No Time and Nowhere by Fergus Hinds

Author:Fergus Hinds [Hinds, Fergus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-186-0
Publisher: Iff Books
Published: 2016-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Elements of a Dream

This is a brief account of the theory put forward by Martin Seligman and Amy Yellen of the University of Pennsylvania in Behaviour Research and Therapy on ordinary dreaming (Seligman and Yellen 1987). They identified their broad form and the way the main parts are assembled. The essence of their proposal is that dreams consist of just three elements.

The first they call visual episodes or visual bursts. These are vivid images of brief duration whose essential feature is that their subject matter is random; it is free of links with anything that has just been dreamed beforehand, and uninfluenced by the emotional tone of the dream itself or by the subject’s feelings before it started. They propose that their bursts can be identified by being vivid, central to the visual field, and capable of being scanned by the dreamer who can direct his attention to any part of them.

The second element which, together with the bursts, makes up the skeleton of the dream comprises the emotional episodes – loosely the dreamer’s feelings. They say these probably have ‘humoral underpinnings and humoral time courses’, growing and declining over minutes or hours. These feelings have a physiological basis, such as real aches, thirst, discomforts; they may be caused by the topic of the dream; or they may reflect a dreamer’s waking-life anxieties.

The third and last element is integration, which is the dreaming mind trying as well as it can to synthesize the emotional tone and the visual bursts into the least imperfect plot of which it is capable. The form of this integration is largely visual. It consists of a succession of images that are less vivid and less bizarre than the visual bursts, all of them self-supplied from the dreamer’s own experience. By and large a dream consists of vivid random bursts – one of which is needed to start it – filled out with duller images that follow one another in a loosely connected stream.

Central to their whole theory is the proposition that the dreaming mind has to present a narrative whose development conforms to both the emotional tenor and the initiating visual burst. Thereafter each duller integrative image appears by involuntary association with its predecessor. Though tied more or less to the theme, this association is by a peculiarly imperfect process whose principle is conspicuously not by meaning as it is awake. The dreaming mind may juxtapose actual events or people or places that were experienced in separate unrelated waking contexts. Or it may select an image for its having aroused in real life the same feelings as those in the dream. Or the tie may be similarities in shape or colour or sound, for example the words like Gillian/Chilean associated by assonance rather than synonym. Seligman and Yellen call this feature ‘adjacency’, and it is enough to achieve coherence of a kind. They give this imagined dream as an illustration:

The bursts: Ronald Regan’s face, a grapefruit, a rowing boat. The emotional tone: it’s all very sad.

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