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Chapter Ten - Dream Varieties

from Part II - Dreams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2023

Patrick McNamara
Affiliation:
Boston University School of Medicine
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Summary

It is not possible to understand dreams unless we become familiar with the whole terrain of dreams. We have discussed ordinary run-of-the-mill dreams that are associated with both REM and NREM sleep states. But there is a very large variety of dream types reported by people. To build an adequate understanding of dreams and a testable theory of dreams, we therefore need to marshal all of the salient facts concerning dreams, and those facts must include the chracteristics of a wide variety of dream types. Scientists who study dreams agree that dreams vary substantially in terms of their content and formal phenomenologic features. For example, children’s dreams are very different from adult’s dreams, and men’s dreams differ substantially from women’s dreams. There are nightmares, “big” or emotionally significant dreams, lucid dreams, shared or mutual dreams, twin dreams (dreams reported by twins), “spiritual” dreams, precognitive or prophetic dreams, visitation dreams (where deceased loved ones appear in a dream), and many other types. Dreams also vary by historical period: Dreams of the ancient Greeks and Romans are different than dreams of people in the Rennaissance period of European history. Dreams also vary by culture: Dreams of people living in traditional socieities are very different from the dreams of modernized peoples. Similarly, dreams of people living in Islamic cultures differ from the dreams of people living in cultures where other religions predominate and so on. All of this should be pretty obvious, but dream variation is an understudied topic in the field of sleep and dream studies. While the variation in dream content and types has been documented, there is little discussion of the theoretical importance of that variation. The fundamental theoretical importance of dream variation, I will argue, is that it suggests that dream function is probably multiple. Dreams do not have only one function. No one theory can account for the huge variation in dream conent. The evident fact that there are multiple dream types is also consistent with the idea that dreams are products of the social brain and function, at least in part, to shape, alter, influence, or manipulate social relationships. Now that is NOT all that dreams do. It is likely that dreams transcend mundane social functions in multiple ways, but we simply do not know enough about these suprarational functions of dreams to comment upon them intelligently. I urge further research on so-called anomalous phenomena and dreams, but I focus here on the available empirical data we have on hand.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Grunebaum, G., & Callois, R. (1966). The Dream and Human Societies. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobson, J. A., Pace-Schott, E. F., & Stickgold, R. (2000b). Dreaming and the brain: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 793842.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, H. T. The Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination and Consciousness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
McNamara, P., Pae, V., Teed, B., Tripodis, Y., & Sebastian, A. (2016). Longitudinal studies of gender differences in cognitional process in dream content. Journal of Dream Research, 9(1). doi.org/10.11.588/ijord.2016.Google Scholar

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  • Dream Varieties
  • Patrick McNamara, Boston University School of Medicine
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
  • Online publication: 06 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009208840.013
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  • Dream Varieties
  • Patrick McNamara, Boston University School of Medicine
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
  • Online publication: 06 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009208840.013
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Dream Varieties
  • Patrick McNamara, Boston University School of Medicine
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
  • Online publication: 06 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009208840.013
Available formats
×