How Dreams Affect Our Waking World

Research Paper for college.

I-Search Paper

Mark Riendeau

16 January 2016                 

How Dreams Affect Our Waking World

 

Part I.

          It’s early in the morning, but I don’t even remember scraping my foggy self from bed. Maybe getting out of this room will help. Based on a gut feeling, maybe a walk outside will wipe my mind clean of this film like coating settling on my brain’s thought process, like plaque buildup on teeth. Climbing down the stairs, walking through the shallow hallway and into the bare kitchen, my brain suddenly collapses. Where are mom and dad? Is there no one home with me? Am I the only one here? Why does my house feel bigger and all the furniture smaller and farther away? Why does the world around me feel so bare and empty and my brain so cloudy? Stop asking questions, take yourself on that walk, and clean your mind up. It is early autumn, the morning cold enough for the grass to be covered in mildew. I begin to walk toward the driveway while being engulfed by amazement in a world I see every day. Wait, how did I forget shoes? Before getting a chance to understand the situation my body loses its weight and acts like a feather. A gust of wind pushes me toward the sky and then slowly, but continuously, I am pulled towards the clouds by a force unknown to a simplistic brain. Like a cat to water, I flail frantically while tears viciously fall from my 4-year-old face only to travel down to the distant blacktop. This is the earliest dream I can remember from my childhood and I can still remember it as a day I lived in the waking world. Being extremely vivid, appearing as negative to my young mind, and even being one of my earliest memories, I have always been fascinated by dreaming. I have been left wondering, how exactly can my dreams improve upon my life in the waking world? I did not try to find answers to any of my many questions about dreaming until I was about 11 �" 12 years old, when vivid dreams once again became an extremely common experience. I became fascinated and trained myself to dream every night and it remained a habit for years. When I was about 15 �" 16 years old I started to suffer from what is clinically called sleep paralysis and was petrified of the idea of possession and demonic beings because of what I would see, feel, and hear during these states of paralysis. Every night upon falling asleep I would fall into a state in which I was paralyzed, the only possible movements being wiggling of my fingers and toes, opening and closing of my eyes, as well as rocking side to side with all my might and willpower to gain momentum in order to break free. If I stayed calm in this state, I would often induce extremely clear and vivid dreams in which I documented from time to time. Experiencing the dream world became an obsession of mine. I would stay up as long as I could and embrace sleep paralysis a couple times a night facing my worst fears while tackling my biggest fascination. About a year later my dream journal stayed alive, but my sleep paralysis faded only appearing if I had conversations about my past throughout the day. Presently, I have slowly drifted away from dreaming and for 8 months now have not recorded another dream in my dairy due to work and college, that is until this research paper came along. Now I am forced to research dreaming at a scholarly level and wish to gain information supported by professional sources rather than just my own personal experiences.

 

Part II.

In order to get reliable information on dreams I will need to hear and study knowledge beyond my own and study documented research. To do this I will be interviewing a reference from Professor Laura Albert, Paul Pines, a psychotherapist, lecturer, writer, and jazz enthusiast who’s work includes studies on dreaming and states of consciousness. Having been a professor at SUNY Adirondack Community College with a vast knowledge on the world of dreaming he is a perfect candidate for a reliable interview. I’ll also be reading parts of Stephen Leberge’s “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming”, advertised as a bestselling step-by-step guide to lucid dreaming.  Through this book I will learn how dreamsigns are connected to the physical world and compare them to Sigmund Freud’s research on dream symbols. I will be using the school’s library and database, in order to refer to Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreaming” and research from professors around the world that have studied dreaming. In order to interpret words used within my scholarly sources I will also be using “The American Heritage Dictionary” required for my Intro to College Writing class. I am also going to relate my own dreams that have been documented into my personal dream journal and hope to be able to interpret a relationship to my waking world.

 

Part III.

My studies have been reborn under a new perception of the power of dreaming, the hidden knowledge of the unconscious mind I naturally felt was there has proven its existence through my research. The start of this research was slow and began by surfing through the SUNY Adirondack library database using basic terms that connect psychology to different dream studies. My goal was to find a large amount of work that directly relates dreams to different aspects of a human’s waking life done by professors and scholarly people from around the world. I accumulated about ten articles before I stopped digging, most being different experiments making participants document dreams and emotions felt within, after, and during dreams. This reminded me of my own dream journal and how it had been 8 months sense I recorded a dream. I realized that if I made time to document my dreams again I could be my own test subject and be able to interpret my dreams and relate them to aspects of my waking life. After reading through my collection of articles I settled on one that directly covers how dreams effect the waking world of an individual and studied this article by annotating, note taking and reading it over multiple times. The piece of work I am referring to is “The Logical Structure of Dreams and Their Relation to Reality” by Jeremy Barris of Marshall University.

Jeremey Barris’s study argues the logic behind dreams, he sides with the idea that dreams are logically valid. The fact that dreams hold plenty of contradictions compared to how things work in our waking lives makes most believe dreams to be illogical. When in fact, dreams work with logic to characterize the deepest dimensions of our waking reality, proving the dream world to be just as logically valid as our lives and actions in the conscious world (Barris 1). This is supporting the idea that dreams are hard to understand and interpret because they hold information stored within our unconscious mind rather than our conscious mind. The difference between the two are fairly simple and described by Sigmund Freud’s theory on the unconscious mind in which I will describe within the next paragraph while discussing my knowledge of Freud’s dream work and its relation to my thesis. Barris argues that logic itself is a form of philosophical thinking by stating “What is more, logical systems are themselves developed and justified on the bases of philosophical considerations, which are therefore more ultimate arbiters than they are.” (Barris 3). The interpretation of dreams is a form of philosophical thinking and by arguing that dreams make no logical sense is fighting philosophy with philosophy, there are no actual winners. The violations of sense found within one’s dreams simply characterize what lies deep within the unconscious mind, and is characterized through dreams because of its importance to the dreamer at a subconscious level. Barris describes this accurately, “These are dimensions in which we deal, not with this or that aspect of ourselves, our lives, or the world, but with ourselves as a whole, our lives as a whole, or the sense of reality as a whole.” (Barris 3). I was only able to understand Barris’s work because of my understanding of Freud’s example of an iceberg to compare the unconscious mind to the conscious mind which is included with this I-search paper and should be observed before continuing.  

 Freud separated the mind into three parts, the conscious mind (what your focusing on now), subconscious mind (what is held within our memories), and the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is where your true thoughts and feelings are held and are only observed when filtered through the subconscious mind or by the interpretation of one’s dreams. When you dream you are shown small fragments of the unconscious mind and upon remembering dreams you are bringing something from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind. When a dream is interpreted correctly one will realize that dreams show our true selves, slowly unlocking the truth behind any unanswered questions (McLeod). Thus proving that a dreams logicality is one in the same as the reality we live in the waking world within our conscious mind.

My fascination with Sigmund Freud started when my English class took place in the library one day for the sake of teaching the class how to use the library’s database, not only for this I-search paper, but also for other research papers during our college careers. Towards the end of this rather unsatisfying class I was presented a book from a resource librarian, Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”. I felt like Donnie from the movie Donnie Darko when he is presented a book from his science teacher that directly affected his outlook on experiences he has with time travel. This provided him a greater understanding on how to interpret these experiences. Upon doing some reading on Freud I came to the understanding that he was the first to research the concept of dreaming as in depth as he did and a lot of his work with dreams still stands valid in the eyes of many. With Freud’s way of dividing the mind already described we shall move on to how he interpreted dreams based on the division of the mind he presents. Freud believed that in our waking reality we naturally disguise ourselves and are unaware of doing so. The unconscious mind therefore holds our true intentions and reactions to situations presented to us in the waking world. His belief was that dreams can be deciphered by symbols with relation to sexual materials. Freud states “The dream takes advantage of this symbolism in order to give a disguised representation to its latent thoughts.” (Freud 291). I disagree with his closed perception of limiting dream symbols to sexual thoughts, I find the analysis Stephen LaBerge presents more relatable to my personal experiences with interpreting dreams. LeBerge labels dreams symbols as “dreamsigns”, a more modernized term, and classifies them into four categories being inner awareness, action, form, and context. Inner awareness dreamsigns are particular thoughts, emotions, unusual sensations, or altered perceptions impossible within our reality. Action dreamsigns are any actions performed by you or a dream character that are unusual or impossible in the waking world. Form dreamsigns develop the shape of everything within a dream and include any deformations and transformations that may be seen. Context dreamsigns are formed when a setting or situation is strange, LaBerge uses the example of being a commando behind enemy lines in World War II (LaBerge 43-46). With that said symbols within our dreams are definitely real and are often things of great importance to the dreamer within the waking world. 

To continue my argument that dream symbols are often something the dreamer holds dear to them in the waking world I present my own dream journal as a reliable source of information. Often a common experience within my dreams that comes up throughout my journal entries are items I use on a day to day basis. They often appear in random places causing me to question why these items happen to be where I find them. For example, my personal notebooks and sketchbooks that hold my studies on dreams and my own psychology, as well as the documentation of specific thoughts I believe have been uprooted from my unconscious mind and hold great significance to my growing level of intellect. I have found my work on the brink of destruction laying on the edge of a cliff or far too close to a body of water and I have also found my work in alleyways, the hallway of my high school, even simply left outside at a place I find calming deep in the woods behind my house. There may not be a lot of work to show for, but I have dedicated a few years of my life to this work and know I wouldn’t leave these things wherever; this was one of my most frequent dreamsigns documented when I used to dream daily. This has brought me to believe that Freud’s idea that all dream symbols are sexual symbols is outdated, but still correct when dissected for knowledge. Freud understood that dreams hold symbols linking the conscious mind to dreams and it is my continuation of this belief that upon finding these symbols one can also find fragments of information directly from the unconscious mind that need deciphering in the waking world to understand completely.

 At this point in my research I have come to a halt. Not to slack off or to do other college homework, but to read a book by C.G Jung before I write about my experience meeting the man that changed my view on, not only dreams and how to interpret dreams, but myself and how to interpret myself. Paul Pines seemed as if he looks up to Jung, so as my way of thanking him I shall look up to Jung as well, but I mustn’t rush such a commitment. Before continuing to the next paragraph I will start the reading of C.G. Jung’s “The Undiscovered Self” and have a brief understanding of Jung before going on the part IV.

I was astounded by the amount of artwork I saw around Paul Pines’s house, from the ceiling to the floor on the left and right walls of his study were books of all kinds and ages. I told him my reasoning for wanting to interview him and how my work for this paper is more personal than it is for a grade in my English class and told him my earliest dream (refer to Part I). He asked for permission to interpret my dream and told me that I panicked upon flying because I wasn’t ready to feel, as well as use, the power of dream world. It was my way of showing myself the potential I had and how I have a lot to conquer in the years to come. He went on to linking the meaning of this dream to my experiences with what I called by the clinical term during our interview, sleep paralysis. He called these experiences an altered state of consciousness and explained this as having one foot in the conscious world and one foot in the unconscious world. I learned to harness this entry to limbo and see the beauty and riches of the information given to me while in these states. Pines didn’t like the clinical term of sleep paralysis and personally now that I have knowledge on these experiences of mine, I will never label an altered state a clinical condition because they are not helped by medicine or science they are conquered by those who experience them. Pines opened my mind to a different outlook on life and I can now say with confidence that any problems I have had with my psyche were not problems at all, but chapters within my life. In other words, by overcoming the “problems” in life one will grow as a person in every aspect possible and in a way some never will experience. This is because in order to grow you must learn and accept any harmful experiences you’ve encountered in life. To link this information to my thesis, when directly asked the question behind this paper (How can dreams improve our lives in the waking world?) Pines answered by saying “By making us aware…enlarging consciousness and it’s not only consciousness of ourselves, but its consciousness of the way the world works, of the way knowledge and development work” (Pines). In order to see past the waking world one must have a relationship with their dreams to uncover knowledge locked within our unconscious mind. By doing this you are enlarging your conscious mind, the part of mind used within the waking world. This is benefiting you not by giving you a high paying job that will get you a big house and a new car and that perfect material life you wished for sense you were old enough to want, but by enlightening you and allowing you to see past material things and understand yourself and your true intentions and needs as a human being. Human beings are not machines we need a purpose and a reason to live or we will not want to. I can say from experience that by enlarging my conscious mind I am gaining the knowledge that will in return give me eternal happiness for me and my loved ones. Dreams link us to the unconscious mind and the knowledge that can be found will always have an effect on waking life. It is up to the dreamer to interpret their dreams and use the knowledge they find to improve their waking lives as well as the waking lives of those around them.

Part IV.

            I often found myself struggling with this research, claiming I didn’t have time, not reading articles all the way through and having to reread them, even just avoiding my work to escape reality through music and other forms of entertainment. By completing my research, I have come to a very specific type of peace mentally by beginning to conquer my personal struggles including my fears upon sleeping. I do not fear the entry into altered states of consciousness, they remain only a fascination. I do not fear the presence of demons upon sleeping because the only negative things presented to me within my dreams are lessons from my unconscious mind. As a young teenager I would often write to myself, thanking my past self for doing things that benefited me in the future or writing so when I look back years later I could decipher a message for the sake or forcing myself to remember information I uprooted from my dreams so it could not be forgotten or lost within my subconscious. Throughout my research I have uprooted more knowledge than I could have ever predicted, most of which is the result of being able to talk with Paul Pines. Based on what I have learned I can only say that to understand the true meaning of this paper and my experiences you must dedicate yourself to finding the fragments of your unconscious mind that are throughout every experience this life has to offer, dream world and waking world alike both hold fragments of knowledge that can only be uncovered through perception and realization. You do not chose what you find and you cannot predict what you can find, but I believe that our true ideology and ethical features can only be understood by uncovering our true selves. This is not the study of dreaming but the duty of life, the study of all studies. Thank you Paul Pines I hope to meet with you again.  

Part V.

Annotated Bibliography

Barris, Jeremy. "The Logical Structure Of Dreams And Their Relation To Reality." Dreaming 20.1 (2010): 1-18. PsycARTICLES. Web.. 9 Nov. 2015.

Jeremy Barris, professor of psychology at Marshall University, covers the concept of logical dream structures and their relation to one’s reality. Barris supports the concept and explains with legitimate references some important ways dreaming is closely related to our reality.

 

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York City: Sterling Publishing, 2010. Print.

                        Sigmund Freud’s studies on dreaming were the first of its kind making this piece of work a must have source of information. This is simply a collection of Freud’s dream studies and holds the very first assumptions and studies within the field. I shall only use his studies closely relating psychology to dreaming.

 

LaBerge, Stephen. Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. New York City: The Random House Publishing Group, 1990. Print.

This is as closest as you can get to a step by step guide to lucid dreaming and how to study dreaming by showing you how to document and have dreams as well as manipulate dreams and use them to benefit from. I shall refer only to the second half of this book (coincidently the second half I haven’t read) in order to express how performing different acts within dreaming could benefit some of our everyday obstacles and to show that nightmares can be very serious but can always be overcome.

 

McLeod, Saul. “Sigmund Freud”. Simplypsychology.org. n. p. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

This article describes Freud’s theory of psychology and the conscious and unconscious mind. His analysis of the conscious and unconscious mind serves as a simple way to describe the two and help my reader form an understanding of the two. Freud being an old source of information his research on psychology still stands valid today.

 

 

Pines, Paul. (November 17^th 2015). Personal Interview.

This was a personal interview covering the idea of conscious states and even interpretations of my earliest dream experiences bringing closure to many fascinating personal studies and situations I have been presented throughout my life. Pines broadened my insight on dreaming tremendously and taught me a little about the understanding of why, how, and what dreams actually are. I hope to stay in touch with Pines and one day have as much knowledge on the mind as he does.