisque, lorsqu’il se réveille, une tablette, que Jupiter lui a donnée dans sa vision, s’est matérialisée sur scène. Une inscription énigmatique sur la tablette marque la poursuite du songe dans le monde des sensations vérifiables. Cet article s’intéresse à l’interaction entre le rêve et la représentation, en se concentrant particulièrement sur le rôle des sens dans la description et détermination de la nature expérientielle de l’épisode. Une analogie avec la Temps du rêve des Aborigènes australiens permet aussi d’offrir une interprétation du rêve de Posthumus et d’interroger la signification dramatique attribuée à l’action constituée par le rêve au cours du dénouement de la pièce.

Exploiting our ability to lucid dream could help erase real-life traumas, finds sleep researcher Michelle Carr

The dream exists as an experience extended in time which can be captured in the dream report as an excellent approximation of the experience. Dreams can be adequately collected and reliably measured. Dream reports are both stable and variable across time. Dream reports show meaningful content differences in group and individual situations where psychological differences are known to exist. Dreams and waking life are linked and dreams are responsive to the immediate emotional concern of the dreamer. The dream is sufficiently orderly that the search for its meaning is justified. Methods exist to establish the meaning of the dream experience working with dreamer through associations or amplification. A method “Dream Translation” is described in which the meaning of the dream report is explored using the associations of the translator rather than of the dreamers. The translation approach could be used by the clinician to assess whether the patient has improved and to establish the immediate current emotional concern of the patient at initial contact or at points of block in the therapy. Although the dream report has the necessary characteristics to establish a meaning from it; this does not address the possible functional significance of dreaming. I describe here my selective, mood regulatory function of sleep and dreaming. We have explored this question more thoroughly in a monograph on dream function (Moffitt et al., The functions of dreaming, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993)

Dreaming is one of the most mysterious and interesting experiences in people's lives. The research paper is based on a dream activity of the human mind. The video under presentation “A dialogue with subconscious in a dream” draws public attention to the negative actions of young people and points out the influence of great ideas on people appearing in the dream state of a guy. As the most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety he feels negative emotions more than the positive ones, but at the end of my video he found out the right way of living in the society with the help of what he imagined about his life in his dream.

Continuity between waking life and dreaming has typically been studied via the quantitative analysis of dream reports, which has illustrated that dreaming reflects waking-life experiences, thoughts, and emotions. However, there are currently no reliable methods of analyzing dreams for the more subjective aspects of dreams, such as those dreams that are metaphorically related to the dreamer’s waking life, which require dreamer input. We conducted a qualitative study involving in-depth semistructured interviews with 4 participants. The interview schedules were based on Schredl’s (2010) dream group technique. Using thematic analysis we developed 3 themes that describe continuity between waking life and dreams: “experiential continuity” (between waking-life experiences/thoughts and dreams), “emotional continuity” (between waking-life emotions and dreams), and “representative continuity” (metaphorical and generic representations of waking life in dreams). Rather than being dichotomous, participants experienced continuity in gradations. A fourth theme (“attitudes toward continuity”) explored how attitudes toward continuity influenced continuity experiences.

Typical dreams are defined as dreams with similar contents reported by a high percentage of dreamers. Up to now, the frequencies of typical dream themes have been studied with questionnaires, indicating that the rank order of 55 typical dream themes is quite stable over different sample populations. The study presented here is the first to look at the frequencies of typical dream themes in a large sample of diary dreams reported by 425 students (321 women, 64 men; mean age 23 years). Overall, almost all typical dream themes were found in the diary dreams, even though some themes occurred very rarely. The rank correlation between diary data and questionnaire data is relatively high, but for some typical dream themes like “Trying again and again to do something” and “Falling” the ranks differed considerably. Future research should adopt various ways of identifying typical dream themes (e.g. qualitative analysis of large dream samples, themes dreamers themselves identify as typical) and develop a more precise definition for each theme. This would be the prerequisite for empirical studies investigating the question why these dream themes are typical, i.e. how these dreams are related to the waking-life experiences of the dreamer.

Integrative and naturalistic philosophy of mind can both learn from and contribute to the contemporary cognitive sciences of dreaming. Two related phenomena concerning self-representation in dreams demonstrate the need to bring disparate fields together. In most dreams, the protagonist or dream self who experiences and actively participates in dream events is or represents the dreamer: but in an intriguing minority of cases, self-representation in dreams is displaced, disrupted, or even absent. Working from dream reports in established databanks, we examine two key forms of polymorphism of self-representation: dreams (or dream episodes) in which I take an external visuospatial perspective on myself, and those in which I take someone else’s perspective on events. In remembering my past experiences or imagining future or possible experiences when awake, I sometimes see myself from an external or ‘observer’ perspective. By relating the issue of perspective in dreams to established research traditions in the study of memory and imagery, and noting the flexibility of perspective in dreams, we identify new lines of enquiry. In other dreams, the dreamer does not appear to figure at all, and the first person perspective on dream events is occupied by someone else, some other person or character. We call these puzzling cases ‘vicarious dreams’ and assess some potential ways to make sense of them. Questions about self-representation and perspectives in dreams are intriguing in their own right and pose empirical and conceptual problems about the nature of self-representation with implications beyond the case of dreaming.

Summary Suppressing unwanted thoughts can lead to an increased occurrence of the suppressed thought in dreams. This is explainable by the ironic control theory, which theorizes why the suppression of thoughts might make them more persistent. The present study examined the influence of thought suppression on dream rebound, dream distress, general psychiatric symptomatology, depression, sleep quality and perceived stress. Thirty healthy participants (good sleepers) were investigated over a period of 1 week. Half were instructed to suppress an unwanted thought 5 min prior to sleep, whereas the other half were allowed to think of anything at all. Dream content was assessed through a dream diary. Independent raters assessed whether or not the dreams were related to the suppressed target thought. The results demonstrated increased target-related dreams and a tendency to have more distressing dreams in the suppression condition. Moreover, the data imply that thought suppression may lead to significantly increased general psychiatric symptomatology. No significant effects were found for the other secondary outcomes.