Theory Of Dreams (Part 2)

Metaphor is the language of the REM state. French scientist Michel Jouvet suggested that REM sleep is concerned with programming the central nervous system to carry out instinctive behaviours. William Dement and colleagues discovered that the amount of REM sleep a foetus or newborn has depends on how mature an animal is at birth. Animals born relatively mature have little REM sleep as foetuses and after birth, while animals born immature have a considerable amount. During REM sleep, foetuses and newborns are programmed with the instincts that they must seek to complete in the environment. As the sense organs start to receive inputs from the environment, the brain ‘pattern matches’ to the instinctive templates programmed in during REM sleep. According to the theory, just as programming instincts involves creating a pattern or template for which an analogue can be found in the environment (twig-like materials, a friendly human face, etc.), so it makes sense that deactivation also uses sensory analogues or metaphors, enabling the brain to draw on images which represent the unexpressed emotional arousals of the day. Griffin has posited another, more important reason for why dreaming is in metaphor. Using an analogous experience as a means of completing an arousal enables the arousal associated with the instinctive urge to be discharged but, importantly, the instinctive urge itself in the context it was experienced can be remembered. This prevents memory stores from becoming either corrupt or incomplete. It also explains why it is important to forget dreams most of the time.

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming, proposed by psychologist Joe Griffin in 1993, posits that the prime function of dreams, during REM sleep, is to act out metaphorically non-discharged emotional arousals (expectations) that were not expressed during the previous day. It theorises that excessive worrying (regarded as unintentional misuse of the imagination) arouses the autonomic nervous system, which increases the need to dream during REM sleep. This deprives the individual of the refreshment of the mind and body brought about by regenerative slow-wave sleep. While the theory has widely been validated anecdotally, through people’s personal experience, it is not able to be put to rigorous scientific testing, as interpretations of dream events are necessarily subjective. However, Griffin, by tracking through historical data, claims that the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming provides a far more plausible explanation for two famous dreams interpreted by of Freud and Jung.

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