Back in July, I took a look at Freud on the interpretation of dreams (reference 1). I had also been taking another look at Hobson on dreams (reference 2). Which prompted me to try keeping a dream diary. Rather than the bedside notebook talked of elsewhere, I opted for an Excel worksheet next door.
The last endeavour of this sort was the descriptive experience sampling noticed six years ago at reference 3, amongst other places.
The original idea was that the worksheet had one row for each dream. There are a number of categorical columns, things like times, dates and content markers. Then there are three text columns: context, content and comment. But quite often the dreams of any particular period of sleep – perhaps a nap, a snooze or a siesta rather than a proper overnight sleep – resolve into a number of scenes, perhaps three or four, and/or a number of fragments, perhaps one or two. So what exactly makes up a row can vary a good deal and any one period of awakening after a period of sleep might be represented by one or more of them. And any one day might be represented by zero, one or more rows. All a bit untidy.
I should say that, in so far as I can remember them, none of my dreams would be fairly illustrated by anything as elaborate as the image above, turned up by Bing on the search key ‘dream’. An image which is far more coloured and far more specific, far more detailed, than anything I have come up with. Furthermore, while I am in my dreams, I do not dream myself from the outside: I might be in a boat, but I would not see myself in that boat.
Since the middle of July, up to and including a few days ago, that is to say 10th October, I clocked up 105 reports, an average of around one a day. Four more since then. Saturday a bit low and Tuesday at bit high, but probably not significant.
On the other hand, it may be that I was more careful, that my interest peaked, in August.
It is easy enough to count up the number of characters used in the description field, analysed in multiples of 100 above, but my strong impression is that the length of the description does not have all that much to do with the duration or complexity of a dream, rather a reflection of the vagaries of the recording process. A lot of the code 1’s – zero to 99 characters – are dreams the content of which was completely lost by the time I came to record them. I knew there had been a more or less elaborate dream, but that apart, the content had vanished. Sometimes, not very often, some bits and pieces come back over the following hour or so.
It is also sometimes the case that, on waking, I have a strong sense that I had been dreaming about something, say X, even though I cannot recall anything about X from the dream itself. Perhaps I cannot recall anything from the dream itself at all. A variety of blindsight, as it were, that is to say the ability of some visually impaired people to respond to visual stimuli which they are not conscious of, which they are not aware of.
This was a count of the dreams with a sexual element (Sx) and a count of those involving either images of real people or just the names of real people (Nm). With sex amounting to getting on for 10% of the total, the people getting on for 15%. Not much overlap.
The real people images are nearly always people I actually know. The real people names are nearly always people I know of, perhaps because they are in the news, rather than people I actually know.
But both figures are confounded by boundary difficulties. What about a dream which is clearly based on recent events involving known, real people but in which those people are neither imaged nor named explicitly? With time one might develop conventions in such matters, but would that really help given the relatively small numbers?
Are we trying to analyse something which does not lend itself to this kind of analysis? To cross tabulations? That said, it is easy enough to come up with columns which describe this or that aspect of the dream row concerned – I thought, for example, of adding one for alcohol – but would one do better just to read over the descriptions and hope that insight would emerge from the unconscious?
A kind of analysis which is certainly facilitated by recording directly into an Excel worksheet. A recording which is complicated by the tension between the need to get on with recording and changing one’s mind about how best to do that recording as one goes along. The usual answer to which is to have a go for a month or so, then decide on a recording method going forward, probably discarding what had been collected in the first month – but I don’t think I have the energy for that.
A recording which is damaged by it being made some time, perhaps an hour or so, after the event. The notebook on the bedside table admits of a more immediate and a more complete record, at the expense of being rather more intrusive.
But the problem which is taxing me presently is the interaction between dreaming and recording those dreams, an interaction which was loud and clear in the case of my attempt at the descriptive experience sampling of reference 3. The interaction between sleep content and waking content.
Quite often, for example, I slowly wake to what seems to have been an elaborate dream, trying to sort it all out as I wake, a trying which is often prompted by the knowledge that I am going to try to write it all down. What was dream and what is real? Was there any sense to be made of stuff which had seemed perfectly clear when I was asleep? Quite often, most of this stuff has vanished by the time that I have woken up properly, well before I have turned the computer on. And of what is left, how much is a fabrication, perhaps based on genuine dream content, but put together after the event, during the waking up process?
Other matters
There was a fragment last night, from being on the point of sleeping, rather than being on the point of waking, which did, unambiguously, involve colour. An image which occupied just a small part of the otherwise more or less blank and black visual field, a small blob of cells, large pixels if you will, most of which were black but some of which were coloured a deep red, making some elementary shape or other. An image which evolved over a few seconds, then vanished. I then associated to the little green men you got in some of the very first computer games, the green on black ones.
The foregoing is all about what can be done looking at dreams from the inside, looking at one’s own dreams. Wiring sleeping people up and looking them from the outside provides lots more information, information which lends itself to comparison across people, but I do not know whether it extends to knowing exactly when people are dreaming, rather than when it is quite likely that they are dreaming. Such a duration would be a useful complement to the inside perception of duration, complication and elaboration. Maybe Hobson will have something to say about this.
From the dream image included at the start of this post, I associate now to Salvador Dali’s famous picture of his wife having a dream, otherwise reference 4. I would argue now, without having read the Wikipedia article about it, that this was a picture inspired by his wife’s report of a dream, rather than a painting of a dream. And maybe what in the dream was a sequence of images or fragments has here been compressed into a single, summarising image.
Not sure that I want to know about my wife’s dreams in this way. Even less likely that she would want to report a dream which looked anything like this one. From where I associate to Freud’s remarks at reference 1 about the strength of purpose it took to report his own dreams in anything like a complete and honest way. And my own diary, the subject of this note, is lightly censored, even though it is unlikely that anyone else will ever look at it.
Conclusions
If I persevere, hopefully I will get some better insight into the more careful records of people like Freud and Hobson. My present impression is that both of them were able to record their dreams in far more detail than I am able to record mine. Maybe there was more detail to record, maybe it is more about the way they went about it.
It would be good if I could bet a better grip on the senses that are deployed in my dreams. Is it all pretty much the inner thought of descriptive experience sampling? A little grey, more word than image, certainly nothing like the two images included above. Do the images have colour – the stray just reported aside? Are there tastes and smells? In which connection, I am sure I have read somewhere that people who are very hungry dream of food, something which I have not yet done.
In any event, it seems quite likely that different people will dream of different things, that their dreams will reflect their age, their sex, their different personalities and their different circumstances. But maybe one has to be a member of a study group to get a grip on that. Perhaps the sort of thing that a class of psychology students would do? Maybe a project for the University of the Third Age – for which see reference 5 – an outfit which I have not yet thought to get involved with.
References
Reference 1: The interpretation of dreams – Sigmund Freud – 1899/1954
Reference 2: Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep – J. Allan Hobson – 2002.
Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.
Reference 4: Dream caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a second Before Awakening – Salvador Dali – 1944.
Reference 5: https://www.u3a.org.uk/. Apparently adapted from the French original.
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