The Subjective Nature of Dreams

The Subjective Nature of Dreams
The nature of the dream-state is highly subjective and a truly personal experience making the scientific analysis of dreaming somewhat prohibitive. Dreams often contain material that is nonsensical and challenging to interpret rationally, making the characterization of dreams from an objective point of view a perplexing task. While we all dream (though see Solms, 1997, for an example of neuropsychological patients who do not dream), there is incredible variability in the subjective dream experience (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966; Spadafora and Hunt, 1990). Some people rarely remember their dreams and erroneously conclude that they do not dream at all (a condition discussed by Freud, 1900), while others experience vivid dreams with rich visual imagery and emotional content. Sometimes, the story-lines that make up people’s dreams follow a tight narrative and have a relatively smooth transition from scene to scene, while at other times dreams appear as illogical and haphazard associations lacking a coherent sense of flow. Some people have full control of their dreams, exerting conscious control over the supposedly random events which typify dreaming (Laberge, Levitan, Dement, 1986), while others are mere bystanders watching the events unfold without any sense of agency approximating waking volition. With the multiplicity of dream dynamics, it is no surprise that there are differing views on the nature of dreams, as a researcher’s views on dreaming may directly relate to their own subjective experience of dreaming (Potter, 1996).
Despite this subjective nature of dreams, an evolutionary analysis of dreams should not be disregarded and considered outside the realm of scientific inquiry (although for a competing view see Thompson, 2000). Since the cognitive revolution, psychology and other disciplines have made significant progress in developing and implementing methodologies meant to reveal truths about the mental processes underlying our subjective experiences (Miller, 2003). For example, the tools of cognitive neuroscience have allowed neuroimaging data to inform our theories of cognition (Kandell and Squire, 2000). It is not unreasonable to think that these methods will one day allow for a correlation to be established between certain
patterns of brain activity and corresponding dream content, not unlike how current technology now allows accurate prediction of information from subjective experiences.
As an example, neuroimaging evidence can provide information to distinguish between lower-level sensory experiences (e.g., the experience of visual vs. auditory stimuli) as well as higher-level perceptual experiences (e.g., visual processing of a face stimulus vs. a house stimulus; O'Craven and Kanwisher, 2000). In this vein, it is important to approach the study of dreams in a scientific fashion, not biased by our own subjective dream experiences, but rather by letting our theories rest on scientifically collected data. Towards this aim of objective and scrutinizing scientific inquiry, below we present data concerning the function of dreaming.