Why are dreams so difficult to understand?
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4 perspectives on why dreams disguise their meaning
When you're new to dreamwork, it's quite common to find yourself completely befuddled by the images in your dreams (honestly, I'm not sure that ever goes away). Why can't dreams just say what they mean? Why does it have to be so dramatic?
Well, you're not alone. A dream study from 2013 found that:
Depending on scoring criteria, it has been estimated that between 32% (Schredl, 2010) and 71% (Stenstrom, 2006) of dream reports feature bizarre or impossible elements. Despite widely varying estimates, however, there is general agreement that bizarre, incongruous or impossible elements are features of at least a substantial proportion of dreams.
And yet, sometimes dreams are very explicit. I believe this happens to compensate for our unconsciousness–a sort of last resort of warning us against something. The imagery can be rather simple and we experience an a-ha moment upon waking. Some dreams repeat themselves over and over, until the message clicks. Some dreams grace us with a voice or a written note that spells out an important message. And then there are nightmares–dreams so shocking and emotional that "wake us up" to the situation, without any interpretation needed.
However, the vast majority of our dreams aren't like that. They're odd dramas with characters that make no immediate sense. Sitting with a dream can feel like looking at an impossible puzzle. So why does our psyche do that?
1. The Freudian view
Freud proposed that dreams censored things that were difficult to face for people.
Unconscious desires are disguised and transformed into symbols or dream images to protect the dreamer from directly experiencing the repressed content. By using more palatable imagery, the person could engage with the issue in a safer way–particularly sexual issues and unresolved Oedipal conflicts.
While this is partly true (especially in the case of trauma and nightmares), dream specialists have challenged Freud's view as very limiting.
2. Expressing complex emotions
Another possible explanation comes from the emotional nature of dreams.
Dreams help us process daily events and conflicts and have an emotional root that is more or less unconscious. Even in our conscious state we use words like "sad" or "furious" to describe our emotions; but when asked about how they truly feel, we find ourselves using metaphorical language to articulate the complexity of what's going on within.
It feels like there's a boulder on my chest. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. There's a sinking feeling in my belly. I feel like the insects are crawling under my skin.
What's more, we rarely feel one thing at a time. We're often caught in conflicting emotions; we have mixed feelings; or we don't even know how we feel yet.
Therefore, when dreams try to articulate our emotions, they also resort to symbolic imagery to help us understand them and pay attention to them. The drama of the dream represents our complex feelings about a situation, acted out before our eyes.
When analysing a dream, it's helpful to ask yourself "where in my life do I feel like that?" or "what in my life feels like that?".
3. A "primitive" consciousness
The term participation mystique was coined by the philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in 1910 to describe the consciousness of the aboriginal people colonisers encountered and called "primitives". Western colonisers were surprised to discover the superstitions and odd beliefs these people held, which were so contrasting to the rational, Cartesian mind held in the "civilised" West that sought causation.
We can understand participation mystique as a state of union with the unconscious or animism. The individual experiences a sense of oneness or identification with external objects, other people, or the collective unconscious. This state of psychological fusion blurs the boundaries between the self and the external world, leading to a feeling of interconnectedness or even absorption into something greater than oneself. It's a state of synchronicity, rather than causality.
Jung considered this a "primitive" way of thinking, pre-logical–and dreams offer us a taste of that.
For example, events or natural phenomena in the dream becomes a reflection of our inner state, much like it was for the so-called "primitive". What's more, stories in dreams don't follow a causal sequence, but tend to move from one scene to another without logic. Understanding them thus relies less on finding out why one thing leads to another, but more on how the two sequences are co-occuring in time; what unites them.
4. Neurobiology
There's also the brain bit: during sleep, part of our brain activity shuts down–especially the prefrontal cortex, responsible for cognition, self-awareness, and executive functions. This explains what scientists call a lack of metacognitive awareness, meaning that unless we're lucid dreaming, we aren't aware that we're in a dream.
Neuroscience links dream states to the Default Mode Network, a region in the brain active when we're not involved in a task. This region is generally associated with day-dreaming, mind-wandering, thinking about yourself, and reminiscing. In this state, the brain seems to be more likely to freely associate, which scientists believe to be a significant part of dreaming and creativity.
The DMN has also been associated with the seat of the ego, our sense of self. Research on psychedelic therapy has shown that psychedelics disrupt the activity of the DMN, which is experienced as the dissolution of the ego: either as a lowering of defences to access repressed biographical contents, or the full-blown ego death that enables having a mystical, unitive experience of non-duality.
Coming back to dreams, neuroscientists have found that REM sleep, which is associated with dreaming, correlates with an intensification of activity in the DMN. Therefore, it appears that dreams emerge from enhanced states of self-reflection and memory and emotional processing, yet without the analytical capacity of the prefrontal cortex. With an increase in the free-associating part of the brain, we can understand the incredible creativity and apparent lack of logic of dreams.