The Repetition Principle in Dreams: Is It a Possible Clue to a Function of Dreams?
G. William Domhoff, University of California, Santa Cruz
psych.ucsc.edu
Excerpt------------
I have concluded from an examination of such literature that repetition does indicate preoccupation with a problem in all these different instances. People dream about emotional hang-ups, fixations, unfinished personal business. The occasional intellectual, creative, or lucid dream is a rarity. This conclusion brings the argument very close to the question of a possible function for dreams because they seem to reflect personal preoccupations. The idea that dreams may have a problem-resolving function is not new. It has been suggested in one form or another by several theorists using different kinds of research evidence.
Still, as I said at the outset, I am not comfortable with functional explanations. Furthermore, there are reasons to doubt that dreams have any function-so few are remembered, have even a trace of the previous day's events, or contain anything approaching a solution to a problem. The fact that some people live and sleep adequately without them is also a strong argument against a function for dreams. I therefore conclude that evolution did not provide us with a form of thinking during sleep that is "meant" to help us solve our personal problems.
However, if dreams do reflect our emotional preoccupations, as the evidence presented in this paper suggests, then it can be argued that dreams can come to have a psychological "function" in some cultures for those people who remember and study their dreams. In that case, it might be better to talk about problem-resolving as a possible "use" of dreams (cf., Hunt, 1986). Put another way, dreams were not conserved by natural selection to be problem resolvers, or anything else for that matter, but they nonetheless can be used to understand people's unfinished emotional business. Dreams as we are dreaming them, whether in REM or NREM sleep, have no function, but dreams can be "useful" to waking consciousness in a variety of ways. In that sense, people in many cultures, including Western civilization, have invented "functions" for them. From that angle, dreams have an "emergent function" that develops through culture and history. |
