dissociative dreaming

Has there been any research that found a link between dissociative disorders and dissociative dreaming?

I often have dreams where I view a very complicated story, with lots of plot twists, antagonists, protagonists, motives, causes and effects. However, while participating in this dream, I have no idea why people do what they do. At the end of the dream, when all is revealed, I smack myself on the knee and say, "Ah, Professor Plum did it in the kitchen with the candle. That's so obvious, why didn't I see that coming?"

Of course, I wake up and ask myself, "Hey, wait a minute. That dream came form my own head. How did I make up a story I couldn't figure out?"

I can't help but think that there are two folks in my head, one making up stories for the other to watch.

I have had no bouts with multiple personality disorder, as far as I know. I haven't lost any time, to my recollection. I still wonder, though, if dissociative dreams precede other dissociative disorders.

I haven't heard of 'dissociative dreaming' before.

I'm not sure how many people remember having dreams with plots and protagonists etc either.

Most people don't remember dream episodes. You can get better at them by keeping a dream diary, though.

Can you give an example of some kind of dream where there was an 'ah ha' moment?

Freud thought there was a mental structure that not only made up plots etc for the other mental structure to 'watch' but the mental structure also engaged in this elaborate conceilment so that the real urges and desires etc were hidden under layers of symbolism...

I think most people think of this as metaphoric these days. But that being said, dreams are fairly interesting huh :-)

Hi Dollhouse,

Welcome to PC. DocJohn has an open chat at 9:00 p.m. est on Tuesdays. You are more than welcome to come to chat and ask Doc about your dreams.

January

Hey Alexandra,

I can't recall any such dreams, I'll try to have one tonight.

Yeah, dreams are interesting to say the least. Mine are off-the-wall, batty, nonsense, and tons of fun (or tons of fear).

I wonder if any universities have used the functional MRI to scan someone having a dream. That would prove Freud right or wrong pretty easily.

Researchers have used the fMRI for a lot of research in the last year or or two. For example, they can tell if someone is telling the truth or lying, lesbian or straight, and is sociopathic or empathic, depending on what parts of the brain are being used or not being used.

I can't wait until employers use an fMRI screen along with a drug screen. That'll be the day!

Hey. I think most people enjoy dreaming. Unless they wake up in an anxious or fearful state. Sometimes I feel a bit disturbed waking up after a dream. Most of the time I enjoy what I manage to recollect of them, however.

I'm not sure if fMRI's have been used to scan someone while they are dreaming. I've never had an fMRI before... I'm not sure what the machines are like... It might be hard to scan someone while they are asleep. If the machines are very chlaustraphobic or if they make a noise etc. There are other kinds of neural imaging, though, I'm not sure what neural images have been done. I guess they have done stuff with external electrodes. There is stuff on different levels of sleep (REM or dreaming vs deep sleep etc).

I would be dubious about fMRI's being a litmus test for truth telling vs lying... I'd be dubious about it being a litmus test for homosexuality or sociopathy etc too. I'm fairly dubious about the utility of neuroimaging in general, however...

How do you think a fMRI scan would prove or disprove Freud?

I think that there is no evidence for the dynamic unconscious (the state that creates the dreams and hides the content under layers of symbolism). There has been quite a lot written on how cognitive psychology now talks about unconscious processes and hence Freud has been vindicated, but that isn't quite right. The unconscious processes that cognitive psychologists talk about are mechanical processes that occur pre-consciously (e.g., processing prior to conscious awareness like visual edge detection) or unconsciously (e.g., the processes involved in regulating your temperature). Those processes aren't 'intentional' or 'dynamic' (they don't 'choose' or 'hide' anything at all). So seems like Freud was wrong about the dynamic unconscious (the mental mechanism that produces dreams). But that is if he means it literally in the sense that there is such a mental structure that causes one to have the dreams that one does have. If one is looking for meaning... The way one interprets the meaning of tea leaves or rorscarch tests or horroscopes or configurations of planets or rune stones etc etc... Can say a lot about you. But that isn't to say that any of that stuff has meaning independently of what we project onto it in hindsight.

We don't know very much about dreaming... But we know that animals seem to dream (they have brain patterns similar to us when we are in REM sleep and they make motor movements and if you remove the paralysis that normally accompanies REM sleep they will 'act out' their dreams of hunting mice or whatever). If people don't get REM sleep they tend to get psychotic... So it does seem to be a necessary function... One thought is that it is the brain processing stuff that happened during the day so as to facilitate storage etc. Kind of like... A neural defragment. Kind of keeping the files in order. That would explain why things that we have seen or themes that have occured to us often occur in our dreams.

Perhaps...

I'm not dissociative either and often had/have complicated dreams like that. I think it's more like wondering why we don't turn around and face the monster that's chasing us and all the other things we wonder when we wake up. My husband once woke himself in frustration because he was dreaming he couldn't find his car in a huge parking lot/garage downtown and after he woke up realized he couldn't find it because he parked it in a previous, different dream!

I think that's the whole point of dreaming, to get you to wonder such things and rewrite things and see how they apply in your waking life, etc.

Dreaming isn't one-to-one in making sense but nothing you dreamed was unknown to you. I use to wonder as a teenager why all my sex dreams woke me at the critical point and then realized later it was because I'd never had sex yet. You can't "experience" what you haven't experienced and you can't think of something you haven't thought of. That you didn't see how it came out until it was shown you, were it my dream, I'd look hard at situations in my real life where I do that, wait to be shown something instead of working to figure it out. It sounds a little like the teachers who use to accuse us of having to "spoon feed" us? I'd look to see where I wasn't doing my own work in my life but waiting for someone else to do it for me.

hrm. i'm reminded of john locke. he tackled the problem of whether we could think of things that we hadn't yet experienced. he thought that there were atomic (basic) experiences and we could only obtain those via experience. what hte mind could do was to rearrange those atomic (basic) experiences in novel ways.

one example... we experience a horse... and we experience an animal with a horn... then we blend those elements together in novel ways in order to produce something we have never experienced (a unicorn). or the torso of a man and the body of a horse to make a centaur, or stuff like that.

but really... he thought the elements of experience were such things as colour (could you have the idea of red without having never experienced red? he thought you needed the experience on order to acquire the idea in order to put red someplace novel e.g., by using ones imagination to come up with the idea of a red person or whatever).

i'm not sure how much you can dream something that you haven't experienced. i guess i figure there are some ideas (aka concepts) that can only be acquired via experience (or can only be grasped in certain ways via experience) but that once we have those concepts then we can blend them in all kinds of novel ways... i dreamed i could flap my arms and fly but i've never ever experienced that. i have experienced swimming, however, and my kind of flying is basically 'swimming' in the air where i have to work hard to stay 6 feet in the air as one has to work hard to stay submerged in water...

My husband used to fix and resolve things in his dreams. For instance, one of his hobbies was working on old cars, restoring them. He would come to a part that he couldn't figure out. Then he would end up having a dream about it and the next morning he went and fixed whatever had been troubling him. He didn't dissociate though.

I don't remember most of my dreams but the ones I do are very vivid dreams with exacting details down to the nitty gritty stuff. If it's a bad dream, the nitty gritty stuff stinks big time but it can be fun when the dreams twist and turn but don't seem to be scary.

Dreams are fascinating. I don't have an opinion I guess on the fMRI stuff. I'm kind of on the same side of the fence as Alexandra as of right now but I don't have enough knowledge in that area to know for sure.

Good luck with all your figuring out though.

i don't know how interested people are in this issue really...
but we are having a talk this thursday which is related to how much neuroimaging helps us with respect to understanding the structure / function / nature of the mind (from the level of cognitive psychology)

here is a link to some of the background for the talk (in case people are interested)

http://www.cortex-online.org/cortex....s&folderID=180

it starts with the Coltheart editorial and then the forum is devoted to responses to his editorial and he briefly responds to the responses...

hope the link works out. it may need individual or institutional subscription (sorry, there isn't anything i can do about that unless people feel like PMing me their email address so I can send them a PDF).

i'll delete this post if the link doesn't work for me (it is the result of a search)

here goes...

Hey Alexandra,

When you mentioned Freud's theory being "there was a mental structure that not only made up plots etc for the other mental structure to 'watch'" I assumed that the mental structures were physically separate, not intertwined.

With fMRI, straight females have a very particular area of the brain that "lights up" when she smells a man. Lesbian brains don't do that. Nor do men's. So, I figured that if Freud was right, the areas of the brain he implied existed would light up in the fMRI scan.

As far as lie detecting goes, when people recall an event, many areas light up, some having to do with memory. When asked to make up a story, there were a couple other areas of the brain being used, in addition to some of the others used to recall a story. The researchers claimed lie detection was a piece of cake. Or, so says the reporter at livescience.com.

Sociopaths have a problem where a certain portion of the brain does not work, but it does work in the rest of us. This part was used for empathy. When we saw someone else experience an emotion, we felt it too, and that part of our brain lit up. The sociopath "felt" nothing, according to the fMRI.

I think you can do a search at livescience.com for old articles. Try a search on fMRI.

But maybe Perna is right. I can't figure out my dreams because I can't figure out real life, and dreams simply mimic life.

If that's true, I would be rally upset at my subconscious, and make him go sit in the corner!

Oh, and one more thing Perna... I had fantastic sex in my dreams for 7 years before I lost my virginity! However, I realize that's simply what guys do, and I'm sorry girls don't.

I've made it my life's goal to make sure women are equals in that area of life. (Woman, not women.) Maybe my girlfriend doesn't make as much money as I do, but she has way more fun in bed than I could ever dream of!

Here's another fMRI on college students brains as they performed two tasks, one designed to reward that student, the other designed to earn money for a charity.

The scans showed that a certain area of the brain was active when earning money for a charity. The researchers think this is a good test for altruism. When interviewed, the students who asserted that they were altruistic were usually the same students whose brain scan also showed them to be altruistic.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070122/...altruism1_dc_1

er...

the brain scans predicted self report of altruistic behaviour rather than predicting altruistic acts (they said that they didn't know whether these people actually were altruistic or whether they just wanted to convey themselves as being altruistic).

as such... it is unclear precisely what the findings mean...

further research etc etc

;-)

(one reason why i'm wary about bold claims that are made about the significance of neurological / genetic findings is because of the very real possibility of social darwinism / eugenics. if one thinks that we can find biological markers that predict peoples pathological behaviour then it often seems like a very small step to lock them up in order to prevent them offending or to abort them etc. the reason why this doesn't follow is because there is a considerable amount of neural plasticity and variation in the way that genes express in the phenotype. this is because the environment plays a significant role. a favourable environment can result in one twin not displaying schizophrenic behaviours while the other twin does and a favourable (rehabilitative) environment can also create lasting neurological changes)

tell yourself 'i'm altruistic' one hundred times etc etc

;-)

> When you mentioned Freud's theory being "there was a mental structure that not only made up plots etc for the other mental structure to 'watch'" I assumed that the mental structures were physically separate, not intertwined.

there isn't any scientific support for the following mental structures: the id, the ego, the superego, the dynamic unconscious. they are vivid metaphors but there are no such structures. they aren't neurological structures because there simply aren't any neurological structures that have those properties / play the relevant role. things get tricker if you consider them to be cognitive structures rather than neurological. the theory was that they were indeed supposed to interact. conflict between the id and the ego led to neuroticism (for example).

> With fMRI, straight females have a very particular area of the brain that "lights up" when she smells a man. Lesbian brains don't do that. Nor do men's.

one needs to be a bit careful with neurological findings. what they typically do is something along the lines of this: they take a group of people (ie 'straight female' or 'lesbian female' or whatever). the number of people in the group varies (sometimes it is fourteen, sometimes more, sometimes less). then they neuroimage their brains. then what they do is superimpose each brain on each other brain until they get the 'average straight female brain' or whatever. then they assign colours to numbers / frequencies and you get the pretty picture of the 'average straight female brain' or whatever. now, the first problem is that there is CONSIDERABLE variation between peoples brains. just generally speaking, i'm not talking about pathology or anything yet. i'm just saying that if you take a bunch of healthy people then you find CONSIDERABLE variation between their brains. so not a single person in the 'straight female brain' group actually does have a brain that looks like the picture of the 'average straight female brain'. as such... one can't necessarily posit 'that bit there lighting up' as a causal mechanism WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL.

> As far as lie detecting goes, when people recall an event, many areas light up, some having to do with memory. When asked to make up a story, there were a couple other areas of the brain being used, in addition to some of the others used to recall a story. The researchers claimed lie detection was a piece of cake. Or, so says the reporter at livescience.com.

what happens when people believe they are remembering but when the researchers know they are confabulating or vice versa? i haven't heard of neuroimaging lie detecting before... once again i'd be very cautious about this because of the implications for neuroimaging being used in a court of law when people are giving testemony (with respect to allegations of sexual abuse, for example). one would want to be jolly sure that this was reliable before one relied on it. i personally would be really very surprised if this was a litmus test. researchers do often draw hyperbolic implications from their studies in order to secure research grants but i do think it pays to be cautious.

> Sociopaths have a problem where a certain portion of the brain does not work, but it does work in the rest of us.

well... we know they have a problem because they don't exhibit prosocial behaviour like the rest of us seem to do. of course there must differences in inner mechanisms that cause the behavioural differences.

> This part was used for empathy.

sociopaths lack empathy definitionally.

i wonder whether people with autism had similar neuroimaging results? people with autism are often thought to lack empathy though they don't engage in anti-social behaviour the way sociopaths do... what would it mean if they had similar brains? what would it mean if they had 'normal' brains in that respect?

Couldn't ALL of dreaming be considered "dissociative?"