The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Dreams play an important role in psychological theory, not so much as subjects in their own right, as because they seem to validate the unconscious (or subconscious) mind, wherein dreams allegedly originate. This entity, which underlies our conscious will, is supposedly built into the personality of the individual. Even though dream content is no longer given the importance it once had (in Freudianism, for example), dreams themselves help to justify the overall psychological point of view about what explains human behavior: the interaction between the unconscious and conscious minds.

But where dreams originate would seem to depend on when we dream. In other words, dreaming while we are asleep proves that the unconscious mind really exists. Many studies, most of them devoted to exploring the phenomenon of “REM” sleep, seem to indicate that this is so. Of course, all of them depend on awakening the sleeping subject in order to determine if dreaming was actually occurring, since only the conscious mind can communicate with the outside world. But this limitation makes it impossible to establish whether or not dreaming occurs in a different location than the unconscious.

Sleep is a coma-like state which differs from death mainly in that we can be roused from it. This similarity to death is what caused mankind to resist notions of the unconscious. Dreams, like the visions of prophecy, were thought to be packaged and delivered to the dreamer from without – from divine sources, mainly. It defied common sense that the sleep coma could be capable of assembling the characters, the narrative, the heart-pounding drama of a dream.

There are psychologists who reject all talk of “mind” as ephemera. But radical behaviorism -- the notion that people are just stimulus-response mechanisms – “machines made out of meat” -- lies at the bottom of a cliff over which most psychologists would not like to jump. They would prefer not to have their discipline limited to studying rats in a maze.

Since we can’t know if dreams originate in the “ether” of our unconscious minds, we must accept the alternative hypothesis, no matter how unlikely: dreams are artifacts of our conscious minds. In fact, it would appear that dreams are our conscious minds, reassembling themselves from out of the “buzzing confusion” of our internal physiological stimuli and the external irritations of the outside world. They are products of our present but we “remember” them as past events and so situate them in our sleep.

This explanation of where dreams come from gives us no new explanation of their narrative content. That matter still rests with the poets, artists, social scientists, and even psychologists. All it does is blow way the myth of the unconscious mind. And it leaves the biggest mystery of all – the origin of self-consciousness – still unanswered.