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ASD 2000 Conference 17 Abstracts

Millennial Dreaming: Washington, D.C.

The "inspiration" to make this research were my doubts about the compensatory function of dreams. My investigations concerning the relationship between waking and dreaming personality led me to research done  in a Polish psychiatry clinic by two psychiatrists. The authors observed that dreams of murderers present distorted ego. Those dreams could be labelled "psychopathic" as they reveal cruelty and lack of......, and in the case of those subjects the function of compensation fails.  I decided to investigate dreams of murderers who stay in prison. The..... results differ from those scored in the psychiatric clinic and the difference is perhaps due to this factor: prisoners and psychiatric patients are two different groups of subjects.

In my research I analyse written dream reports knowing nothing about their authors. It is so, because one of the important aims of this study is to make a personality diagnosis upon dreams, and then to confront it with the one made by a prison psychologist who used standard psychological personality tests.

I find TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) categories very useful in doing emotional content analysis of dreams. This tool let me distinguish the most common "needs" and "presses".  The most often appearing needs are: the need of safety, affiliation, pleasant and aesthetic impressions; The most manifested presses are: impedance, danger, frustration and loss, diminution and humiliation.

The endings of dreams are also very characteristic. Very often dreams do not end with any conclusions, decisions or solutions. They seem not finished. Dreamer is frequently woken up by unpleasant or painful emotions: anxiety, fear, terror, fright, tension, sorrow, hopelessness, despair.

As the prison psychologists claim, these are all "psychical contents" that they (psychologists) "feel intuitively" in relation to prisoners, and the standard psychological tools  do not come with help to reveal these characteristics.

My observations show that the subjects could be divided into two groups according to the subject of their dreams. There are dreams which action take place in prison or they concern the world of crime, and there are archetypal, integrative and very symbolic dreams. Very often they consist of beautiful, unusual scenes or pictures making the reader think that they come from an artist... As archetypal dreams are supposed to come with help of psychical support, integration and growth I am going to check up whether the dreamers who have archetypal dreams are really better psychologically adapted.

The aim of the research was also:
- to make a kind of phenomenological portrait of dreams of prisoners
- to check up whether prisoners have compensatory dreams or reflective ones 
+ to investigate how each function of dreams is related to the personality of the subject.

The findings will be presented and discussed.

I also hope to investigate whether the length of the time spent in prison influences the dream content.
 
 

EWA SIENKIEWICZ, Ph. D. Smilowo, Poland.

Ewa Sienkiewicz works in the Psychology Department at the University of Szczecin, Poland. Currant interests and research concern the relationship between "waking personality" and "dreaming personality" and the functions of "reflective" or "symmetric" dreams. 

Contact information: 

Ewa Sienkiewicz, Ph.D.
Smilowo, Poland
Email: senka@polbox.com