Pre-sleep Stimulation and Dreaming

A study of the effects of films on dreaming demonstrated some important determinants of what is incorporated into a spontaneous dream. Cartwright (1977) showed a pornographic film to a group of conventional male medical students and a group of young homosexual men (members of a university chapter of a national American gay group). The film included a suggestive 10-minute scene set in an eighteenth-century brothel, in which a male customer chose a female prostitute, helped her to undress in a bedroom and then got into bed with her; and an explicit 10-minute scene of a newly wed bride and groom in a hotel bedroom. Both groups of subjects showed signs of sexual arousal during the screening of the film, indicated by penile strain gauges. However, there were marked differences between the groups' dreams, perhaps unexpectedly, in that the homosexual men experienced more explicit sexual dreams while the medical students tended, when scenes of nudity were included in their dreams, to interpret these in terms of clinical practice, maintaining their professional role. (One might have expected the heterosexual young men to be more influenced by what were, after all, exclusively heterosexual scenes.)

Were the gay group's 'control' dreams also more sexually charged than those of the medical students? Were their dreams after seeing the films more sexually explicit than on control nights? Neither Cartwright's book nor the more detailed published experimental reports answer these questions. It is likely that the pornographic film provided a potent stimulus for both groups of young men, yet the effect it had on their dreams was only explicable in terms of their ideology, particularly in terms of how they viewed sexuality in relation to their own lives. The homosexual men were deeply preoccupied with their own sexuality and with proselytizing a liberated view of sexual practices. The medical students, having decided to enter a traditionally conservative profession, were obliged to subscribe to conventionally repressive attitudes. Just as in waking life they had to adopt a clinical attitude towards human activities, many of which are taboo in Western society, their dreaming interpretations of their own sexuality were also in terms of the medical model.

Both these experiments, and the studies on the effects of hunger and thirst on dreaming, demonstrate the unpredictability of dreaming, explicable only in terms of semantics. All the evidence points to dreaming being a highly complex cognitive activity. Whatever the limitations of the psychoanalytic approach to dream analysis, it does at least attempt to take this into account, and the procedure of showing films, however vivid and disturbing, and then recording spontaneous dream reports is intrinsically limited by the construction the individual puts on the film and the experiment itself.

Two laboratory studies that attempted to assess the effects of real-life stresses on dreams used patients who were either awaiting major surgery or were undergoing group therapy sessions in which each patient had to prepare her or himself for a session devoted entirely to her or his own problems (Breger et al.y 1971). The major findings of this combination of case study and experimental method in the surgery patients were that (1) the preoperative dreams of the surgery subjects incorporated stress-related material both directly and symbolically; (2) the degree of incorporation was quite marked when the personal meaning of surgery and the individual modes of preparation were taken into account; and (3) the content of the dreams was more repetitious and constricted before than after surgery.

Similarly, for the patients anticipating and then undergoing a psychotherapeutic focus session devoted entirely to their own problems, there was clear evidence that this traumatic event affected dream content. One explanation is that dreaming is an essential part of our adaptation to the demands of the world we live in. Not only does dreaming perhaps help in the storage of new memories, but it is actively helping us to solve our emotional problems. The dream process is thus a way not only of rehearsing new experiences, but also of commenting on them and resolving conflicts. A problem with this idea is, of course, that most dreams are not remembered; so that even if solutions to problems are achieved during dreams they cannot be regarded as adaptive, unless we are to believe that these solutions are somehow incorporated unconsciously.