Dreams and Images

Proposition: dreams are thoughts in the original Pleistocene language of images. Today this goes by such names as primary process thinking, fantasy, phantasy etc. This sort of thinking goes on unconsciously waking and sleeping, but perhaps I should say form of language because clearly the images used to carry meaning are very different in a modern hominin psyche from those of a couple of million years ago.

Dream research has followed up many hypotheses concerning the function of dreaming. For whatever reasons dreaming evolved in the first mammals, it is still fulfilling those functions in Homo sapiens. It was co-opted for additional functions as brain capacity enlarged through the evolution of hominids and hominins. My own research, which finally led me to the above idea, was concerned with the use of dreams and images in psychotherapeutic work with schizoid clients.

Symbols: The word symbolic is constantly thrown around in the media and a word of explanation is in order. The Oxford English dictionary will give you one definition of the meaning, the Dictionary of Psychoanalysis another, what it means to you is a third. Verbal language works as a means of communication between psyches because words work more as signs pointing to a strictly limited range of meaning agreed by a general consensus. Both limitation and consensus can fail disastrously as with the word "crusade" recently. (See The Interpersonal World of the Child by Daniel Stern for an understanding of the loss that results from verbal language.) The language of images was evolved for internal communication and is bounded by personal experience. It can be used for external communication when sufficient experience (e.g. cultural) is common to the psyches involved.

My clients have pictured their inner babies as kittens, pillows, dolphins, dolls, all of which provide an interesting and diagnostic selection of meanings. Back on the Pleistocene savanna when symbolic thinking was in its infancy, creatures like the antbear that featured in Nisa's dream described in chapter 9 would be the vehicles of meaning. You can use that word in the site's search facility to access my comments on the dreams of this !Kung woman.

The evolutionary context explains the power that dreams and images seem to exert over our emotions. A couple of million years ago responding fast to an internal image was often a matter of life or death.

What can still be researched today are the mechanisms of thinking that evolved in the Pleistocene, the way meanings are attributed to images and manipulated in the psyche, and something of the effect that this kind of thinking produces in external behaviour.

Way in. Chapter 7, which analyses Carl Jung's self-healing process (an elaboration of the essay An Answer to Answer to Job), contains the most discussion of individual dreams. Other dreams and images are scattered through chapters 2, 3 and 4. For those only interested in dreams and images at the individual level, the transcripts of the session work may be of most interest. To explore the idea of dreams as the original Pleistocene language, and the evolutionary context, you will need to read the whole book from start to finish. Chapter 5 shows how unconscious thinking in images effects cultural products such as films. The paper The First Year of Life…… will give you an overview of the argument.

If I add new material on dreams and images under Updates and Critiques I will do so with the indicator D/I. If dreaming appears in the news there might be something under Hominin Psyche Makes Headlines, but don't hold your breath.