Answers to Student Questions
If you’re a middle school or high school student doing a class project on dreams, please take a look at the questions and answers below from other students who have contacted me. If you’ve got questions in addition to these, and you can wait a couple days for me to answer, feel free to email me. Good luck with your project!
Student Questions #1
1. Why do we dream?
We dream because that's what humans do! Our brains have been shaped by evolution to remain highly active during sleep, engaged in vital processes of memory formation, threat evaluation, emotional balance, and creative problem-solving. Dreaming is the psychological outgrowth of those natural processes, and its basic function in my view is to keep our brain-mind system healthy, flexible, creative, and attuned to the world.
2. What is the difference between Freud and Jung's dream theories?
I have learned much from Freud and Jung, and I use both in my theoretical studies and practical interpretations. I like Freud for his skepticism, his idea that dream symbols relate to cultural symbols, and his emphasis on childhood conflict in adult dreams. I like Jung for his spiritual open-mindedness, his belief that dreams sometimes look forward to our future potential, and his emphasis on the importance of highly memorable "big dreams." The main difference is that Freud believes dreams are disguised expressions of repressed wishes, while Jung says dreams are natural expressions of psychic wisdom.
3. Do substances such as drugs, herbs, and food affect our dreams?
Yes, although in complicated ways. Most drugs (e.g. alcohol) diminish sleep quality and dream recall.
4. Is it possible to control your dreams?
To some extent yes. Advanced meditators in Hinduism and Buddhism are able to control their dreams and even to experience something they call "deep dreamless sleep" or "witnessing sleep." In Western culture many people are intrigued by "lucid dreaming," but I'm skeptical about attempts to control dreams by the desires of the waking ego--the value of dreaming in my view is to gain insights and guidance from sources BEYOND the ego, and some lucid dream practitioners seem to be deliberately avoiding that.
5. What is the difference betweens dreams women, children, and men have?
Children tend to have shorter dreams with more animals and more nightmarish themes (being chased, kidnapped, lost, etc.). Adult men's dreams tend to include more male characters and to be somewhat more aggressive than women's dreams. In general, women remember more dreams than do men, although it's not clear if that's a biological difference or the product of women being socialized to pay more attention to their inner feelings. (It's probably both.)
6. How often do we dream? and when?
Our minds are active all through the sleep cycle, so we're always dreaming, even if we don't remember it in the morning. According to my research the average is about 1-2 dreams remembered per week for most people. Many religious traditions teach that dreams coming toward dawn are the "truest," and that may be connected with the fact that the longest REM phase of an ordinary night's sleep usually comes right before awaking in the morning. (REM sleep isn't identical with dreaming, but closely connected; REM seems to be a trigger for the brain-mind processes that generate our dreams.)
Student Questions #2
1. When did you start your career, and what have you written?
I’ve been studying dreams since college, and I focused my graduate studies in M.A. and Ph.D. programs on dreams. For the most part, I write academic and general audience books about dreams, religion, psychology, and culture.
2. What do you think is the function of dreams?
Tough question. In general, I believe dreams are creative and brutally honest expressions of our deepest fears, hopes, and aspirations.
3. What’s an interesting fact in dream research?
I think it’s interesting that nightmares are more frequent among young children than any other age group. This suggests to me that one of the functions of dreaming is to warn us of potential dangers in our waking environment, because children are in general much more vulnerable than adults.
4. What about people who don’t remember any dreams?
I’m not a dream “missionary,” so I don’t try to push the subject on people who aren’t into it. However, my experience is that almost everyone, even people who say they never dream, have actually had one or two dreams they can remember from some point in their lives, and those dreams are worth thinking about. To be honest, I feel kind of sad for these people—their conscious minds seem to be closed off to a wonderful playground of creative imagination.
5. Can dreams predict the future?
I’m skeptical of the idea that dreams can predict winning lottery numbers and plane crashes, but I definitely believe that dreams look towards the future and present us with “what would happen if…” scenarios. The function of such dreams is to prepare us in our imaginations for what might happen, so we’ll be more ready to deal in waking life.
6. What’s your main area of research?
I’m especially interested in what Jung called “big dreams” because these are the dreams people literally can’t forget—they’re so memorable they stay with a person for years and years. I think these kinds of dreams have the function of “provoking greater consciousness,” which basically means stretching our minds and promoting our psychological and spiritual growth.
7. Why did you start studying dreams?
My interest in dreaming started with a series of nightmares I had as a teenager. So you could say that my whole life since then has been an attempt to understand, explore, and honor the energies I discovered in those early dreams.
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