Forget the crystal balls and the dream dictionaries as there is now new credible research that provides insights into what our dreams are all about and how this can help us to overcome our negative emotions including depression, anxiety, stress, fears etc.
So what is it that dreaming is trying to express?
The latest understanding of what dreams do and what they can mean comes from psychologist Joe Griffin, the co-founder and pioneer of Human Givens psychology. Joe Griffin has also shown why depressed people over-dream, and why that can cause the symptoms of depression. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep. After studying hundreds of dreams in the context of neurology and psychology, Griffin found that we all dream, whether we recall those dreams or not, and what we dream about is unfulfilled arousal.
What this means is that, if we generate an emotional arousal such as a worry during the day but go to bed without having in some way resolved (‘switched off’) that emotional expectation, then we will dream it out symbolically.
So one important function of dreaming is to flush out our emotional expectation by completing it symbolically, thereby freeing up the neo-cortex for the next day’s emotional expectations. If people solve their problems and/or learn not to worry about them so much, they will have a normal proportion of dream/REM sleep – about 25% of their total sleep.
But if they worry and ruminate and churn things over without resolving them in any way, then they will dream more as the brain attempts to clear the build up of emotional arousal. This increased dreaming time cuts into what would normally be deep sleep non-dreaming time, when the mind/body is in full rest and recuperation mode. So chronic over-dreaming can eventually lead to the exhaustion so often seen in clinical depression.
There are two important things to remember about dreams:
- Dreams deactivate emotional arousal which has remained unfulfilled during waking hours. (The ‘circuit’ began during waking hours is completed in the dream, and so that particular arousal can be switched off.)
- Dreams are always cloaked in the language of metaphor and symbolism.
Dreams happen in the subconscious part of the mind so how can you make sense of the dreams that cause you concern:
- Get rid of the dream dictionary that aims to tell you the meaning of every possible dream symbol. We’re all human and it’s not surprising that some common symbols show up in everyone’s dreams. But when you look closely at the actual lives of the dreamers it’s clear that people are expressing symbols borrowed from their own recent experience. Many of the symbols of the dream will simply be the ‘dressing’ for the real content of what the dream is about.
- Look at the feelings you had during the dream. It’s not just what happens in a dream that is important but how you feel during the dream, and what unresolved emotional concern the dream feeling may be expressing. So it’s unresolved emotional expectation that we dream about, and the symbolism of the dream is just the dressing (to use a metaphor). Most dreams effectively flush out unfulfilled expectation and are forgotten, and in a way this is how it’s meant to be.
But if a dream is troubling you we can identify what unresolved worry or expectation it is mirroring by looking at the feelings or the emotions within the dream. We would then connect those feelings to the stuff you have been worrying about when awake and once you have this understanding, this connection the dreams typically top.
- Finally we would help you to complete the emotional loop in waking life providing understanding and finally resolution.
“In Joe Griffin’s wonderful book Dreaming Reality: How Dreaming Keeps Us Sane, or Can Drive Us Mad he describes how a refugee who had escaped the horrors of Bosnia in the early 1990s was afraid that he and his family might be sent back to his war-torn homeland. He kept dreaming of a live grenade exploding in his mouth, killing him and his family.
Fortunately, a nurse knew about Griffin’s dream research and asked him what his biggest worry was. When he told her he feared that he might say something in his poor English that would cause them to be sent back, she reassured him that it didn’t matter what he said, he was quite safe in England. The recurring nightmare stopped immediately. Understanding Griffin’s work means we can analyze our clients’ dreams to discover what is really bothering them that needs to be resolved.
We can also use it to help them complete the ’emotional circuit’ and switch off their unfulfilled emotional expectations by helping them either practically solve the worry or learn to feel differently about it. The content of your dream will always relate to waking concerns from the day before they had the dream. By helping you mentally rehearse feeling confident and calm enough to set boundaries and to take back control. As soon as you start to set limits the dreams stop”. Exerpts taken from Mark Tyrrel’s Therapy Tips, Uncommon Therapy
If you’re interested in how this insight into dreams can help lift depression, anxiety, stress call me on 0407744566.