what roles do dreams play?

Once one posits, as Joseph Weiss does, that an integrated belief system learned from experience underlies much of human behavior, and that this belief system is updated daily as a result of current experience, one is led to ask how, and particularly when, this belief system is adjusted in light of recent experience. Only two possibilities exist: either the belief system is updated in a helter-skelter fashion during a person’s waking moments as the person is attempting to cope with current life situations, or during a respite from external experience during which full attention may be devoted to updating the belief system that is central to the person’s psychological existence, with sleep being the only viable candidate. Weiss assumes the latter, namely, “that a person, in his dreams as in his conscious waking life, thinks about his reality and attempts to adapt to it.” More particularly, according to Weiss:

“A person’s dreams are products of normal (albeit unconscious) thoughts, and they express his attempts at adaptation. He produces dreams in an effort to deal with current concerns that he has not resolved by waking thoughts, either because these concerns are too overwhelming, because he is hampered in his thinking about them by his pathogenic beliefs, or because he has not had time to think about them. A person may sometimes reveal more self-knowledge and may see things more clearly in his dreams than in his waking life.

“In his dreams a person may assess situations and develop plans for dealing with them much as he does in waking life. He may alert himself to a problem that he has overlooked, make a resolution, remind himself of a new insight, console himself for a loss, or reprimand himself for a misdeed. He may prepare for an upcoming task by encouraging himself; or he may bring forth repressed traumatic experiences so as to make himself aware of the traumas and to master the affects connected with them; or he may tell himself more clearly than in waking life how he feels about someone who is close to him; and so forth. In a sense a person, by producing a dream, sends a message to himself.”

Weiss has characterized the dream messages that dreamers experience as “policy statements.” These policy statements may be understood as being expressed during a person’s REM dreams, since these are the type of dreams patients most often recall upon awakening, and therefore bring to therapists for insight.

A New Look at Freud’s Botanical Monograph Dream, by Vic Comello (249 KB)

Deprivation of Dreaming Sleep byTwo Methods, by Harold Sampson, Ph.D. (676 KB)

Normal Adult Human Sleep as a Problem-Solving Process, by Vic Comello (221 KB)

Normal Adult Human Sleep as a Problem-Solving Process: Sleep Cycling Data on Naps and Sleep Stage and Sleep Deprivation, by Vic Comello (316 KB)

The Ongoing Hobson, Solms, Domhoff Debate Points Up the Superficiality of Modern Dream Theories: Introduction, by Vic Comello (131 KB)

Psychological Effects of Deprivation of Dreaming Sleep, by Harold Sampson, Ph.D. (1.0 MB)