Dreaming and the Self: New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion

4. Selfscape Dreams

CHAP TER 4 ———————— 鵽鵾———————— Selfscape Dreams DOUGLAS HOLLAN Dreams appear to serve many biological, psychological, and communicative functions.1 These include the imaginary fulfillment of unconscious wishes, the solving of problems, the integration of new experience into emerging schemas of self, the working through and mastery of traumatic experiences and other types of intrapsychic conflict, and the representation and expression of family and community relations. In this chapter, I explore the possibility that some types of dreams—those that are imagistically and emotionally vivid and easy to recall—serve yet another purpose. Some dreams reflect back to the dreamer how his or her current organization of self relates various parts of itself to its body, and to other people and the world. I call these “selfscape” dreams. They provide the mind with a continuously updated map of the self’s current state of affairs: its relative vitality or decrepitude, its relative wholeness or division, its relative closeness or estrangement from others, its perturbation by conscious and unconscious streams of emotions, and so on. They are one of the ways in which the mind/body seems to assess itself. Selfscape dreams, I suggest, will be found everywhere in the world because they serve a basic psychological function. Their content, on the other hand, varies considerably because the relationships of part-self to part-self and of self to world they map and represent will vary considerably from culture to 61 culture and from person to person even within the same culture. My examples of dreams from Sulawesi and the United States will illustrate this variation in how the self is constituted and represented to itself in different cultures, but also suggest the similarity in psychological function I have outlined here. I focus on dreams that are vivid, both emotionally and imagistically, and easy to recall—at least in the short term. Cultures vary in the extent to which they encourage the remembering of dreams. And we will find much variation in the ability of individuals to remember dreams even within given cultures. Nevertheless, my work in Sulawesi and the United States suggests that most people experience dreams that cry out for their attention, at least occasionally. These are the dreams that awaken people in the middle of the night or the emotional residues of which carry over into waking life of the following days, weeks, or years. In both Sulawesi and the United States, I have been struck by how often the manifest content and imagery of such dreams can be related to the dreamer’s life circumstances and to his or her current conscious or unconscious state of mind, body, self, and emotion.2 In this chapter, I illustrate how selfscape dreams in two very different parts of the world map out the relations of self to body and to other objects and people. I begin by reviewing work that has influenced my thinking about selfscape dreams. I then discuss how and why I collected the dreams I present here, before turning to an analysis of the dreams of two particular men, one from Sulawesi (Nene’na Limbong) and one from the United States (Steve). I conclude with a summary of my argument and a discussion of its implications. Background My perspective on dreams has been influenced by a number of researchers. Following Pinchas Noy (1969, 1979) and a number of other scholars who share similar ideas,3 I assume that the nondiscursive, emotional, and imaginal processes chacracteristic of dreaming are not necessarily more primitive than nor inferior to the cognitive, conceptual, and discursive mental activities charactistic of waking thought and consciousness. Further, I assume that while dreaming may come to represent, and be implicated in, processes of psychological regression, they also may play a central role in psychological growth and development. As Noy points out, processes such as displacement, condensation, and symbolization may be especially well suited to represent similarity and difference in the construction and modification of self-related schemas, and they capture well the timeless nature of the experience of self-continuity. Noy also points out that the nonverbal and imaginal 62 Douglas Hollan processes characteristic of dreaming seem to develop, mature, and become more complex over time, like other cognitive and perceptual processes. My thinking about dreams also has been influenced by recent work in the neurosciences. In Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Anotonio Damasio reminds us just how...