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Odd that there’s no mention at all in the article of Carl Jung’s perspective on dreams - being one of Freud’s more prominent students and having spent an inordi
by mactavish88 3y ago
Odd that there’s no mention at all in the article of Carl Jung’s perspective on dreams - being one of Freud’s more prominent students and having spent an inordinate amount of his life analyzing his own and others’ dreams.
EDIT: The reason I bring this up is that it seems as though the prevailing reductionist perspective on dreaming is that it’s “random noise” created by the brain. This article effectively says the same thing, but says that the noise is created by arbitrary muscle twitches during sleep while the brain “learns the body”.
Jung and his students spent a huge amount of their time looking for patterns in that “random noise”.
It’s entirely possible that there are layers to the purpose of dreams. Yes, they could help the brain “learn the body” better. But why those specific dream characters and not others? Why those specific scenes and not others? How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life right now?
It seems unlikely that evolution would produce very wasteful complex processes - it seems far more likely to me that they also serve a use in a certain type of psychological (and therefore ultimately physical) energy dissipation or tension resolution - an idea that seems to come up through Jung’s insights.
Jung and his students then analyzed out common themes in the symbols in people’s dreams and discovered themes that were common across cultures, implying connections to common biological and sociological patterns (e.g. the fact that each of us grows older facing different kinds of challenges along the way).
- slfnflctd 3y ago> How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life I started writing down super-brief summaries of parts of my dreams on a near daily basis a while back. There are absolutely clear connections between things I've seen, heard or experienced recently and things which show up in dreams. One curious aspect of this is that there's often a delay of at least several days between the actual event and when something like it shows up in a dream, usually after I've stopped consciously thinking about it.
- mactavish88 3y agoMy understanding of Jung’s hypothesis about this was that every facet of the dream (the scene, the characters, etc.) is you - your psyche. In other words, your subconscious is effectively using those images as puppets to act out a play of sorts that reveals or releases some kind of tension.
- kmill 3y agoEven if it's just random noise, if you feed noise into a system you can measure the response and infer properties of the system based on what resonates. I think shouldn't be surprising that if you pay attention to what pops up in dreams you can gain some understanding of our minds. Fourier analysis is just a lot more straightforward than Jungian analysis... and it's made harder from how it's trying to analyze a system from within itself.
- Frannyies 3y agoIn modern brain science another theory is that a dream is a type of replay of things the brain is busy with and allows for fine-tuning of it. Like when you learn something and it's better the next day. If it's just a brain region which has to be awake for the rem sleep to do what it does, it can also be a compensation mechanism. I'm not following the idea that energy has to dissipate. The firing origin is not some electricity which needs to discharge,