The Function of Dreaming
Dreaming is quite an enchanting cognitive psychological activity in daily life. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are the disguise of unconscious desires, which are typically hidden or repressed libidinous urges when awake but free to express themselves by distorted symbols when asleep due to less vigilant in conscious mind (Angeloch, 2023). In Mulholland Drive by David Lynch, cognitive psychological activities, like sleep and dreaming, subconsciousness and defense mechanisms, emotion regulation and memory reorganization are manifested. One failed actress, whose lover succeeded and betrayed her, was so desperate and jealous that she murdered her lover with extreme fear and guilty as stimulus to be integrated into dream scenes with her latent motivations in a reorganized but coherently narrative storyline. To deny her crime, suppress her distress and reverse her failures in career and relationships, she escaped into dreaming, where her paranoid subconscious reorganized realistic memory elements like time, place, people, events, and relationships, reconstructing a virtual world where she changed her career destiny and developed positive intimacy with her partner. The heroine’s dream is degraded as a hallucinogenic placebo to withdraw from external realities and avoid internal conflicts between id and superego but fails to support positive self-exploration or outside achievements. However, recent research has shown radical perspectives of dreaming, including boosting sleep quality, enhancing cognitive functioning, regulating emotion, transforming to creative problem-solving and art therapies (Angeloch, 2023; Malinowski, 2021).
Dream-work acts as the fundamental condition for human’s higher mental activities involving all thinking forms. The purpose of thinking is to explore the truth between one’s internal and external world, to test fantasies or hypotheses against reality. Dreams, like other unconscious thoughts either awake or asleep, or daydream fantasies, could interplay with experiences in daily conscious activities, beneficial to individuals’ emotional, mental health, intellect, and personality development (Angeloch, 2023). Malinowski (2021) has found that dream content mirrors phasic sleep-dependent cognitive processes. Early-night non-REM dream reflects episodic memory consolidation while late-night REM dream is related to personal emotions, more hyper associative featured with bizarreness, metaphor functions and time orientation variance, crucial for creative thinking due to loosen connections, chain activation and transfer reuse in diverse scenes of a single memory source. Counter-intuitively, not only does dreaming not disturb sleeping, but also it tends to promote sound sleep and emotion regulation, which is indispensable for mental well-being. From Bion’s binocular psyche perspective, the core function of dreaming is to transform emotional experiences with multi-sensory perceptions into both unconscious waking thoughts and dream-thoughts simultaneously to digest, resolve, and evacuate painful emotions difficult to regulate in awake conditions, providing and maintaining a permeable contact-barrier through which healthy people can freely escape to or out of the awareness of reality, that means reality and fantasy could be distinguished as well as communicated interactively. As a counterexample, psychopathology is usually the result of failed dreaming in a disorder symptom like neither awake nor asleep. In short, “inability to dream is inability to sleep, and inability to sleep is inability to wake up” as Angeloch (2023) summarized.
As a psychic apparatus, dreaming contributes to cognition like attention regulation and memory consolidation. According to Christoff’s state-space framework, dreaming could be categorized as a form of unconstrained spontaneous thinking, similar to mind wandering involving episodic autobiographical memories like mental time travel, during which cortical networks DAN (dorsal attention network), DN (default network), FPCN (frontoparietal control network), and SN (salience network) for different cognitive functions are coordinated for adaptive activation or deactivation due to lack of strong intentional controls in these mental state transitions from deliberately focusing on conscious tasks to drifting away to free association, from attention-offline awareness to redirection, thus facilitating efficient attention allocation and memory consolidation in a top-down mechanism (Brandmeyer, 2021).
Finally, dream-work promotes creativity. Dreams’ transformation function from isolated, fixated, and undigested raw sensory materials to emotion-experienced, interconnected, changeable, and restructuring mental building blocks offers the fluid-like associations with abstract, analogical, and creative thinking for experience-learning and problem-solving (Angeloch, 2023). In Olsen et al. (2020)’s experiments, two thirds of 299 participants admitted helpful dreams’ conscious use to solve their waking life problems, most of which are emotional problem-solving (52.9%) and creative input (55.8%). According to Yu et al. (2020)’s examination on the relationship between lucid dreaming and resilience, reflective cognitive work during dreaming assists recovery from negative events whereas the problem-solving degree depends on bizarre dream-work rather than lucidness, indicating broadening solution range without objective constraints. Creative individuals transform unacceptable desires into societally acceptable artworks in which primary unconscious thoughts in dreaming or imaginations are dipped into secondary conscious information processing to create useful things (Sternberg, 2023). Whether dreams or its representative artworks could be an attempt to achieve a balanced individuation. To this extent, dream-work has the healing function for personal development and well-being (Rosales-Wyman, 2023).
Mini-References
Angeloch, D. (2023). thinking the dream: Dream and dream thinking in sigmund freud, hanna segal, and wilfred bion. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83(2), 178-209. https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-023-09396-9
Brandmeyer, T., & Delorme, A. (2021). Meditation and the wandering mind: A theoretical framework of underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(1), 39-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620917340
Malinowski, J. E., & Horton, C. L. (2021). Dreams reflect nocturnal cognitive processes: Early-night dreams are more continuous with waking life, and late-night dreams are more emotional and hyperassociative. Consciousness and Cognition, 88, 103071-103071. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.103071
Sternberg, R. J. (2023). Unwrapping gifts: Understanding the inner workings of giftedness through a panoply of paradigms in the field of psychology. Roeper Review, 45(2), 84-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2023.2172754
Rosales-Wyman, C. I. (2023). Dreams and the archetype of home as the path to healing. Jung Journal, 17(1-2), 63-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2023.2171714
Yu, C. K., & Wong, S. (2020). Lucid dreaming as a correlate of locus of control and resilience. Dreaming (New York, N.Y.), 30(1), 19-28. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000124
Olsen, M. R., Schredl, M., & Carlsson, I. (2020). Conscious use of dreams in waking life (nontherapy setting) for decision-making, problem-solving, attitude formation, and behavioral change. Dreaming (New York, N.Y.), 30(3), 257-266. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000138