afhNLA3t_VA.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          I mean, there's a lot of debate in the scientific literature about the meaning of dreams and perhaps there's even debate about whether it's possible for dreams to have meaning. I think partly the debate exists because to do dream analysis properly, as union particular pointed out, uh, you need a vast body of knowledge in the dream interpreter about comparative mythology and ritual and symbol and, and art history and so forth because dreams of course use images as their primary means of conceptualization now in order to understand what, what dreams mean and how they can be useful in therapy apart from appreciating the fact that the interpreter needs a broad body of knowledge that scientists generally don't develop. It's also important to know what it is that scientists have discovered about dreams. So for example, we know that dreams occur during rapid eye movement sleep. You cycle into rapid eye movement.

Speaker 1:          01:09          Sleep about every 90 minutes when you're asleep, when you're in rapid eye movement, sleep, your motor centers. So your action centers are very much activated in your brain, but your body is paralyzed so that you can't move around. Um, your eyes are moving because of course it doesn't really matter if your eyes move while you're asleep because they won't take you anywhere, but if your legs were moving while you were asleep, you run into walls while you were dreaming and scientists have actually managed to damage the motor inhibition systems in cats so that they do move around when they're dreaming anyways. If you wake up when someone's dreaming, their brain is about as active as it is when they're awake, so there's a tremendous amount of neural processing going on in the dream state. If you wake someone up when they're dreaming, there's about an 80 percent chance that they'll report the emotion of anxiety.

Speaker 1:          02:10          Dreams tend to focus on threat processing. Now, a threat is anything that might hurt you, but it's more than that to a threat is anything that doesn't fit into your current conceptual scheme. So imagine that you have a theory about the way the world is and then you act on that theory and sometimes things work out the way you'd like them to work out, but often they don't. And every time things work out in a way that isn't how you would like or how you predicted that indicates that there's some more about the world that you have to learn about and that fact first manifests itself in anxiety. Now the dream focuses on anxiety and then it loosens up. It's the normal conceptual constraints that characterize waking thinking and it starts to play in a sense or hypothesize about how your current categorical structure could be shifted around so that that threat could be accounted for.

Speaker 1:          03:16          Okay? Now that means the dream is dealing with things that you need to understand, but you don't yet understand. So when you wake up and you remember the dream, the dream doesn't really make sense because it's about something you don't understand. Now it's your brain's best guess at configuring or understanding the unknowable, but it's like it's like the first layer of a multilayered process, which eventually would culminate in fully developed thought maybe over months or maybe over years, or maybe you would never manage it at all. The unknown thing or the threat is just too great to really come to any terms with it whatsoever. Okay? Now imagine that you're dreaming about something and it produces enough emotion with the threat produces enough emotion, not only to produce a very vivid dream, but to wake you up. When you wake up, you remember the dream and then you go to someone about it. Well, the dream is about something you don't yet understand that it's upsetting and if you tell a bunch of people about it, they're going to give you all sorts of opinions on the dream and that's a way that you can gather more information about the threat,

Speaker 2:          04:28          which is known as a nightmare. Perhaps Cynthia dream, which is troubling, all puzzling because it's so abstract. Could you differentiate? I think

Speaker 1:          04:39          it's clearer in the case of nightmares and often too, because nightmares tend to have archetipal themes. You know, people for example, are often threatened by monsters at night and a monster is a Chi Mira that's made up of the different parts of different parts of frightening thing. A dragon is a camera, for example, because it's made out of reptilian parts and it also includes the idea of fire in transformation, so a nightmare is that a dream that tends to use archetipal imagery to conceptualize a fairly powerful threat and if you recounted nightmare to a person with no specific training, they're going to have some opinion about it and their opinion might be useful in terms of information, Katherine, but if you recount a dream to someone who's psychologically trained and his also symbolically trained and who has, you know, great, great depth of knowledge with regards to the structure of religious thinking and and comparative literature. The light that they're going to shed on your dream is much greater and more profound and sometimes a, a dream interpretation can offer the person who's had the dream a leap forward in knowledge that might've taken them five or six years to conceptualize by themselves.

Speaker 2:          06:03          No ordinarily have had. Because the person who's the expert who's had the dream recounted to them knows and says, Oh yes, I know of that place that they say the theme to that experience. They've had that symbol and it's meaning and a bubble what it feels like because of surely it is, um, some people say that me included, I'm that one way to interpret a dream when you wake up is to just like you would taste a sip of wine, just hold the flavor and, and hold the feeling. What does it feel like and what does feel, what feels the same in your real life? And that's what the dream is trying to tell you with a collage of singles and memories as well that is drawn on in recent. I'm conscious, uh, experience to try and put it together. Hence the dream can be very abstract. Would you say that's the case? Sometimes

Speaker 1:          07:00          I think there's two things are really worth highlighting in the first is the category is that a dream uses are generally based on emotional similarity rather than logical similarity?

Speaker 2:          07:14          Yes.

Speaker 1:          07:15          So a dream for example, might represent fear or the fear of something unknown by using a juxtaposition of a variety of images of frightening thing. So imagine that in the dream world, the basic rule is all things that produced the same emotion are the same thing, and so you're a description of a dream interpretation process that relies on identifying similarities in emotional state, gets right to the core of how dream thought works. Now secondarily, I also believe that if you are able to help someone, a construct at dream interpretation that fits there also able to feel that it fits, it clicks or it makes sense or it's like the punchline of a joke in some way they can tell that the interpretation have, uh, put some missing pieces of the puzzle into place. And I think it's important to rely on that as an indicator of whether the interpretation is actually derived from the dream or sort of just at a theoretical imposition on its structure.

Speaker 1:          08:26          Now we can go underneath that too. And I mentioned already that basic categories are more action oriented than object oriented. So basic categories, the basic categories of the human mind are categories to do things with. Well, by the same token, there are also motivational and emotional categories. So the primordial mind, like the animal mind thinks sort of axiomatically that all things that produced the same are the same thing. So there's things that make you happy or there's things that make you sad or there's things that make you anxious and the fact that all those things share the capacity to evoke that emotion speaks of some essential essential identity between them. Now the identity is in relationship to the experiencer and not necessarily with regards to similarity between the objects, but it's still how we naturally think. And it's certainly how mythologies thinks and it's how drama thinks and how religion things. We've lost sight of that in part because we've become scientifically trained to some degree and we tend to believe that the real categories of the world are objective and, uh, that, that just strikes me as it's wrong. There's something about it that's wrong and it's wrong because we have to act.