New Ways of Conceptualizing and Working with Dreams

The most fundamental change in psychoanalytic thinking about dreams has to do with their place in mental life. Freud thought of dreams as mini-pathological events that occurred relatively rarely, about once or twice a night, when a wish arose that would disturb sleep. This viewpoint had to be revised when Aserinsky, Dement, and Kleitman discovered that we dream regularly throughout the night, at least every 90 minutes, and much more often than we consciously realize (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953; Dement & Kleitman, 1957a, 1957b). Today, we recognize that a dream is a mental event that occurs regularly throughout the night.

Because dreams are such a regular occurrence, it seems less sensible to look for a single cause of dreaming. If we keep asking “Why do we dream?” then also we shall have to ask, “Why do we think?” In neither case can we expect a single answer. Both thinking and dreaming are regularly occurring mental activities, both take many different forms, and both probably occur for many reasons.

There are many reasons that have been given for why we dream. I will summarize 10 of them:

1. to maintain sleep in the presence of unacceptable wishes (Freud, 1900/1950a);

2. to compensate for excessively one-sided conscious attitudes held during the day (Jung, 1948/1974);

3. if the dream is told, to communicate something to someone else that could not be said otherwise (Ferenczi, 1913/1980; Kanzer, 1955; Blechner, 1983);

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4. for no reason at all—dreaming is merely an epiphenomenon of periodic brain firing—with the mind “making the best of a bad job” (Hobson & McCarley, 1977);

5. a housecleaning of the mind—to rid the mind/brain of parasitic neural connections and contents that are not functional (Robert, 1886; Evans & Newman, 1964; Crick & Mitchison, 1983);

6. to consolidate disparate areas of thinking and to integrate the information acquired during the day with other information acquired during the dreamer's lifetime (Winson, 1985, 1990), especially emotional experiences (Reiser, 1993; Smi