Dreams and dream theory

blissblogger

Well-known member
I wonder if anyone can recommend books or writings on dreams - the function of dreaming, the meaning of dreams, and how these have changed over the centuries, or are different in other cultures - artistic movements influenced by the idea of the dream...

I think there's probably some stuff in Ernst Bloch but I haven't gone digging . Gaston Bachelard too probably but I have found his stuff a bit hard-going
 

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Jon Hassell - Dream Theory In Malaysia

^ not what you were asking, but it fits with the thread title and it's a superb album

but as you were asking, check this recommendation from @DannyL

There's a fully developed new model of this from Eric Wargo - his book Precognitive Dreamwork & the Long Self is genuinely really exciting.
Interview with him here but buy the book: https://whatmagicisthis.com/2020/12/12/the-timely-ideas-of-eric-wargo/

proper dream work / precog
 

Murphy

cat malogen
Memory building, toxin flushing, latent symbolism, all that interpretation of subconscious layering, back to the Witch who sat on your chest and induced sleep paralysis

Wesleyan Divines saw dreams as ‘manifestations’ in the quest for grace. The Dream of Macsen Wledig is an old old British story/myth and dreams are how historical Druidic figures would sleep on a decision. If the answer came in the dream, it came as cloaked but decisive and legally binding. The waking dream of speaking in tongues comes to mind too, liminal, Oberon out making mischief

The Grateful Dead did a dream telepathy experiment with a psych dept around 1973, the paper’s online somewhere and amusing reading for period grimness while touching on a few woohoo moments with image projection which might indicate I dunno what
 

Murphy

cat malogen
Had a client who kept a dream diary for years. In it they recorded a relative being diagnosed with a terminal illness

20 years later, boom, diagnosis came through. This client was so zapped even years later, bought the diary in as a register. it’s an example where you stumble offering any rational support and possibly the only time in my working life where someone has handed me both a battered old notebook and a copy of an nhs diagnosis confirmation pleading to take it seriously. 100% known and sane, no mythomania, no exaggeration, always early for appointments, no nonsense but this episode crushed them on a level where you need colleagues to introduce interpretations like seriality and deja reve in regularly sorry @woops

Weird as fuck world
 

martin

----
What I don't get is: I'll watch some footage of skydiver parachute accidents...or worry about energy bills, then watch a video of a wasp turning a caterpillar into a zombie... or think about my sister having major back surgery next month...or nearly hit a dog during a driving lesson - and then, that night, have a vivid dream about hanging out with Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun, because I caught a 30-second snatch of Take My Breath Away in a charity shop earlier.
 

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yeah, I deleted a post about Castendada, but yeah there's a whole bunch of stuff about looking at your hands in his books and then realising "oh, I can see my hands, i must be dreaming" and then you realise you are dreaming and then you are LUCID and you can control your dreams, but it's not as simple as that because you're really on the astral planes and you might try and mould "reality" in a way that pisses off the inhabitants of the planes, and then they kick you out

real talk, true stories
 

william kent

Well-known member
yeah, I deleted a post about Castendada, but yeah there's a whole bunch of stuff about looking at your hands in his books and then realising "oh, I can see my hands, i must be dreaming" and then you realise you are dreaming and then you are LUCID and you can control your dreams, but it's not as simple as that because you're really on the astral planes and you might try and mould "reality" in a way that pisses off the inhabitants of the planes, and then they kick you out

real talk, true stories

A couple of others I've heard are looking for a clock or light switch and if the hands of the clock don't seem to tell any obvious time or the light's unaffected when you flick the switch then you're in a dream.
 

luka

Well-known member
therapists and analysts say that a client in freudian analysis will invariably have freudian dreams
and a clinet in jungian analysis will invariably have jungian dreams.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
William James, Freud, Jung?

I read a neuroscientist's book on dreams recently that claimed their main purpose was to keep active cells devoted to visual processing during the day as otherwise they would overnight retrain for some other purpose. This is summarised here: https://time.com/5925206/why-do-we-dream/

William James is a good thought - I have a copy of Varieties of Religious Experience but it's in storage I think

There's a fantastic chapter in that about the Anesthetic Revelation - all these clerics and high-minded folk who experimented with ether and nitrous oxide in the 19th Century. Rather like the very early days of people like Aldous Huxley experimenting with peyote and LSD, a kind of mandarin class interest in altered states of consciousness.
 

Murphy

cat malogen
Frances Yates and memory work



Abstract
This article argues that rapid eye movement (REM) dreaming is elaborative encoding for episodic memories. Elaborative encoding in REM can, at least partially, be understood through ancient art of memory (AAOM) principles: visualization, bizarre association, organization, narration, embodiment, and location. These principles render recent memories more distinctive through novel and meaningful association with emotionally salient, remote memories. The AAOM optimizes memory performance, suggesting that its principles may predict aspects of how episodic memory is configured in the brain. Integration and segregation are fundamental organizing principles in the cerebral cortex. Episodic memory networks interconnect profusely within the cortex, creating omnidirectional "landmark" junctions. Memories may be integrated at junctions but segregated along connecting network paths that meet at junctions. Episodic junctions may be instantiated during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep after hippocampal associational function during REM dreams. Hippocampal association involves relating, binding, and integrating episodic memories into a mnemonic compositional whole. This often bizarre, composite image has not been present to the senses; it is not "real" because it hyperassociates several memories. During REM sleep, on the phenomenological level, this composite image is experienced as a dream scene. A dream scene may be instantiated as omnidirectional neocortical junction and retained by the hippocampus as an index. On episodic memory retrieval, an external stimulus (or an internal representation) is matched by the hippocampus against its indices. One or more indices then reference the relevant neocortical junctions from which episodic memories can be retrieved. Episodic junctions reach a processing (rather than conscious) level during normal wake to enable retrieval. If this hypothesis is correct, the stuff of dreams is the stuff of memory.



IMG_0637.jpeg
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
hmm natural selection should mean that whatever dreams do should be useful; this sounds useful

But obv dreams could be helping in many ways with this just one of them. The roles that dreaming plays would have been acquired in order of their usefulness at the time with each new purpose being constrained/enabled by the evolved state of the overall dreaming function up to then. eg.

1) function: ensure vision neurons are up to the job on waking; priority: VERY HIGH as otherwise swiftly predated
THEN
2) function: improve fidelity of memories through rehearsal; priority: HIGH as improves hunting/gathering
THEN
3) function: revise comparative importance of memories; priority: etc.
THEN
4) function: carry out evaluative dis/integration of memories from life-course in order to make the organism more efficient
etc.

The functions might have developed in an order that corresponds to Maslow's hierarchy of needs; if the most rarefied needs are not well represented it could be a sign of unmet human potential. Alternatively, if all needs appear represented, the dreaming function is probably pretty well optimised and does loads of useful things in lots of clever ways.
 
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