Psychologist Robert Haskell of the University of New England notes
that the body undergoes numerous changes in REM sleep. Heart rate and
breathing fluctuate more, for example. Certain hormones are released,
while others are suppressed. Blood pressure rises. People with duodenal
ulcers secrete more gastric acid. Dreams from which we awaken, heart
pounding, palms sweaty, offer a good illustration of the impact of mind
on body. The reverse also may be true. "It is quite possible, and
reasonable to assume," Haskell asserts, "that just as simple external and
internal physical and somatic stimuli are worked into dreams, that more
complex 'cognitions' (awareness) are also worked into the dream process,
cognitions about the state of physical health and illness.'
Stanford University researcher Ernest Hilgard personifies the dream
system as a "hidden observer," an internal self-monitor, that supplies us
with a steady stream of information and scrutinizes bodily cues that we
might otherwise miss or dismiss-as inconsequential.
Scientific journals contain numerous examples of this phenomenon: A
woman with rheumatoid arthritis dreamed her arms were bound in a
straitjacket. Her illness flared. Later, she dreamed that she fell down
on ice but got up easily. Her symptoms subsided.
A woman overwhelmed by work dreamed of looking at her watch, only
to find its face covered over by strips of paper. Soon afterward, she
became so exhausted she could not continue working. After taking time
off, she recovered. She then dreamed she looked for her missing watch and
remembered she had put it on a shelf. When she took it down, she found
the face "quite clear.'
Research suggesting that dreams may have diagnostic validity and
even may predict the course an illness will take is just beginning.
Researcher Robert Smith and his colleagues at Michigan State University
interviewed 49 hospitalized cardiology patients about their dreams. One
member of the research team asked the patients to ten them a dream
occurring in the past year, any dream at all. The researcher then rated
the dream for references to death or separation.
Patients who reported having no dreams at all had the most severe
illness. In the dreamers, there was a good correlation between the
severity of their cardiac disease and the content of their dreams, with
an interesting sex difference: Men who had the highest number of
references to death in their dreams also proved to have the most severe
disease; while women who were the sickest dreamed the most about
separation or disruption of a personal relationship. The men's greatest
fear was loss of life; the women's, a loss of connectedness. Because many
of the patients underwent corrective coronary artery bypass surgery, the
researchers were not able to correlate the types of dreams with the
likelihood of survival.
When Dreams Are Disturbed
Psychologist David Foulkes of the Georgia Mental Health Institute
has spent many years studying dreams in children. His early research at
the University of Wyoming shows that children's dreams follow a regular
sequence of stages over the years. The changes reflect more than the
increasing ability to use language to describe dreams; they represent
real developmental steps in the dreams themselves. "Proficiency in
dreaming," Foulkes says, "evolves hand-in-hand with waking cognitive
ability."
Although we create dream images from social experiences, dreams are
not themselves social acts. No one corrects our misperceptions of
meanings in dreams as they do when we are learning spoken language.
Foulkes concludes from his work that the potential for us to create dream
narratives is wired into our brains as surely as our ability to develop
spoken language, and both go through an orderly developmental pattern.
The single-image, literal dreams of early childhood form the basic
alphabet we use later to construct more complex narratives.
Traumatic events that occur in childhood threaten this orderly
process. Such events-even for children who are loved and supported, even
if sudden and brief-are seldom forgotten. They leave behind unmistakable
memory traces that show up in fears, games, or play activities in which
the child reenacts the terrible event. And they show up in dreams.
Having these highly charged images in the memory bank means that
new experiences, even minor ones, that evoke feelings of fear and
powerlessness will produce echoes of these earlier images for a long time
to come, perhaps even for a lifetime.
San Francisco psychologist Patricia Garfield asked 13 girls, aged
13 to 20, to describe their "worst dreams." All were victims of severe
sexual abuse at the hands of their fathers or other adult males taking
the father's place. Not surprisingly, the most common dream theme was
that of being attacked, and the most common emotions in dreams were
helplessness and terror. One child, abused by both her stepfather and her
mother's ex-boyfriend, reported this dream:
"After X molests me, he gets my mom and my brother and me and takes
us outside to this big shoe. It has a cannon in it and he takes my mother
and puts her in the cannon and shoots her out. And I have to watch him
kill my mother. The same with my brother and then he does it to
me."
Tags:
assortment,
axe,
crabs,
crises,
crowd of people,
dream,
dream interpretation,
dreamers,
earthquakes,
family members,
first clue,
home economics,
horror movie,
landmark study,
laundry,
living room,
nightmares,
old mother,
pipes,
plumbing,
railroad switch,
sense of self identity,
sleep,
unconscious,
underwear
