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Freud expected in the way of  associations . Now that the false
memory phenomenon is so well known, it is easy for us to see what
mischief Freud s  scientific precautions must have cost him. To
avoid repeating these mistakes, we need to be much more critical,
and much more versatile, than Freud was.
One way to free the formal approach to dreaming for immunity
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Why did the analysis of dream content fail to become a science?
from the charge of self-fulfilling prophecy is to keep our mind
genuinely open with respect to psychological meaning, to resist
any formulaic approach to interpretation, and to refuse any
interpretation that is not straightforward and tied to physiology.
This means that we have to settle for less than Freud wanted. As
made clear in Chapter 11, there remain many aspects of dreaming
that we cannot explain today, although, as this book attempts to
show, many aspects of dream content can be explained today using
the formal approach. Those that cannot be explained will have to
wait. But, with the field moving as fast as it is today, the wait will not
be long, and it will be worthwhile because we will finally obtain
what Freud could only dream of: a psychology that is perspicacious
and free from doubt.
Brain mind isomorphism and the science
of dreaming
The word  isomorphism means similarity of form or shape, and
brain mind isomorphism that every form of mental activity has a
similar form of brain activity. Therefore, if we detect a dream form,
we can seek a corresponding brain form. In dreaming, the simplest
example is activation. To explain the awakening of the mind in sleep
we should expect to find a similar (but not of course identical)
awakening of the brain during sleep. As we see in Chapter 3, we do
find this  the brain is electrically activated in sleep and, when this
happens, the mind is turned on too. Naturally. It s that simple.
A more detailed example should clinch our point. If, in our
exploration of the brain in sleep, we find physiological evidence that
memory systems are disabled, we should expect to find that
memory is altered during dreaming and that dreams would be
difficult to recall. We already know that the second prediction is
true, but just how true we cannot yet say precisely. The first
prediction has, however, scarcely been entertained. Is it generally
true that I cannot exercise my episodic memory when I am
dreaming? Does this affect dream content?
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Dreaming
These examples are chosen to highlight two important points about
the doctrine of brain mind isomorphism. One is that it is just as
fruitful to map from the brain to the mind as it is to map from the
mind to the brain. The second is that we must choose carefully
the appropriate level of each domain at which to focus our
isomorphic efforts. In the beginning, and we are still very much at
the beginning, we will find that global and psychologically general
levels will be more generous than detailed and psychologically
personal ones. Individual differences have never been generous to
psychology. And how many of them are real? Although it may
disappoint you if you hanker after a fortune-telling interpretation
of your dreams, our attention to the mirrored formal aspects is
necessary to the scientific understanding of dreaming as a universal
process. Later in this book we will see how it can be used to help
individual dream interpretation by relieving it of an impossibly
difficult task and helping us to discover the usually clear emotional
salience of our dreams.
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Why did the analysis of dream content fail to become a science?
Chapter 3
How is the brain activated
in sleep?
Consciousness is so rapidly and dramatically reduced during sleep
that it was natural to assume that the brain simply turned off at
sleep onset and turned on again just before awakening. Indeed,
some people do sleep all night in that deep, oblivious, and
uninterrupted way. Some, but by no means all. And no one sleeps
that way all the time. There are periods of life change and stress
when mental activity seems to go on all night. Are these to be
attributed to our not really being able to sleep at such times?
Perhaps. But what about dreaming? How could such elaborate
and exciting mental activity arise in an inactive brain?
This question was answered in a wide variety of erroneous ways.
As dream recall was generally poor and needed awakening to be
present at all, many scientists  Sigmund Freud among them 
wrongly assumed that dreaming occurred only in the instant before
awakening. Now it is certainly true that dreaming can occur just
before awakening. And we have already noted that dreaming can
be so unpleasantly exciting as to provoke awakening, leading to
another erroneous assumption: that all dreams are unpleasantly
exciting, i.e. all dreams are characterized by negative emotions such
as anger, anxiety, or fear.
Another erroneous theory was that dreaming arose in response to
external sensory stimuli that were strong enough to activate the
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brain, but not strong enough to produce arousal. Again it is true
that train whistles, indigestion, and spouses coming home late can
influence dream content. But they often don t, and dreaming
doesn t depend on such stimuli even when they do gain entry to
the sleeping brain.
It turns out that most dreaming occurs under the calm cover
of sleep and is the result of a built-in mechanism of brain
activation that operates in all of us every night of our lives. It
is the goal of this chapter to explain how the brain activation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]