MANNHEIM (dpa) – Why it is that we dream still remains one of the great mysteries. But in answer to the question of how we dream, scientific researchers have come up with some important answers.
Contributing a lot to this knowledge has been observation of the brains of people who are dreaming, with the information portrayed on monitors. And it appears to be of major significance that dream consciousness and waking consciousness are structurally the same.
According to dream researcher Michael Schredl, writing in a recent issue of “Psychologie heute” (Psychology Today), the dream is an experience like any other.
This confirms the experience each and every night that what happens in dreams, no matter how fantastical, confusing and devoid of any reason or logic, is felt to be exactly as real as life is when a person is awake.
The identity of the “dream-I” and the “awake-I” additionally means that the human being can learn from his dream experiences just as he can from those when awake.
For Schredl, who works at in the sleep laboratory of the Zentralinstitut fuer Seelische Gesundheit (Central Institute for Spiritual Health) in Mannheim, this is an important conclusion drawn from new research results.
Schredl said that dreams offer “the opportunity to gather experience of the most diverse kind – experience which broadens one’s own waking experience. In dreams, one experiences things which expands one’s own waking life or wake personality. One has more free space.”
In the past, it was writers in particular who had described such experiences. The writer Novalis wrote that dreams educate us, while Friedrich Hebbel said they show us what we should do.
It may be that the majority of dreams are connected to current and everyday experiences, but beyond that, dreams can also build a link between the far distant past and the present.
In a dream, one can experience oneself as a child, but also as “one who is beyond all metamorphoses of aging, a being indestructible and outside of Time, as a core personality which we preserve inside us without change”, Schreld says.
This provides us the chance to learn something about ourselves in dreams and to call forth important things to our consciousness. On the one hand, fears become particularly vivid in dreams, while on the other dreams can point to something being suppressed in one’s personal relationships.
Aside from psychological dream research, Schredl points out the otehr two major research paths being taken by scientists. One is depth psychology and the other biological psychology. Both have their “difficulties”, he says.
For example, in the psychoanalysis established by Sigmund Freud, it is not clear whether the case studies provide generally applicable conclusions independent of clinical therapeutic practice. And researchers of “dream biology” have to admit that how dreams function is not as easy to understand as many people first thought.
This biological discipline began a decades-long boom after the discovery in 1953 of the so-called “REM (rapid eye movement) sleep”. This initially found that dream phases accompanied by rapid eye movements are guided by the brainstem.
This is the region of the brain which has greatly to do with regulating a person’s breathing and body warmth, but little with the psyche or consciousness. This led American sleep researcher Allan Hobson to conclude that dreams were a coincidental product of various actions of the nerves.
Aside from the fact that people also dream outside of the REM phases, it is also known by now that the REM sleep is not the physiological foundation for dreaming, notes British neurologist Marc Solms in an interview in Psychologie heute.
REM could be a mechanism which triggers dream events, but one can also dream without this boost. Solms says his research results point to dreams being produced not from primitive, but rather higher regions of the brain – those which handle things like motives, emotions, memory and sensory experience.
Psychological understanding of dreaming also means that differences in dreams between men and women do not have a biological foundation.
Instead, they must be understood as an expression of the everyday world as experienced. There is no gender difference in dreams, but only a difference in waking experience – which then is reflected again in the dream.
