Why It's Worth Exploring Your Dreams

In a recent talk in Zurich, German psychoanalyst Konstantin Roessler surveyed the current state of dream research. Tracing some of the earlier scientific studies on dreams, he made a renewed case for the importance of dreams. Even formerly skeptical neuroscientists have now begun to see the meaning, purpose, and value of dreams for everyday life and overall psychic health.

Dreams as Meaningless “Content”

Not too long ago, it was a widespread view that dreams were mostly meaningless nocturnal activities. Roessler cited one of the leading scientific voices on dreams, Allan Hobson, who argued that there were no functions of dreams.

As Hobson described, dreams were “meaningless electrical discharge” (1977). This view is echoed in a lot of colloquial reports of dreams, by people who say either that they don’t dream (which is not true) or that dreams are merely random “stuff” in the psyche that is “too weird” to be of any real meaning.

Hobson also critiqued the idea that there was hidden meaning within dreams, calling this notion the “mystique of fortune cookie dream interpretation” (1977). Since he was a psychiatrist and M.D., it seems likely that his resistance to interpretation rested on the idea's scientific merit, or lack thereof. How could we claim, for example, that being chased by a monster might have a standardized meaning across people and cultures, perhaps indicating a particular psychological issue or stressor?

From Meaningless Content to Physiological Function

Still, ever the scientist, Hobson continued to study dreams as well as record and track his own dreaming. Later in his career, he concluded that dreams do serve important, though still mysterious functions. Focusing on the “physiology” of dreams (and not their meaning), he argued that dreams may be the best way the brain has to communicate to itself about events and feelings experienced the day before.

This line of inquiry suggests that dreams are a way to process, work through, and even integrate material from everyday life into our larger psychological system. The notion here is that even if we do not process things—such as, say, a violent confrontation—in our conscious life through dialogue, therapy, or meditation, our unconscious picks up the slack. In other words, there is a self-driving psychic system that works to manage and process events in conscious life to prepare for the next day.

Dreams and Continuity Hypothesis

Fast forward about 20 years, and dream research landed on what is now called the “continuity hypothesis” (Hau, 2002): that dreams are continuous and contiguous with waking life, or that contents and experiences from waking life are embedded in dreams. From a physiological point of view, it has been argued that dreams help in the formation and consolidation of memory and, again, are an important way to process and resolve difficult experiences and trauma.

Anecdotally, I notice in myself and in my own patients that added sleep and active dreaming often can help in difficult times like acute grief or trauma, relieving the patient from having to “work” hard consciously to resolve or manage their feelings. In other words, giving oneself over to the supposedly passive activity of sleep and dreaming can have benefits on the conscious side of our lives.

The Question of Dream Interpretation

While contemporary scientific thought has caught up to the notion that dreams matter on a biological and physiological level, like a self-cleaning system, the challenge and question remain about what dreams mean, or if they mean anything at all. In other words, can we agree that dreaming matters no matter what the dreams are of, or does the content have a significance, or does it speak to any part or blind spot about our waking lives?

For psychoanalysts, and Jungian ones in particular, dream content matters enormously. Without surveying the whole field, we may say that discussing dream content can serve as a way to open up or loosen up our sometimes rigid cognitive frames for how we see ourselves and point us to under-examined parts of ourselves.

In his book, The Gift of Therapy, M.D. and psychiatrist Irvin Yalom spends four chapters talking about why we must use dreams in our therapy: “Dreams, use them, use them, use them!” Dreams have emotional dimensions that can alert us to parts of ourselves, like shame, guilt, pride, etc., that we may have buried or forgotten about.

Dreams can have a way of indirectly drawing attention to these parts of ourselves, and most specifically, our unsanitized self-concepts. Yes, sometimes looking at a dream yields nothing clinically interesting or useful. But other times, associating around a dream image or feeling can prompt interesting conversations about seldom-examined personal histories or experiences that prove fruitful in a clinical environment.