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June 28, 2006

In Conversation on the psychology of dreams:

marinela_sleep.jpgABC Radio National's In Conversation has an interview with psychologist Susan Gilchrist who has been studying the psychology of dreams and emotion.

As part of her research, she's been asking people to record and rate and emotional content of their dreams, as well as the emotional impact of the events during the week.

One interesting finding is that the emotional theme of a dream may be more influenced by the average emotional experience during the past week, rather than just the day before.

Gilchrist seems to be taking an empirical approach to an area that was traditionally tackled by Freudian analysis, and was subsequently
ignored as unresearchable.


Link to transcript and audio of Susan Gilchrist interview.

—Vaughan.

Posted at June 28, 2006 08:30 AM

Comments

Heida Maria Sigurdardottir says:

In the interview she was talking about some sort of encrypted messages from the unconscious. To me that seems like a bit of fluff...

Comment posted at June 28, 2006 04:26 PM

Kschltr says:

Freudian interpretations and psychoanalytical approaches are NOT unresearchable. One must just consider the scope of the research and determine to develop a method to test one or more hypotheses from a statistical plethora of possibilities.

Dreams can be researched in many ways. Yes, dreams are often indicative of unconscious processing of issues which lie close to the surface of our awareness in our normal waking state. Dreams are also often prophetic in nature and indicative of associative spacetime processes which give rise to such phenomena as Deja Vu, Precognition, as well as contributing to transient hyperalertness, suspiciousness, paranoia, and frank hallucinations when folks do really stupid stuff as was suggested by the Interviewer, like take large quantities of Melatonin and have dreams while awake.

Thin and THICK Boundaries? Give me a break! But yeah, for lack of a better set of nomenclature, folks with potentially loose associations, shakey ego boundaries, and prone to emotional, and or cognitive upset... Or, schizotypal vs. frank schizophrenia types?

Later, gotta go.. But yeah I've studied this for many, many years.... Disappointing to say the least...

Comment posted at June 30, 2006 03:08 PM

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