Music and Dreams

Dreaming is still a mystery of human cognition, although it has been studied experimentally for more than a century. Experimental psychology first investigated dream content and frequency. The neuroscientific approach to dreaming arose at the end of the 1950s and soon proposed a physiological substrate of dreaming: rapid eye movement sleep. Fifty years later, this hypothesis was challenged because it could not explain all of the characteristics of dream reports. Therefore, the neurophysiological correlates of dreaming are still unclear, and many questions remain unresolved. Do the representations that constitute the dream emerge randomly from the brain, or do they surface according to certain parameters? Is the organization of the dream’s representations chaotic or is it determined by rules? Does dreaming have a meaning? What is/are the function(s) of dreaming? Psychoanalysis provides hypotheses to address these questions. Until now, these hypotheses have received minimal attention in cognitive neuroscience, but the recent development of neuropsychoanalysis brings new hopes of interaction between the two fields. Considering the psychoanalytical perspective in cognitive neuroscience would provide new directions and leads for dream research and would help to achieve a comprehensive understanding of dreaming. Notably, several subjective issues at the core of the psychoanalytic approach, such as the concept of personal meaning, the concept of unconscious episodic memory and the subject’s history, are not addressed or considered in cognitive neuroscience. This study argues that the focus on singularity and personal meaning in psychoanalysis is needed to successfully address these issues in cognitive neuroscience and to progress in the understanding of dreaming and the psyche.

In dream reports, however, one often notices banal situations, strange scenes, or even frightening events. Why is there such a contrast between the popular meaning of the word “dream” and the content of dream reports? Why are some dream scenes so bizarre? Are dreams built from images that arise randomly from the sleeping brain? Or is the emergence and organization of dream images controlled by currently unknown parameters? Does dreaming have a function?

Answering these questions is not easy because dreaming is elusive. We still do not know when it happens during the night, how long it lasts, whether we can recall its entire content, or how to control it. For more than a century, such limited understanding of dreaming has seriously hampered experimental investigations. Nonetheless, scientific research has managed to produce considerable information about the phenomenology and physiology of dreaming and has improved our understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.

Considering the issues that remain unresolved (e.g., neurophysiologic variability, parameter(s) influencing the emergence of representations in dreams, the meaning of dreams), a psychoanalytic perspective would certainly benefit dream research by providing new directions/leads and helping to reach a comprehensive understanding of dreaming.

On the one hand, psychological research has demonstrated that dream content is influenced by one’s personal life, especially personal concerns (Schwartz, 1999; Schwartz and Maquet, 2002; Schredl and Hofmann, 2003), and some neuroscientists have hypothesized that dreaming is involved in psychological individualism.

Thus, both psychology and neuroscience have provided results and hypotheses that validate the possibility that dreaming has something to do with personal and meaningful issues. On the other hand, Freud argued that the unconscious, which guides behaviors and desires, express itself during dreams.

The two disciplines’ (cognitive neuroscience and psychoanalysis) convergence on dreaming thus seems obvious; however, very little collaboration has occurred to date.

Note that some experimental studies in psychology have considered the psychoanalytic perspective. For example, Greenberg et al. (1992) attempted “a research-based reconsideration of the psychoanalytical theory of dreaming.”

They evaluated the presence of problems (defined as an expression of negative feeling or any situation evoking such feeling or requiring some change or adaptation) during dreaming and pre- and post-sleep wakefulness in two subjects.

They showed that problems occurred very frequently in the manifest dream content and that these problems were nearly systematically related to the problems noted during pre-sleep wakefulness.

In addition, they observed that effective dreams (i.e., dreams that presented some solution to the individuals’ problems) were followed by a waking state in which the impact of the problems was diminished, whereas ineffective dreams were followed by the persistence of the problems. This study thus confirmed that personal concerns influence dream content.

In addition it provided new results suggesting that dreaming may have some psychological problem-solving function (this result recalls the neuroscientific findings that sleep has a cognitive problem-solving function associated with brain reorganization; e.g., Wagner et al., 2004; Darsaud et al., 2011).

Greenberg et al.’s (1992) study managed to quantify personal issues and clearly broadened the cognitive neuroscience perspective on dreaming.

To proceed further, approaches integrating psychoanalysis and neuroscience must now be developed. Several subjective issues at the core of the psychoanalytic approach, such as the concept of personal meaning, the concept of unconscious episodic memory and the subject’s history, are not addressed or considered in cognitive neuroscience. This limitation hampers the understanding of psychological and neurophysiological functioning in humans.

These issues must be addressed, and the expertise of psychoanalysts in singularity and personal meaning is needed to do so in neuroscience and to further the understanding of dreaming and of the psyche.

SOURCE: Ruby, P. (2011) Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives

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