ASD 2000 Conference 17 Abstracts

Millennial Dreaming: Washington, D.C.

The symposium participants separately, and sometimes together, have performed a number of investigations to clarify the notion that a dream might contextualize (provide a picture context for) the dominant emotion of the dreamer.  The studies have dealt with the Central Image or Contextualizing Image (CI), which we believe pictures the dreamer’s emotion, or emotional concern.

First, a simple scoring system has been devised for CIs, and has been used by a number of researchers. Inter-rater reliability has ranged from r = .60 to r = .90.  The scoring system asks a rater, examining a written report of a dream or other material on a blind basis, to decide whether there is an image which stands out by virtue of its power, vividness, detail or bizarreness.  The rater assigns an intensity rating from 0 (no image) to 3 (close to the most intense such image you have seen).  Ratings of 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 and 3 are allowed.  The rater is then asked to guess what emotion — from a list of 18 — might be contextualized by this image. 
 
Using this rating system we have been shown that the CI scores are significantly higher (approximately twice as high) for dreams as for daydreams, and that CI scores are significantly higher in material from REM sleep than in material from non-REM sleep, which in turn is significantly higher than sleep onset or waking material.  Series of dreams collected after trauma have been shown to have higher CI scores than students’ dreams.  There is also a positive correlation between CI scores in a single written “most recent dream” and thinness of boundaries on the Boundary Questionnaire: students with thinner boundaries who “let things through more” (including emotions) also have higher CI scores. 
 
Taken together all these studies support the view that the CI is more characteristic of dreams rather than other reports, and that it occurs in a stronger form when emotions are stronger or the person is more in touch with emotions. 

In this symposium we summarize these studies and extend them in several directions.  Zborowski and his associates demonstrate that among students, those who report any instants of physical or sexual abuse — either in childhood or more recently — have dreams which receive higher CI score than dreams of other students.  This is based on each student simply writing down a single “most recent dream.”  Zborowski’s group also presents data showing a positive correlation between CI scores and other dream measures such as vividness and motionality. CI scores also show a significant relationship to a number of sleep measures and personality measures. 

Kunzendorf has concentrated on the question of whether an how an emotion can influence visual percepts or visual imagery.  In one study his group showed, for instance, that when subjects are experiencing anger, they are better able to detect the location on a screen of subliminally presented red faces as opposed to blue faces. 

Hartmann and Kunzendorf present new data showing that ongoing emotion can influence experienced imagery, and in fact that under the influence of emotion a waking subject can produce a dream, or at least very dreamlike material.  This study involved students in a classroom setting, who underwent a relaxation procedure and then were asked to choose an emotion that felt fairly close to them in any case, and to intensify this emotion over several minutes.  They were then asked to allow imagery to develop and to write down what they experienced.  These written reports were then compared on a blind basis with five other written reports from the same students: imagery obtained without the emotional stimulus, the most recent dream, the most recent daydream, a memorable dream and a memorable daydream.  The scoring showed that on both of the standard scales used — scales for “bizarreness” and for “dreamlikeness” — the laboratory imagery following intense emotion produced material that could not be differentiated from the most recent dream, but was scored as more dreamlike and bizarre than daydreams or material imagined without the emotion. 

In other words, it appears possible to “build a dream” in the waking subject — using as scaffolding the idea that a dream (or at least the center of the dream) consists of an image which contextualizes or pictures the dominant emotion of the dreamer.
 

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