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Pagel, J. (2000).
Nightmares and Disorders of Dreaming. American Family
Physician, April 1, (61)7, 2037–2042. AFP has the
largest circulation of any medical professional journal. This
paper is written as a review for the generalist physician of
frightening dreams and parasomnias, such as confusional arousals
and sleepwalking. Nightmare syndrome in adults and children is
differentiated from the frequent nightmares which are the most
common symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Frequent
nightmares are common in children and usually don’t reflect
underlying psychopathology. In adults for whom frequent nightmares
disrupt sleep and affect daytime activity, behavioral and
pharmachologic treatments can reduce frequent nightmares and night
terrors. A parental handout for parents of children with
nightmares and night terrors is included that can be utilized in
general medical practice.
The
following reports are taken from the Tucson Consciousness
Conference, in April 2000, which was attended by many dream
researchers, as well as philosophers, psychologists, artists,
neuroscientists, and individuals with synesthesia (i.e., mixing of
the senses), inability to recognize faces, and inability to see
colors. A report and discussion about that conference, the format
of which has many similarities to ASD, will occur at the
Washington ASD conference.
Draper, T.W. (2000). An implicit fifth stage in Foulkes’s
dream-based developmental model of self-reflective consciousness
in children. Consciousness Research Abstracts, Tucson 2000,
p. 110. Draper describes the four stages of the
development of dreaming in children as recorded by David Foulkes
over thirty-five years of research. That work showed that children
under the age of three years have no dreams, that between three to
five years dreams are rare and short, tending to have no action,
and that for dreams at five to seven years there is a sequence of
events but little self-participation, and that after seven years
the self begins to be active. The ability to dream thus develops
over years, just as consciousness does. Foulkes’ work has been
controversial, in that many parents report that their children
have more complicated dreams than this. Draper proposes that the
child’s elaboration of the dream when awake, which Foulkes had
tried to guard against, can be seen as a fifth stage in the
development of dreaming, that is social and creative.
Blagrove, M. (2000).
Dreaming: Where does the cognitive deficiency lie? Consciousness
Research Abstracts, Tucson 2000, pp. 110–111. The debate
over whether dreams are deficient or insightful in their cognitive
abilities is reviewed. We do make decisions when awake and when
dreaming, but we may often not need conscious control of volition
even when awake. Dreams relate to our current concerns, and can
depict choices and expectations, but it still seems that when
dreaming we cannot hold many expectancies or options in mind at
once.
LaBerge,
S. (2000). Smooth tracking eye-movements discriminate both
dreaming and perception from imagination. Consciousness
Research Abstracts, Tucson 2000, p. 111. If one watches a
moving object, such as the tip of one’s finger slowly going in a
circle, one’s eyes can smoothly track its path. If one imagines
watching a moving object then one’s eyes instead make jerking
movements, or saccades. LaBerge had lucid dreamers follow the path
of a finger within a dream and found that their eyes made smooth
tracking movements. Hence dreaming is similar to waking perception
of real objects rather than imagination.
Kahan, T.L. (2000).
Metacognition in dreaming and waking. Consciousness Research
Abstracts, Tucson 2000, pp. 111–112. Kahan reviews how
similar waking and dreaming cognition may be, contrasting this
with views of the discontinuities between the two states. A major
point is that if a rater reads an account of someone else’s
dream then less decision-making is found than if the dreamer is
asked whether they made choices in the dream; thinking in dreams
should thus be studied by asking the dreamer to rate the content.
Kahn,
D., Pace-Schott, E.F., Stickgold, R., & Hobson, J.A. (2000).
‘I just know it’s John!’ Character recognition in dreaming
consciousness. Consciousness Research Abstracts, Tucson
2000, p. 112. Dreamers were asked on waking to report who the
characters were in their dream, and how they recognized them.
Although many characters were recognized by face or behavior, in
many instances they ‘just knew’ who it was. The authors
propose that this characteristic of dreaming follows from REM
sleep being physiologically different from the wake state.
Tarkko, K. (2000).
Binding and the phenomenal unity of human characters in dreams. Consciousness
Research Abstracts, Tucson 2000, p.112. This study found
that a large proportion of the human characters in dreams have
bizarre elements, but some types of bizarreness are more frequent
than others. Features intrinsic to a person (such as how they
look) are less frequently bizarre than are the external relations
between the person and the context (e.g. the place). Thus, binding
a representation coherently together is less prone to errors than
is binding several different representations together.
Valli,
K. & Revonsuo, A. (2000). Threatening events in dreams—Evidence
for an evolutionary function of dreaming. Consciousness
Research Abstracts, Tucson 2000, pp. 112–113. Revonsuo
(2000) has proposed that in dreams we select threatening waking
events and simulate them repeatedly so as to practice skills of
overcoming the threats; dreaming thus has an evolutionary
function. This major new theory will be fully reviewed later this
year in Dream Time, and is supported by work on nightmares,
recurrent dreams, and posttraumatic dreams. In support of the
theory Valli and Revonsuo report data from about 600 dreams,
showing that the threats encountered in dreams are often much more
severe than those encountered in waking reality by the same
subjects, that the threats are realistic rather than fantastic,
and that the more life-threatening the event is, the more likely
the dream ego is to respond to it in a relevant way.
Deslauriers, D.
(2000). Spiritual intelligence and dreams: A case example of
consciousness integration across states. Consciousness Research
Abstracts, Tucson 2000, pp. 152. This paper explores the
connection between spiritual intelligence (such as the pursuit of
meaning, ultimate values, and ethical behavior) and the ability to
integrate multiple states of consciousness. The claim is made that
spiritual intelligence is connected with the increased ability to
move purposefully between states and with the ability to gain
insight across states. Dreamwork is thus connected to the
development of spiritual and emotional intelligence, for example
through analogical thinking, by the ability to apply guidance from
dreams, and by displaying empathy toward oneself and others as a
result of dream sharing.
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