What is the current “accepted” science behind dream interpretation?

Question

I'm doing some casual reading about dream interpretation (meaning I'm reading the wikipedia entry) and the article mentions that there are several ways of thinking about dreams from a psychological standpoint:

In modern times, various schools of psychology have offered theories about the meaning of dreams.

But the text offers no judgement of which of these approaches is currently believed to be most "accurate". It simply lists various scholars and their theories.

What I want to know is: which approach is considered the most "correct" by the scientific community and why? Is there a reason to take one of the listed methods of interpretation more seriously than another as a casual layman?

Note that I'm not asking for your subjective answer. I'm looking for any evidence as to whether a specific method is more successful or more pursued by the profession and community in general.

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no accepted science to dream interpretation. In fact, there's no science to it at all. Evidence has shown that indeed, dreaming draws material from people, places, and things in our lives, but there's absolutely no scientific data out there (that I'm familiar with) that links dreams to anything meaningful in our actual daily lives.

If anything, dreaming and sleep is an opportunity to "replay" patterns of neural activation that occurred during the day, leading to consolidation of long-term memories. I wouldn't take anything on that Wikipedia page seriously.

Other arguments for why we sleep and dream:

(1) We may sleep to repair our brain or maintain homeostasis within the system. This would suggest that there's a substance in our body which requires sleep that increases its need over time. This possibility is evidenced by the fact that you can die of sleep deprivation -- but evidence against is that some amount of deprivation doesn't set you back all too far. (Also, why does sleep feel restorative, if it's only maintaining homeostasis?) There's increasing amount of evidence to suggest that improved circulation of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain during sleep serves to clean the brain from toxic metabolic byproducts of daily activity.

(2) It's also possible that sleep and dreaming serves the body's overall safety. This argument stems from value long-ago in sleeping during the dangerous nighttime, when predators and other dangerous animals generally have the upper hand over man. This seems reasonably vestigial in humans, though...

(3) It also may be the case that sleep and dreaming is effective for conserving our neurak energy over the course of the day. Indeed, slow-wave sleep is associated with reduced cortical activity -- but then again, REM sleep features high activity.

(4) An even more powerful possibility is that neural reprogramming is dependent on sleep. This is evidenced by consolidation effects that occur while we rest, and the fact that less interference occurs during the sleeping hours (see Jenkins & Dallenbach, 1924, if you want to read a real classic). There are many minimal sleepers out there, though, that are high functioning, so what does that mean for this theory?

Answer 2

As far as I know, dreams are meaningless information, strung into a story or series of events and interpretation are therefore highly subjective. The theory that I know best is that dreams are a result of memory consolidation during sleep. Of course, this is still controversial.

Memory consolidation is explained (simple version) as follows:

during waking, your senses bind information from the different senses into a single "experience" in the hippocampus. This is stored as episodic memory. When you sleep at night (and even during the day, stream of consciousness may be associated with this effect) your hippocampus is consolidating the episodic memories into (for instance) semantic memories in the temporal lobe. The hippocampus actually sends signals all over the neocortex, but the semantic memories are the best understood and most easily graspable to laymen. The basic idea is that all your experiences with an apple (episodic memories) get consolidated to some generalization of what an apple is (semantic memory).

It is thought that as these streams of information travel from hippocampus to the rest of the brain, bits of its randomly interact with parts of our brain that are semi-conscious, but probably not in any significant way. In other words, the meaning and episodes experienced in dreams probably has no direct resemblence to the declarative memories they are encoding.

sleep and memory consolidation in general:

Nature 437, 1272-1278 (27 October 2005) | doi:10.1038/nature04286

Answer 3

We could have scientific clinical study of the reports of dreams. Given that the dreams don't relate to specific real world events and often have very bizarre properties there's no reason to believe the report has much to do with what really happened. Therefore, from a clinicians standpoint they're useful in that you're in a relaxed state when they occur and you're interpreting things according to your current psychological condition. I'm sure any study of them from the clinical end that did occur would reflect some correlations of general features to chronic anxiety or clinical depression because of your interpretation of what happens. That's sort of a gimme.

Then again, it's still hard to interpret because depression and anxiety cause more sleep events (Kimura, Müller-Preuss, Wiesner, Flachskamm, Wurst, Holsboer & JM Deussing, 2009). Perhaps that alone changes reporting.

Answer 4

I was influenced by this lecture. I will jump ahead to the pertinent part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ei6wFJ9kCc&t=59m20s

My interpretation is that there are two general areas in the brain responsible for memory formation: 1) hippocampus and 2) basal ganglia. According to the speaker, a study shows a direct correlation between the amount of hipocampal learning done during the day and the amount of REM sleep that occurs the following night. I.e., a sort of encoding happens through dreams. No correlation exists for learning done with the basal ganglia.

My rough interpretation of the differences between the two types of learning are the hipocampal is higher thoughts and logic like math concepts where the basal ganlia records more basic cause and effect type correlations. I'll appreciate being corrected where I'm wrong; especially if you site your source. Thanks.

Answer 5

I don't know if you want this type of answer, but I would like to focus on conceptual issues as well that I thought as necessary. Well, to ask if a certain approach to the meaning of dreams is better or more accurate, one has first to ask if dreams have meaning and this also requires a definition of meaning.

As for the first question, there is an approach by Allan Hobson that says dreams have no meaning. Dreams come to be when neural impulses from the brainstem are received by the cortex which reacts producing images thoughts and feelings relating to what lies in the memory storage. So dreams may be personal but there is not any meaning to them. The other approach is by Anttio Revonsuo who supports the meaning of dreams in the sense that they have evolutionary value. Dreams in this case, enrich our experiences relating to dangerous events and allow us to be more careful in a consequent dangerous situation. And of course psychodynamic theories of which you are aware, support the meaning of dreams but the interpretations differ depending on the psychoanalyst which makes the whole thing seem suspicious.(for an overview of the above check Kolb and Whishaw's "An introduction to Brain and Behaviour", it has a chapter about sleep and dreams)

But what do we mean by meaning is not all that clear.The concept of meaning has been a waste basket of evaluative and aesthetic judgements, as well as used in divergent trends and in different contexts. Also, meaning is a concept that cannot be discussed without intentionality, that is meaning has to be meaning to someone that only he/she can feel directly. You can have meaning in the level of society or civilization but again it reduces to personal experience. Because meaning is subjective, I don't know if it can be studied scientifically. Qualitative research that studies meaning is quite informative and interesting to do but it can hardly be viewed as scientific. That is what dream interpretation is. A qualitative analysis of experiences. So when a psychoanalyst claims he can uncover the meaning that my dreams have to me, what he does is fit the reported experiences in a set of theoretical constructs. In other words, he constructs a meaning of my dreams imposing a psychodynamic frame of reference which is no different from a common man's frame of reference in terms of validity. After all, if one gives their own meaning to their dreams, isn't that a meaning also?

I hope that this makes clear that no approach of dream interpretation can be considered better or worse because the act of interpretation is subjective and although we can study (through psychological research methods) what mechanisms and resources are used by people to construct meaning, there is no evidence that could be used to support a kind of meaning over another. It is like asking what literary approach is more accurate or more accepted to interpret a surrealistic poem. Literature theorists can develop different trends the acceptance of which depends on sociological factors and not on empirical validation.Thus, anyone can interpret the poem as he wants and his meaning will be accurate for him.

Answer 6

There can't be an objective, scientific answer to 'the meaning of dreams' because the effects are purely subjective. I've found by experience, however, that a dream is something like a 'meaning' without a stimulus event to cause it, like a semantic without a word. Usually or very often next day a waking event does occur and the dream meaning then becomes very clear by that event's occurrance. Neurologically, as the scientists suggest, the past days' events are incorporated into memory and in a relatively stable social environment will be recalled with the appropriate stimulus as might be expected. Subjectively, I think it is otherwise known as deju vu or very like it. In this sense a dream is predictive but, to avoid misunderstanding, only in this sense. For a 'scientific' enquiry into dream interpretation I recommend the theories of the psychologist C G Jung but it is no way a simple subject.

Answer 7

I believe that the current view is that when asleep, the mind processes the events of the day, the issues of note, and classifies them, storing the relevant events in memories linking these to others.

Dreams are then the process of replaying and connecting events to others, making links to other memories, which is why sometimes solutions can come when asleep, because conenctions re made. Also, this is where nightmares come from, as links are made to other negative or disturbing experiences.

In my experience, this makes sense, which holds no scientific basis whatsoever, but I find it a comfort.

Answer 8

This is not "accepted" science behind the meaning of dreams. From a physiological perspective , the role of sleeping (suspended neural activity ) in relation to cleaning the brain of toxic byproducts of daily activity is undeniable (every open system, like a cell, generates residue, entropy laws ), but this does not explain the associated dreams and their meaning (if any). It might have something to do with the perception of time, in other words, consolidating the information extracted from past experiences and successfully managing/predicting decision making in future challenges (which is essential for survival from an evolutionary perspective) might explain this phenomenon. In deep learning (and big data science) the training of a neural network is an essential process (and it takes time). The brain trains itself on past experiences, in order to better manage/handle future challenges. That's what the brain does when you sleep. It's all about training the neural network, in order to be more efficient when faced with future challenges. So I would not put too much weight on the "meaning " of dreams, there isn't any. And I suspect that this training that the brain performs is more advanced than the standard neural network training required in pattern recognition.. The brain performs training in simulated scenarios, this is dynamic training.