Meaning Of Dreams
(Meaning of Dreams Pt 1)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 2)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 3)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 4)
(...Continued
From Pt 1)
This leads us back to the question of what things we think
are meaningful and how they get that way. One way of viewing
this problem-of-meaning is through story-contexts. For some
scientists, science is not about meaning and value at all,
its about quantity and statistics. From this story or context,
science can't give an answer to the question of whether or
not dreams are meaningful. One can't start with a measure
that has no meaning in itself and jump to any conclusions
one way or the other about meaning from a statistic or measure.
But science is guided by other stories and contexts besides
statistics.
In biological sciences, the
story-context that gives things meaning is evolution. If something
fits into this context, it is considered meaningful and if
it doesn't involve evolution, its not considered meaningful.
Are dreams advantageous to evolution, or are they an epiphenomena
and functionless appendage like the appendix or tonsils? Are
they essential to the well-being and continuation of the species
and individual, or just something like poop that we excrete
and don't need to attend to for survival and passing on of
genes?
Here are a few areas that
science has investigated as to the functioning of dreams:
Memory consolidation - moving
memories from short to long term memory.
Learning consolidation - organizing
things we have learned during the day
Emotional contextualization
- giving context to new emotions.
Clearing networks - cleaning
up loaded neural networks.
Protecting Sleep - allowing
imagination to spin stories instead of waking us up each disturbance.
Self Maintenance - to maintain
our sense of self through sleep.
Problem solving - to resolve
conflicts during the day and find creative solutions.
Hard-wiring during fetal development,
soft wiring of neurons after birth.
There are scientists who point
out that these are theories not proven facts which are clear
as saying the heart pumps blood and the lungs process air
and carbon dioxide. And so the debates and investigations
and research continue. However, like the meaning of dream-content,
the meaning of the dreaming process seems to be evolving in
some ways to the same theoretical acceptance. That is, the
dreaming process has many functions and meanings. Like most
of our organs, dreaming seems to do more than one job. Sometimes
the word "polyvocal" is used to express the notion
of the dream having many voices, or "heterogeneous"
to express the notion that dream come from many sources, are
many things and have many parts and functions, many goals
and desires.
But are we getting too far
away from the original question of the meaning of dreams?
Usually when this question is asked, it's about a specific
dream, such as "I was waking down an empty hall and saw
an open window," or "I married a woman who turned
out to be my mother," or "I started flying across
a vast ocean of alien creatures." Do these dream images
have any meaning? Here the story-context is different than
that of science. Here the question of meaning is more like
"Is there a personal significance to me that is held
in these dream images or story?" Or, "Is something
or someone trying to tell me something through this dream?"
Hard science has yet to adequately
address this issue as there is now a kind of brain-mind split
in research. Hard science studies the brain and its observable
effects. At this time we can't directly observe the imagination
and other subtle forces. Thus the hard-core dream sciences
are left studying only the effects, impacts and changes that
can be observed at this time with our tools for measuring
objectively. However, we also have the humanities, which can
go beyond the brain and objective behavior to study the mind
and its productions.
In Clara Hill's research for
example 8, she uses statistics to compare different non-statistical
feelings of meaning. In one experiment she had three conditions
of therapy where people got to discuss their lives through
different story-contexts. One used their own dream stories
and another used their own life-event, and another used dreams,
but they were someone else's dreams. The clients were encouraged
to use these various stories to explore the meaning and value
of their lives, and then rate the satisfaction they felt in
doing this. It was found that exploring one's life through
the lens of one's own personal dreams was far more satisfying
than using someone else's dreams or using a life-event (usually
a problem in one's life).
Critics have noted that it's
too big a jump here to say that the study proves that dreams
are meaningful. We can only say that upon waking, people can
make meaning and give them value, but this doesn't prove they
are intrinsically meaningful. Like a rock on the ground, they
say, it doesn't become meaningful until it's used.
This seems like a rather
strict use of the application of meaning that almost creates
a tautology. That is, if something weren't meaningful unless
a person uses it in a meaningful way, then by definition,
that letter I got yesterday from my mom wouldn't be meaningful
unless I opened it. It is "Conscious use or function"
that seems to be the lurking story-context that is in that
kind of science. However, most scientists are willing to admit
that life has many story-contexts that give life and its parts
(like dreams) meaning and value. One scientist in dream science,
Milton Kramer, MD, has stated that "Anything with structure
has meaning," and that "dreams clearly have structure."
9 Here the story-context is more inclusive, but perhaps too
inclusive. In Kramer's definition of meaning, a loose rock
in a rock pile is meaningful. It doesn't necessarily get at
the question most people want to know about when they ask
if a dream is meaningful or not.
For the greater part of our
century, the problem was usually expressed in the mind/body
problem. The body was seen as material, the mind as non-material.
Given this definition, science had little or nothing to say
about how the mind and body might connect. If the mind was
not material, how could it then act on material bodies? If
the body was material, how could it influence and act on the
mind? Therefore science decided to ignore the mind and study
only the body. Some associationalism was admitted. That is,
chains of actions and reactions were observed and assumed
to somehow cross the body-mind barrier. The final result of
this in psychology was Behaviorism, which attempts to look
at all behavior without reference to the mind. However, many
19th and 20th Century scientists and researchers were not
happy with the neglect of the mind and simply side-stepped
the philosophical problem and looked at ways the mind and
brain were influenced by the world and in turn, influenced
the material world. ..(Continued
In Part 3...)
(Meaning
of Dreams Pt 1)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 2)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 3)
(Meaning
Of Dreams Pt 4)
| Authors Details: Richard Wilkerson
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