The Interpretation of Dreams,and of Jokes

Abstract

The problem of meaning in dreams is examined along with the question of how such meaning may be legitimately extracted. Quantitative content analysis has shown that a rough continuity exists between dream content and awake experiences and concerns (and that, therefore, dreams are implicit memories). Continuity becomes more pronounced when figurative (latent) contents are taken into account in addition to literal (manifest) contents and when temporal disjunctions between dream experiences and life-events are factored in. Formal homologies exist between dreams and jokes, which provide a simplifying model for dream interpretation. Jokes prove, for example, that latent contents (which arise from interactions of surface manifest contents with context) convey crucial meanings missing in manifest contents. Dreams are release phenomena involving disinhibition and underregulation of content and style, and for this reason are simultaneously revealing and confusing. Dream distortions turn out to be identical to those found in other types of resource-poor cognition (e.g., aphasia, subliminal perception), suggesting that defense (“censorship”) is not necessarily responsible for dream distortion.

Keywords

content analysis distortion dream-work jokes manifest versus latent content

Although the much celebrated “cognitive revolution” in psychology is by now more than half a century old, the cognitive psychology of dreams has been remarkably neglected. This neglect is probably due to the widely held view that dreams, after all, are random mental events, basically meaningless froth, a view that can be traced to the extraordinarily influential activation-synthesis model of dreaming of Allan Hobson and his colleagues (e.g., Hobson, 1988, 2002; Hobson & McCarley, 1977). This position seems now to be receding. In recent years, Hobson has complained of having been misunderstood and to have always maintained that dreams have meaning (Hobson, 2011, 2012), although Hobson continues to insist that dreams are “transparent”—that their meaning is obvious—and that they do not involve defensive disguise. In any event, it is a fact that the modal number of pages devoted to dreams in modern cognitive psychology texts is zero.

To be sure, there has been much important neuroscience research on dreams over the past several decades, although it seems that some of the classic earlier work is now being swallowed up by some of the more recent work. Most shocking is the apparent break-up—or, at least, loosening—of the classic linkage of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and dreaming (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953; Dement & Kleitman, 1957). It was known early on (e.g., Foulkes, 1962) that the REM−dream connection was not altogether crisp and that the relative percent of dream reports associated with REM and non-REM (NREM) awakenings depends on one's definition of what qualifies as a “dream.” Also, early versus late night REM and NREM awakenings yield different percentages of dream reports, to the extent that NREM dream reports near awakening are difficult to distinguish from early night REM dream reports (e.g., Cicogna & Occhionero, 2013).

A body blow to the REM−dreaming connection was delivered by the neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms (1997, 2003), who showed from analyses of brain pathology that dreams and REM can be doubly dissociated: dreams can occur without REM and REM without dreams. Solms (2003) concluded from his own and others’ research that “dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms” (p. 51) because large lesions in the pontine brainstem eliminate REM sleep but not dreaming, whereas forebrain lesions (in two anatomical groups, the temporo-parietal-occipital [TPO] junction and the ventromesial quadrant) eliminate dreaming without affecting REM sleep (Solms, 2003, pp. 53–54).

There is disagreement about where we are heading or, even, where we currently are (e.g., Pace-Schott, Solms, Blagrove, & Harnad, 2003; Llewellyn, 2013), but the general trend is toward decoupling the REM–dream connection. Here is a recent take on the subject by two neuroscientists, Nir and Tononi (2010):

… [T]he initial equation of physiological state (REM sleep) with a mental state (dreaming) was incorrect, or at best, an oversimplification…. Dream reports can be elicited during any stage of sleep … and, conversely, some awakenings can yield no report, no matter in which sleep stage they were obtained…. The one thing that is clear is that researchers need to move beyond the REM−NREM sleep dichotomy and beyond traditional sleep staging. (p. 8)

If REM sleep is not necessarily the physiological proxy for dreaming, as has been supposed for the past several decades, what have we learned about dreams in the past several decades? Perhaps the best answer is that REM sleep is—and always has been—only a probabilistic indicator of dreaming, one that actually is a reasonably good correlate of dreams that are vivid and story-like. Further, REM sleep is a correlate of more comprehensive paradoxical brain states (a generalization of Jouvet's, 1962, 1999, “paradoxical sleep”) occurring periodically in sleep in which, simultaneously, some regions of the brain light up in excitement (e.g., brainstem regions, including the pons; limbic and paralimbic areas; imagery centers in the TPO junction), while other regions—including the most advanced executive regions (notably, portions of the prefrontal cortex—dim into inactivity (Braun et al., 1998; Dang-Vu et al., 2005; Hobson, 2002, 2011; Jouvet, 1962, 1999; Maquet et al., 1996; Schwartz & Maquet, 2002; Nir & Tononi, 2010; Solms, 1997, 2003, 2012).¹

This broader brain picture is suggestive and conjures up classic notions of dreaming going back to Freud—or Plato. In the Republic, Plato (1888) asserts:

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild beast nature which peers out in sleep. Reasoning [and] shame [are suspended and the] beast within us … goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime—not excepting incest or any other unnatural union, or parricide … which [he] may not be ready to commit. (Book IX, pp. 281, 280)

In the modern neuroscience literature (e.g., Dang-vu et al., 2005; Hobson, 2002, 2011; Schwartz & Maquet, 2002), a formalistic theory of dreaming has emerged that focuses on the correspondences (“isomorphisms”) between distinct brain activity and psychological experience. For example: the limbic system's association with general pleasure (“pleasure centers”), and with specific drives and emotions, such as sex, fear, and aggression, correspond to the most frequently reported experiences in dreams (e.g., fear, aggression, sex, joy); the activation of imagery areas in the TPO junction (Domhoff, 2003; Kosslyn, 1994; Solms, 1997, 2003) is concordant with the imagistic representation of dream content (plastic representation; Freud, 1900/1953; 1917/1963; 1917/1961 & 1963); the garbled cognition often found in dreams—Freud's (1900/1953, 1917/1963) primary-process thinking—occurs, presumably, when the more primitive parts of the brain are at full throttle while the most advanced are “not playing with a full deck” (Hobson, 2011, p. 152) and thus “release” (Pötzl, 1917/1960) the cognitive system from usual levels of inhibition and control (see also Solms, 2012; Solms & Turnbull, 2002, pp. 212, 215).

Such formalistic categories of dream reports may begin to suggest categories of dream meanings (e.g., fearful, aggressive, illogical, visual). But, what have we learned from brain science about the actual, specific meaning of dreams, the kinds of individual meanings that psychologists are often asked to unravel? We have not gotten there yet, and the future prospects for such a breakthrough are by no means certain. We might even wonder whether it is sensible to ask this of biology.

In this work, I return to psychology and discussed the problem of meaning in dreams and other “twilight phenomena” (Erdelyi, 1985)—for example, subliminal perception, aphasic memory, jokes, garbled long-distance remembering—and the question of how we legitimately extract such meanings.

I first discuss quantitative content-analytic approaches, which have revealed a rough congruence between the content of dreams and the wake experiences and concerns of the dreamer. I propose that this congruence, which has come to be known as the continuity principle, is enhanced when temporal disjunctions between dreams and their real-life counterparts are factored in, along with semantic depth. Jokes (which Freud, 1905/1958, showed bore significant similarities to dreams) are then examined as simple cognitive models of dreams that cinch basic ideas that are more difficult to pin down in dreams (e.g., the distinction between manifest and latent content). I then develop the notion that dreams are forms of (noisy) remembering and that the continuity principle can be subsumed under the broader framework of memory. This formulation suggests that, in line with cognitive science's treatment of memory, meaningful associative structures must necessarily underpin dreams, and that these associative structures are concretely reflected in the distortions observed in a variety of resource-poor cognition, including aphasia, subliminal perception, distant memory—and dreams.

The overall conclusion that follows from this integration of empirical and theoretical work is that dreams and cognate phenomena (e.g., aphasic communication, subliminal percepts, jokes, garbled distant memory) are suffused with meaning, and at all semantic levels.

Content Analysis and the Continuity between Dreams and Awake Experiences

Content analysis seeks to provide counts of stimulus content in psychological materials that can then be subjected to statistical analysis (including reliability and validity assessments). In subliminal perception research, for example, the number of stimulus elements appearing in perceptual reports or in subsequent free-associative fantasy may be counted (e.g., Haber & Erdelyi, 1967; Erdelyi, 1996). Similarly, word counts or idea-unit counts can be used to reliably score complex memory narratives (see Erdelyi, 1996). In dream reports, similarly, the frequency of various types of contents (e.g., friendly encounters, aggression, sexual themes, number of animals, success and failure events, feelings of apprehension) may be extracted (e.g., Domhoff, 2003; Hall & Van de Castle, 1966).

An extensive literature has accumulated on the systematic content analysis of dreams that allows us to move beyond common-sense evaluations of specific dreams and to make general quantitative statements about the relation between dreams and the waking life of the dreamer (e.g., Domhoff, 2003, 2011; Giordano et al., 2012; Hall & Van de Castle, 1966; Propper, Stickgold, Keeley, & Christman, 2007; Schredl, 2006; Van de Castle, 1994). The standard finding is that dream content reflects the experiences and concerns of the dreamer in waking life (e.g., trauma, marriage, the menstrual cycle in women, fears, sexual feelings, illness). Although this mirroring by dreams of everyday life is imperfect and often subtle, a continuity principle seems to apply: Dream consciousness is roughly continuous with wakeful experiences and concerns (Domhoff, 2003, 2011; Hall & Van de Castle, 1966; Van de Castle, 1994). (This conclusion has also emerged from systematic clinical assays of dreams: The mind is a “twenty-four hour mind” [Cartwright, 2010, pp. xvi, 157, 178].)

Longitudinal analyses, sometimes extending over years, have also turned up meaningful patterns that would not be discernible in any particular dream, such as changing feelings about a marriage or divorce (e.g., Domhoff, 2003; Van de Castle, 1994). Content analyses of dreams can also reveal private information that the dreamer might not necessarily wish to reveal. Van de Castle (1994) found, for example, that female dreamers are more friendly to males and cooler to females around ovulation but, after ovulation, become more friendly to females and more disinterested and even hostile to males.

Temporal Characteristics of Dream Indicators

A neglected aspect of content analysis, which might yield stronger continuity effects if taken into account, is the temporal alignment—or misalignment—of the indicator (the dream) with the target events indicated (the awake experiences). In economics, much more than in psychology, it is appreciated that temporal disjunctions exist. Thus, there are leading indicators, which anticipate future developments (e.g., the stock market is a leading economic indicator), lagging indicators (e.g., employment level), as well as concurrent indicators (e.g., industrial production). Dreams can function both as leading or lagging indicators of psychological or somatic events.

Dreams as Lagging Indicators

One intriguing recent finding is that a relatively short-term U-shaped function, over roughly a 1-week window, characterizes dream incorporation of waking events in dreams: Dream content maximally incorporates waking events from a day or two before (the dream residue effect) and from around seven days before the dream (Blagrove, Henley-Einion, Barnett, Edwards, & Seage, 2011; Blagrove, Fouquet, et al., 2011; Nielsen & Powell, 1988, 1989; Nielsen, Kuiken, Alain, Stentstrom, & Powell, 2004). An obvious question for future research is whether temporal periodicities might apply over longer term intervals.

Dreams can be extremely laggard indicators of past events. For example, in a recent study of the “phantom limb” phenomenon and how it plays out in dreams (Mulder, Hochstenbach, Dijkstra, & Geertzen, 2008; see also the commentary by Brugger, 2008), it was found that about one third of amputees started dreaming of themselves as amputees “more or less immediately” but another one third took their time, with about 6% of these amputees taking as long as 6–12 months and another 10% taking a year or more to revise their body image in their dreams. The remaining third (31%) of the amputees continued to dream of themselves as physically intact. Time lags interacted with age, with older amputees being less likely to adjust their dream representations to their new anatomic reality. Time lags in dream representations can involve less drastic life events. For example, McDonald (1984, as cited in Brugger, 2008, p. 1274) reported that it took some eighteen months for his dreams to begin registering that he had grown a beard in real life.

Temporal delays in dream incorporation of life events have theoretical and methodological implications. One theoretical question that should be of interest to a broad spectrum of psychologists is whether the marked individual differences observed in time lags map onto broader psychological dimensions, for example, psychopathology. Also, would individual differences in dream incorporation be obtained with laboratory-presented stimuli and would time lags interact with the type of stimulus used (e.g., sexual, aggressive, happy). Further, would other types of disinhibited cognition—for example, free associations, fantasy, doodles—produce individual differences corresponding to those found in dreams. An obvious methodological question is the extent to which continuity would be enhanced if we factored in time lags between life events and dream experiences.

Dreams as Leading Indicators

The empirical evidence for dreams as lagging indicators is very strong, but the opposite temporal disjunction, between current dream contents and future life events, has received little experimental attention, even though there is a classic tradition, exemplified by the likes of Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Artemidosius, and Jung (see Ellenberger, 1970; Van de Castle, 1994), that dreams can foreshadow future personal events such as heart attacks or mental illness. Hobson himself has recently begun to emphasize the “forward-looking side” of dreams (Hobson, 2012).

Mainstream dream researchers have largely avoided this problem area, perhaps for fear of being drawn into arguments about precognition (although, ironically, psychologists have lately begun to emphasize the “prospective” thrust of memory (e.g., Seligman, Railton, Baumeister, & Sripada, 2013; Schacter & Addis, 2007). Actually, the existence of dreams that reflect future life events is virtually demanded by state-of-the-art dream science. There can be little question that we spend a fair percentage of wake time considering future events, many of them likely to come to pass, and so the continuity principle would require that some of these future-oriented ruminations turn up in the content of our current dreams. Also, to the extent that some of the important trends of our thoughts and feelings are inhibited in our awake consciousness suggests that dreams, which release us from some of these inhibitions, access inhibited contents that would not find their way into consciousness until the dissipation of inhibition over time.

Although sparse, there is some empirical evidence for dreams foreshadowing future developments in the dreamer's life. For example, dreams collected from hospital inpatients months before their discharge predicted later deterioration of health (interestingly, in different ways for males and females: Death-related dreams—graveyards, funerals, wills—predicted health deterioration in males, but separation dreams—disruptions of relationships, displacement from home—predicted deterioration in females (Smith, 1984, 1986; see Van de Castle, 1994, p. 370).

Intriguing work by Donald Spence and his associates (Spence, 1980; Spence, Scarborough, & Ginsberg, 1978) may be relevant to the notion of leading indications of unconscious disease processes. Spence reported that “lexical choice” in interviews of women awaiting biopsy results for possible cervical cancer tended to predict later biopsy findings of malignancy, this before either patients or physicians knew the outcome. The most predictive word (death) was usually produced in metaphorical language (e.g., “I was scared to death”; “I love them to death”; “I almost froze to death”; Spence, 1980, p. 122), leading Spence to conjecture that “metaphor provides a particularly useful hiding place for the taboo information” (p. 122) because the explicit meaning of the embedded word is not fully processed consciously and so bypasses “the restricting effects of awareness” (Spence & Holland, 1962).

In sum, it is likely that decisive experimental evidence could be produced for dreams predicting future life events, but the area is essentially unexplored at this juncture. A crucial adjunct to such research would be the evaluation of the extent to which dreams provide additional prediction of future events beyond that furnished by explicit conscious ruminations about the future or fantasy about the future. Thus, do dreams add unique information about the future that other indicators fail to provide?

Dreams as Concurrent Indicators

Dreams and awake experiences cannot occur simultaneously, and so “concurrence” must involve dream incorporation of awake life events that are temporally close to awake events. It remains for future research—empirical and theoretical—to determine whether a principled temporal window for concurrence suggests itself. At this juncture, it is established that short-term incorporations occur (e.g., the day-residue effect; p. 117) and that dreams track ongoing somatic events (e.g., the menstrual cycle in women; p. 117). Van de Castle (1994, p. 369) has suggested that dreams might “almost … serve as X-rays” for detecting biological events that the dreamer—or the physician—has not yet identified.

Manifest (Literal) versus Latent (Figurative) Content

An emerging theme in modern content-analytic approaches to dreams is the need to take metaphoric or symbolic aspects of dream content into account (e.g., Brugger, 2008; Domhoff, 2003; Frank & Lorenzoni, 1992). For example, Frank and Lorenzoni (1992) have reported one such case (in which the significant information might have been missed by standard content analysis):

A 26-year-old man, who had lost a leg in an accident at age 14, had a recurrent dream during the times he took his driver's lessons. In that dream he would be the car-driver, and he invariably experienced himself with two legs. However, as invariably he would lose control over the car because his foot would fail to manage the breaks.” (Frank & Lorenzoni, 1992, p. 77, as cited in Brugger, 2008, p. 1273)

In another case, this one involving the representation of phantom limb pain in a dream, “a leg amputee's phantom foot pain was symbolically represented as induced by a rat, which was gnawing at the foot while he was swimming” (Stetter, 1950, as cited in Brugger, 2008, p. 1274).

Ironically, the developing emphasis in modern content-analytic approaches of the need to take figurative meaning into account recapitulates the classic manifest latent content distinction insisted on by Freud a century ago (Freud 1900/1963; 1917/1963; 1917/1961-1963). The manifest content is the literal, surface text of the dream report; the latent content is the subtext, that is, the figurative meaning of the dream. The same distinction—between surface and deeper semantic content—was applied by Freud to a wide range of other twilight phenomena, including hysterical symptoms, parapraxes, paranoid delusions, and, of course, jokes (see Erdelyi, 1985). (A simple semantic dichotomy—manifest versus latent—is ultimately oversimple, because some linguistic venues may involve multiple, overlapping semantic layers (Zizak & Erdelyi, 2014).

It remains for systematic research to determine the extent to which the continuity between dreams and awake experiences, which until now has often been subtle, turns into a robust correspondence once semantic depth and temporal disjunctions are taken into account. Also, it is of great interest whether content interacts with semantic level, with different content (e.g., “nasty”—sexual, hostile—materials) predominating at deeper, compared with surface, levels. This often seems to be the case with jokes. It would be important to establish (with random samples of dreams scored by blind judges) whether in dreams the taboo materials are also mostly relegated to the latent content. It may be that the frequency of different dream contents varies substantially with semantic level—just as, for example, the contents of one's house varies with floor level (e.g., attic versus basement).

The Interpretation of Jokes

Only a few years after the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953), Freud published his 1905 monograph, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud, 1905/1958), in which he demonstrated significant homologies between dreams and jokes. For example, the dream-work distortions (i.e., censorship, condensation, displacement, plastic representation, and symbolization) are also found in jokes (where they are termed the “joke-work”). The importance of jokes, for our purposes, is that jokes are much simpler cognitive venues than dreams, and jokes can resolve many intractable issues in dream psychology, such as the distinction between manifest and latent contents and how one interprets latent contents—and whether such interpretations yield reliable and valid outcomes.

Although the importance of latent contents may be obvious to some, it is also denied by some dream scientists, for example, Hobson (1988, 2002, 2011). This is one area where jokes become especially useful, because the distinction between the manifest and latent content in jokes (“the façade” versus “the deeper meaning”; Freud, 1905/1958, p. 55, p. 106) cannot be reasonably denied. When one asks about a joke, “Did you get it?”, one is asking, in effect, “Did you manage to interpret the joke's latent content?”

Consider the Graucho Marx joke below (from an interview of a man on his television show some decades ago that resulted in the cancellation of the program):

Groucho: “How are you?”

Man: “Fine.”

Groucho: “Well, tell me, are you married?”

Man: “Yes, I have been married for nine years.”

Groucho: “Gee, that's swell! Do you have any kids?”

Man: Yes, nine already and the tenth is on the way.”

Groucho: “Wait a minute! Ten kids in nine years?!

Man: (sheepishly) “Well, I happen to love my wife very much.”

Groucho: “Well, I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in while!” (Erdelyi, 1985, p. 93)

Although content analysis of the manifest content (“cigar” and “mouth”) would be highly reliable, this level of analysis would miss the point: By counting meanings in the manifest content, standard content analysis may miss the meaning that counts in the latent content. Further, the crucial role of context for the extraction of latent contents (discussed further, pp. 119–120) should be noted: “cigar” and “mouth” in isolation, without the surrounding context, would not generate the latent content on which the joke depends.

A recent cover of The New Yorker, titled “Carlos Danger” (see Figure 1), supplements these basic points in a pictorial format. A standard content analysis would, again, yield consensual meaning (a man is sitting atop a skyscraper and photographing the crown of the skyscraper between his legs, helicopters are whirling about, etc.). Although meaningful, the picture, at this level, is quite nonsensical—just as the surface content of dreams is often nonsensical. With some context, which most New Yorkers—or readers of The New Yorker— could readily supply, it becomes obvious that the man (Anthony Weiner, formerly a mayoral candidate in the New York city Democratic primary) is taking a photograph of his crotch, which he intends to text to various women, as he has done in the past, sometimes under the cover name, “Carlos Danger.” As in dreams, some of the elements remain puzzling and some of the possible additional interpretations are less air tight (e.g., is this King Kong, redux?).

Figure 1

“Carlos Danger.” Reprinted from cover, by J. Cuneo, 2013 August 5, 2013, The New Yorker.

Notwithstanding its genuine contributions, standard content analysis is methodologically incomplete and some of its conclusions are clearly misleading. For example, a standard content-analytic count of sexual material in the two humor samples would yield a frequency of zero, when in fact both stimuli are essentially about sex. It is for this reason—its failure to reflect deep meanings—that Freud disdained the manifest content of dreams and focused on their latent contents. Experimental psychologists, for their part, historically disdained latent contents because latent contents are not palpably objective and interpretations by different interpreters are sometimes wildly divergent. Because, however, both manifest and latent contents are valid levels of meaning, ignoring either one or the other results in the loss of the full stimulus. The great scientific advantage of jokes is that they make some of these obvious points obvious.

For example: The interpretation of latent contents in jokes yields high interjudge reliability. My students and I (e.g., Bergstein & Erdelyi, 2008) have found that our interpretations of the latent contents of some 200 cartoons were highly concordant, yielding close to 90% agreement. Further, using signal detection theory techniques, we (and also, Kozbelt & Nishioka, 2010) were able to measure sensitivity (e.g., d′) to latent contents—there are real signals there—finding that (perhaps not surprisingly) individual differences exist: Some of us are more sensitive to latent contents than others. Also, we were able to show that sensitivity to latent contents (insight) can increase over time with effort. Thus, the meaning of jokes is not uniformly “transparent” and their degree of transparency can change over time.

Context as the Key to Interpretation

In the case of jokes, the context is usually internal (our memories and our knowledge of the world, especially the physical and functional resemblances between representations and referents). In dreams, additional context is usually needed in the form of preamble and free associations to successive elements of the dream—and sometimes amplifications (a Jungian term, e.g., Jung, 1968, for, essentially, focused elaborations of elements of the dream). Thus, context constitutes additional information, internal or external, that may be brought to bear on the manifest content to yield new meaning. This new meaning is the latent content, which may be defined as the interaction of context with the surface manifest content.

Context effects can be so powerful that they can produce reversals of meaning, as in sarcasm, where a simple meaning—“You are looking great!” —turns into its opposite—“You are looking awful!” One difference between jokes and dreams is that the latent content of jokes—or sarcasm—is almost always conscious, whereas the latent content of dreams is often unconscious to the dreamer. (Freud usually conflates inaccessibility with semantic depth. I decouple them here: latent contents can be unconscious or conscious.)

The manifest-latent content distinction can be formalized by the inequality,

Є_{m} \neq Є_{m} \times {Є},

where Є_m is an event, {Є} is the context, that is, a set of other events, and Є_m × {Є} is the interaction of the event, Є_m, with the context, {Є}. The manifest content corresponds to Є_m, and the latent content to the Є_m × {Є} interaction (Erdelyi, 1985, 2006). Ignoring latent contents is like ignoring interaction effects in an analysis of variance and reporting only main effects. Laboratory psychologists, with their understandable impulse for simplification, have traditionally denuded their stimuli of context (e.g., Ebbinghaus's, 1885/1964, nonsense syllables) and have consequently ignored or underplayed the role of latent contents. It might be noted that if we ignored the context component ({Є}) in our formalization, the latent content would disappear and we would be left with the absurdist notion that Є_m ≠ Є_m. Without context, we lose latent contents and devolve to a behaviorist science of manifest contents.

An important theoretical nuance may be noted. Because the context, {Є}, is subject to extensive selective biases, latent contents are vulnerable to wide-ranging defensive distortions, as in projection, where illusory meanings are extracted, or as in denial, where obvious meanings fail to be extracted (Erdelyi, 1985, 2006).

Manifest and Latent Content in Dreams: The Elephant Dream of Alive V. (Nemiah, 1984)

In this section, a concrete dream sample is presented to illustrate basic points. (Full-fledged experiments on randomly selected dream samples remain to be undertaken in the field.)

Preamble

Alice was a 25-year-old married woman who already had five children. She had fraught relations with her father (who, she said, “was poison to” her) and avoided him as much as possible. Even so, her father had recently gone out of his way to help her out of a financial jam.

Alice reacted strangely to his generosity: She developed obsessions that involved irruptions into consciousness of unbearable “obscene” images of herself and her naked father having sex. She would “desperately try to push the images out of her mind by shaking her head or thinking of other things” (Nemiah, 1984, p. 55), but to no avail. She become increasingly anxious and depressed and was finally hospitalized.

The dream presaged Alice's breakdown, although, in therapy sessions in the hospital, Alice recovered a memory of having had a similar transitory obsession some fifteen years earlier (when she was 11 years old), which she claimed to have forgotten. She also reported that, until she was 5 years old, she had slept in a crib in her parents’ bedroom.

The dream

“She was … at a zoo. It was nighttime, and she heard strange noises in the darkness. She asked an animal keeper standing next to her what these noises were. ‘Oh,’ he replied casually, ‘that's only the animals mating.’ She then noticed a large gray elephant lying on its right side in the grass in front of her. As she watched, she saw the creature moving its left hind leg up and down as if it were trying to get up onto its feet. At that point she awoke with a sense of terror and during the morning experienced the first episode of the frightening imagery of sexual activity with her father.” (Nemiah, 1984, p. 56)

Associations to the dream

Alice recovered a long-forgotten event going back to when she was 4 or 5 years old. She had awoken one night in her crib and saw her parents naked, having sex. Suddenly aware that Alice was watching them, the parents sprang apart and tried to hide their nudity: Alice's mother covered herself in the bedclothes, her father rolled over onto his back. Alice noticed her father's erection, which he tried to hide by lifting up his left leg. He then sat up and screamed at Alice to go back to sleep.

Comments

The dream by itself—excluding preamble and free associations—is a reasonably coherent, if puzzling story, that does not obviously mirror Alice's wakeful life. A standard content analysis would pick up sexual content (“animals mating”) but would not link the elephant to Alice's father, who, the later information reveals, found himself in an analogous situation in Alice's childhood.

The dream recapitulates the traumatic event from Alice's childhood, with the “elephant” corresponding to her father, who had been “mating” with Alice's mother. The dream depicts the primal scene, so unbearably upsetting to Alice in real life, in an emotionally muted way—the animal keeper at the zoo responds casually, in an assuaging fashion: Animals mating, no big deal. Alice's father, regardless of how generous he might have been, was, actually, “poison” to Alice because he cued the traumatic memory that Alice was trying to avoid.

The contextual background of the dream—the preamble and the free associations—interacts with the officially demarcated dream. Only with the context can the “elephant” in the dream be reasonably considered a stand-in for Alice's father.

Dreams as Memory

Classic traditions have linked dreams to memory (e.g., “dreaming is another kind of remembering”; Freud, 1918/1955, p. 51) and the ubiquitous modern notion of implicit memory (the indirect, unconscious remembering of past experiences; e.g., Erdelyi, 2012; Roediger, 1990; Schacter, 1987) subsumes dreams by definition. In general, to the extent that dreams are correlated with awake experiences from the past—which they are, as we have seen—dreams are forms of remembering. It follows, then, that the continuity principle can be subsumed under the broader framework of memory.

The conception of dreams as memory has implications for the semantics of dreams because memory is not a random collection of elements but is associatively structured (e.g., Anderson, 1983; Anderson & Bower, 1973; Collins & Quillian, 1969; Collins & Loftus, 1975; Rummelhart, McClelland, & the PDP Research Group, 1986). Dreams, therefore, even if they are noisy forms of remembering, must be associatively meaningful (Llewellyn, 2013). Thus, the question in modern psychology should not be whether dreams have meaning but whether it is possible for dreams not to have meaning.

Linguistically oriented cognitive scientists (e.g., Andrews, Vigliocco, & Vinson, 2009; Landauer & Dumais, 1997), working outside of the concerns of dream theory and jokes, have advanced formal mathematical models for the extraction of “semantic representations” (meanings) from associative “neighborhood structures” (context), and have succeeded in simulating behavioral phenomena such as lexical substitution errors, in which, as in the case of aphasic errors—paraphasias (see p. 121)—“one word mistakenly replaces the intended word” and exhibits “meaning resemblance to the intended word” (Andrews et al., 2009, p. 479). A follow-up question for dream interpretation is whether free associations to dream elements constitute a psychological technique for mapping “neighborhood structures” and extracting “semantic representations.”

Aphasia, Subliminal Perception, Memory, and Dreams

In the preceding section, I discussed the standard view that memory representations are associatively organized. In this section, I examine breakdowns in this organization that give rise to characteristic errors and distortions that are especially egregious in resource-impoverished states such as aphasia, subliminal perception, distant memory, and dreams. Dream distortions, therefore, are not unique, but belong to a universal class of distortions that are especially prominent in resource-poor cognition.

Aphasia

Only a few years before Freud abandoned neuroscience research at the University of Vienna (because he could not secure a permanent position there), he published a theoretical monograph, On aphasia (Freud, 1891/1953), which in significant respects prefigured his later psychological work in psychopathology (Breuer & Freud, 1895/1955), dreams (Freud, 1900/1960), “Freudian slips” (parapraxes; Freud, 1901/1960), jokes (Freud, 1905/1958), defensive distortions (Freud, 1909/1955, 1911/1958), and other “twilight phenomena” (Erdelyi, 1985).

Aphasic patients suffer from various disorders of expression and comprehension. Freud and others in this period did not draw a fine distinction between aphasia and amnesia, and much of this early work dovetails with modern research on amnesic syndromes of various stripes that have produced such significant synergies between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It was in his 1891 monograph that Freud (1891/1953) introduced the still current nosological entity, agnosia, which refers to the inability to recognize common objects. Modern research on some specific agnosias, for example, prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize familiar human faces), has suggested discriminative emotional responses to faces that are presumably not being consciously recognized (e.g., Tranel & Damasio, 1985).

Of central interest in the various forms of aphasia is that, as in dreams, failures of processing are often only partial, with noisy or distorted responses—paraphasias—pointing to the inaccessible material. Thus, an aphasic patient shown a pencil might incorrectly report seeing a pen, or a patient wishing to say Berlin might, instead, say Potsdam (Freud, 1891/1953, p. 22). Also, sometimes, “words of a similar sound are mistakenly used for the other, such as ‘Butter’ for ‘Mutter’” (p. 22) and, further, “two intended words are fused into one malformation, such as ‘Vutter’ [for ‘Vater’ and ‘Mutter’]” (p. 22). In only a few years, such fusions, whether in dreams, jokes, or symptoms, were to be designated condensation, one of Freud's “dream-work” mechanisms.

Further on, Freud discussed a case of “mind blindness” (from C. C. Freund) in which the patient made successive errors in attempting to name a candlestick : “spectacles”; “It is for putting on, a top hat”; “It is a stearin light.” The responses—resembling free associations—are at first recondite, but then begin to converge on the recalcitrant target. Moreover, when the patient was allowed to hold the candlestick—while closing his eyes—he quickly produced the correct term. Thus, the patient could retrieve the concept when an alternate, more favorable input channel was employed (touch) and when the defective input channel (vision) was subtracted out. Apparently, a stimulus may be better identified and remembered when the stimulus is withdrawn from sight. An aphasic patient (of Lube, in Freud, 1891/1953, p. 43) was able finally to read a word only after the removal of the word—because the patient could no longer pursue the self-defeating tactic of trying to spell out each individual letter (each of which he promptly forgot). The dream state, analogously, might yield better access to inaccessible contents by being freed from some of the interfering activities of awake consciousness.

More recently, Weiskrantz (2002) found, to his surprise, that when one of his blindsight patients, on closing his eyes after the stimulus went off, reported a conscious afterimage of the stimulus for which “he had reported absolutely no awareness …” (p. 573). Late-developing consciousness for initially subliminal stimuli in, for example, hypnagogic imagery, is actually a classic phenomenon, going back to the works of Helmholtz, Purkinje, Johannes Müller, Urbantschitsch, among others, with the recovered materials undergoing “transformations, for example, condensations, fragmentations, displacements, rotations, and so forth, similar to those found in dreams” (Fisher, 1960, p. 3).

Even when the aphasic patient cannot recover some target material, the patient may still access its “sphere of meaning” (Werner, 1956). In one case, reported by Conrad (1948 as cited in Werner, 1956, p. 351), the patient was not able to repeat words or phrases but was able to produce semantically related responses. The patient, for example, responded to the stimulus, Zunge (tongue), with: “Something on the body, where and what I do not know.” The same patient, trying to read the expression, “Eine flinke Katze kriegt die Mäuse” (a quick cat gets the mice) produced: “Fox and rabbit, or something; a proverb it was, I think; something to do with hunting.” Such meaningful errors in aphasia are often obtained in normal subjects’ dream reports, subliminal percepts, and distant memories (Erdelyi, 1985, 1996; see pp. 121–123, below).

Subliminal Perception

I now turn to the work of the Viennese neuroscientist, Otto Pötzl (1917/1960), who extended the neuroscience of aphasia/mind-blindness to the effects of subliminal stimuli on dreams. Pötzl had been working with a group of patients with brain damage in the visual cortex and observed that the blindness they exhibited was often only partial and that the presumably unperceived stimuli often emerged in consciousness in distorted form after an interval of time.

Pötzl wondered if he could duplicate his observations in neurologically intact participants exposed to a subliminal stimulus and found that, as in his neurological cases, the inaccessible elements from the stimulus often emerged, in distorted form, in the content of the participants’ dreams. Pötzl's study suggested not only the existence of unconscious perception but also that the distortions in the perceptual recoveries corresponded to dream-work distortions: “They had the characteristics of dream images that Freud pointed out: condensations and displacements … mirror images and spatial translocations” (Pötzl, 1917/1960, p. 45).

Pötzl's research was not without problems. According to Fisher, (1960), who decades later revived Pötzl's work, “Pötzl wrote in one of the most turgid and tormented styles ever to flow from the pen of man” (p. 1). More substantively, there was no quantification or statistical analyses of the dream contents and there were no controls for base rates and other potential confounds. Fisher, who was a psychoanalyst with an experimental bent, made some improvements (e.g., he included control participants who were not exposed to the stimulus), and replicated Pötzl's work on dreams and extended the research to free-associative fantasy. Like Pötzl, Fisher found that inaccessible stimulus contents sometimes emerged, in distorted form, in the content of both dreams and wakeful fantasy.

In one study (Fisher, 1988), the compound stimulus shown in Figure 2 was presented for 10 ms to a handful of participants (psychoanalytic patients). None reported seeing the snake at this very brief exposure, but subliminal aspects of the stimulus later emerged in dreams, daydreams, and fantasy imagery—again, in distorted form. In one case, a succession of free-associative images resulted in the substantial recovery of the initially inaccessible stimulus element, the snake (see Figure 3, Drawings a, b, c, and d).

Figure 2

Compound stimulus presented for 10 ms (Fisher, 1988, p. 6). Reprinted with permission.

Figure 3

The participant's successive free-associative images drawn after the (once-presented) tachistoscopic stimulus in Figure 2 (Fisher, 1988, pp. 12, 13, 14, and 16, respectively). “Ali Baba Hiding in a Jug” (a), “A genie” (b), “A mermaid” (c), and “The Rape of Europe by the Nazis” (d). Reproduced with permission.

These types of findings have been corroborated with standard experimental and statistical procedures in studies on imagery and free-associative fantasy (e.g., Haber & Erdelyi, 1967; Shevrin & Luborsky, 1958; see Erdelyi, 1985, 1996, for modern overviews; see Hartmann (2011, pp. 31–42, 62–64, for a recent treatment of fantasy, daydreams, and dreams as largely overlapping forms of cognition on a “continuum of mental functioning” extending from focused waking thought to dreaming).

Memory recovery, actually, turns out to be a standard phenomenon in neurologically intact subjects (e.g., Breuer & Freud, 1895/1955; Erdelyi, 1996, 2010), but has been, until recently, largely alien to experimental psychology, which has tended to conceive of the Ebbinghaus (1885/1964) amnesic memory function as the inevitable model of memory over time. Note, the stimuli in the Ebbinghaus project were nonsense syllables and the participant (Ebbinghaus) avoided thinking of the memory list during the retention interval (Erdelyi, 2010). With lists of pictures (and retrieval effort instead of retrieval avoidance), memory is hypermnesic, increasing over time (Erdelyi, 1996, 2010).

Of likely relevance to dreams, which tend to be experienced as hallucinatory images and which are hypermnesic according to Freud (1900/1953, pp. 11–17, 589), the laboratory literature has shown that hypermnesia is critically moderated by the stimulus or cognitive format. When the stimuli are pictures, hypermnesia is found in virtually 100% of the cases; with lists of words, in about 50%; with nonsense syllables, in 0% (Erdelyi, 2010). Further, it has been found that high-imagery verbal materials (e.g., poetry, jokes, stories) reliably yield hypermnesia over time. Even plain word lists reliably produce hypermnesia if each stimulus word is recoded into an image (see Erdelyi, 1996).

Bartlettian and Freudian Distortions

The reconstructions of perception and memory over time are widely conceived of in cognitive psychology as Bartlettian reconstructions. But they are also Freudian reconstructions. Bartlettian and Freudian distortions turn out to be the same distortions, even designated by the same names by Bartlett and Freud (Table 1; Erdelyi, 2006, p. 509; see also pp. 540–542). What distinguishes them are not the distortions but the posited motive for the distortions (cognitive needs for schematization in the case of Bartlett and emotional needs for defense or wish fulfillment in the case of Freud).

Table 1

Some Overlaps Between Bartlettian and Freudian Distortions

Bartlett (1932)	Freud (various)
Omission	Omission, censorship, ellipsis
Rationalization	Rationalization
Elaboration	Secondary elaboration
Change in emphasis	Displacement of accent
Condensation, importations, transference	Condensation, displacement, smuggled-in items
Items are symbolized	Symbolization
Constructions	Constructions
Interpretation	Interpretation
Bias in recall	Tendentious recall
Imposed links of connection, striving after associative links	False connections, compulsion to associate
Distortion	Distortion, falsification
Transformations	Transformations
Reversals (“opinions and conclusions are reversed,” p. 128)	Reversal, reaction-formation
Imaging	Imaging, plastic representation
Curious perseveration of the trivial (p. 184)	Representation by triviality

Note. Actual terms are boldface. Reproduced from “The unified theory of repression,” by M. H. Erdelyi, 2006, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, p. 509, Table 1. Copyright 2006. Reprinted with permission.

We never have access to the dream itself but only to the dream as remembered. Because Bartlettian and Freudian distortions occur inexorably over time, it is inevitable that the original dream (D) gets overlaid with standard distortions, Bartlettian or Freudian, and so the reported dream involves not just the dream (D) but the reconstructions added (+) after the dream; hence, we may designate the remembered dream as D+. Defense can intrude not only during the dreaming process but also after, in the remembered dream.

Dream distortion in Freud's writings (1900/1953, 1917/1963, 1933/1964) is attributed to the operations of the dream-work (censorship, displacement, condensation, plastic-representation, symbolization). The dream-work supposedly translates the underlying latent content into the surface manifest content (whereas interpretation reverses the process, translating back the manifest content into the latent content). There is a problem with this view, however, because some of the dream-work operations are regularly executed—and executed better—in the waking state (e.g., “censorship”).

Consensus now holds that dreams are release phenomena (Erdelyi, 1985; Hobson, 2011; Pötzl, 1917/1960; Solms, 2012) in which the highest executive systems are relatively weak and, hence, relatively ineffectual in regulating and inhibiting more primitive forms of functioning. The dream-work, therefore, actually constitutes resource-poor cognition—substandard work, or subwork, by the highest executive systems—which results in distortions that are more primitive, less efficiently executed, more clunky—and therefore more revealing of covert contents and processes. Modern research on the detection of deception (and defense may be viewed as self-deception) has also suggested a release effect with resource impoverishment: Seeing through deception actually increases with impairment of higher order cognitive functioning, as in subliminal perception (ten Brinke, Stimson, & Carey, 2014), conditions of cognitive overload (Albrechtsen, Meissner, & Susa, 2009; Reinhard, Greifender, & Scharmach, 2013), and aphasia (Etcoff, Ekman, McGee, & Frank, 2000).

Thus, the view of the dream-work as executive subwork logically converges with other forms of cognition that literally involve resource-poor processing, for example, subliminal perception, aphasia, distant memory. The tachistoscope (in subliminal perception), the defective brain (in aphasia), and Ebbinghaus over time (when amnesia results) impoverish or liminalize the stimulus (Erdelyi & Zizak, 2004) and release inhibited contents and processes while at the same time yielding more error-riddled percepts or memories. Defense, therefore, need not account for distortions; we get the same distortions whether they are Bartlettian or Freudian (see Table 1)—the point being not that distortions might not be defensive but that they need not be defensive. In any event, whatever the causes of distortion (cognitive, emotional), our discovery of a universal grammar of distortions in resource-poor cognition helps us to extract meanings that the lay dreamer or naive interpreter might miss and pass over without comprehension.

With the understanding that distortions in the remembered dream (D+) can be, but need not be, defensive in nature, a huge consilience in dream science becomes possible—one that may already be under way. Recently, Hobson (2011) wrote,

I am a great believer in dreams as meaningful …. In fact my ideas on this subject are so similar to what most therapists who have been trained in psychoanalysis now believe that we could move forward together if only they would renounce Freud's now-outmoded Disguise-Censorship Model. (p. 241)

Solms and Turnbull (2002, p. 215), in turn, have agreed that there is “no need to introduce the additional function of censorship” to account for dream distortion, a position also advanced by Erdelyi (1985, Chapter 5), with the caveat that over time the remembered dream (D+) is likely to include both defensive (Freudian) and nondefensive (Bartlettian) distortions. It might be noted that Freud's (1905/1958) treatment of jokes introduces a distinction missing in his dream theory that readily connects with the emergent consilient view of dream distortion. Freud posited two kinds of jokes, innocent and nasty (“tendentious”), only the latter of which required “censorship.” For innocent jokes, the “joke-work” achieves its effects through primary-process (primitive) cognitive operations such as displacement, condensation, omissions, reversals, and symbolism—note, standard distortions in both Bartlett and Freud.

The reformulation of the dream-work as resource-poor cognition also yields a simple conception of universal dream symbols (Erdelyi, 1985). In dreams, compared with waking consciousness, mental representations are relatively primitive, failing to achieve the highest levels of abstraction (Pötzl, 1917/1960, pp. 45–46). Consequently, dream symbols tend to be “plastic” representations (Freud, 1917/1960, p. 161/182)—concretistic, or analogic renderings—that (noisily) represent referents by physical appearance or function. Although many dream symbols are personal, a subset are universal symbols, and not necessarily because the symbols are archetypal (e.g., Jung, 1935/1968), but because they resemble their universal referents. Thus, a phallus is a phallus all around the world, and so a “phallic symbol” universally resembles a phallus (in whatever analogic dialect the representation is rendered—a spear, a gun, a rocket, etc.).

There is a huge amount of research clamoring to be done. It makes no sense for cognitive psychology utterly to ignore night cognition and to focus only on day cognition—especially because, as we have seen, there is every expectation, now that we have moved past the suspicion that dreams might after all be meaningless, of achieving breakthroughs in a unified cognitive psychology, one that includes both the cognition of day and the cognition of night.

Footnotes

1

A more comprehensive listing of areas in the central nervous system that are relatively activated or deactivated includes: (1) activated: reticular brainstem regions (e.g., the mesopontine tegmentum); thalamic nuclei; limbic-paralimbic areas (e.g., amygdaloid complexes, hippocampal formation, insula); motor and premotor cortices; temporo-parieto-occipital junction (Brodmann's Area 40); and (2) deactivated: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; medial prefrontal cortex; right inferior parietal cortex; posterior cingulate cortex; spinal motoneurons (Braun et al., 1997; Braun et al., 1998; Dang-Vu et al., 2005; Hobson, 2002, 2011; Jouvet, 1962, 1999; Maquet et al., 1996; Maquet et al., 2004; Nir & Tononi, 2010; Nofzinger, Mintun, Wiseman, Kupfer, & Moore, 1997; Schwartz & Maquet, 2002; Solms, 1997, ).

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