The Mindbrain and Dreams

An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation

Mark J. Blechner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815394570
• eBook ISBN: 9781351185653
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Mindbrain and Dreams: An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation, Mark J. Blechner argues that the mind and brain should be understood as a single unit – the "mindbrain" – which manipulates our raw perceptions of the world and reshapes that world through dreams, thoughts, and artistic creation.

This book explores how dreams are key to understanding mental processes, and how working with dreams clinically with individuals and groups provides an essential route towards achieving transformation within the psychoanalytic process. Covering such key topics as knowledge, emotion, metaphor, and memory, this book sets out a radical new agenda for understanding the importance of dreams in human thought and their clinical importance in psychoanalysis. Blechner builds on his previous work and takes it much further, drawing on the latest neuroscientific findings to set out a new way of how the mindbrain constructs reality, while providing guidance on how best to help people understand their dreams.

The Mindbrain and Dreams: An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation will appeal to psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cognitive neuroscientists who want new ways to explore how people think and understand the world.

Chapter 1

Introduction

It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Let us start with the word “mindbrain.” I made it up, but not out of whole cloth. It is a word that has been gestating for a long time. When we say “mind,” we mean the collection of mental processes and faculties. When we say “brain,” we mean the bodily organ located in our cranium which most scientists think is responsible for the processes we call mind. We hear that distinction from our earliest years, and so it evolves into a conceptual distinction that is hard to shake.

Descartes argued that mind was separate from brain, and we have been wrangling with Descartes’s dualism for 400 years. Modern neuroscientists find it incompatible with scientific evidence; we are quite sure today that Descartes was wrong that the mind or soul was located in the pineal gland. We have been moving ever closer to viewing the unity of the mind and brain. Linguistically, it has become quite common to write about the “mind/brain.”¹ But that forward slash retained the trace of dualism. Since the words “mind” and “brain” continually force us into Descartes’s dualism, no matter how much we try to escape from it, we must take linguistic action and create a new word that will enable us to think new thoughts.

In my book The Dream Frontier (2001), I wrote:

The aim of modern neuroscience, as well as Freud’s aim in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, is to be able to account for mental events in terms of neurobiological processes, and vice versa, so that ultimately we will understand them as unitary phenomena. And so, many of us have come to talk about the “mind/brain.” This compound term is the closest we can get in English these days to bypass Cartesian dualism. Maybe someday we will have a single word for the mind/brain. Perhaps we will say “mind/brain” often enough, and it will be slurred into a new word like “mibron.” Or maybe a completely new word will be coined. Maybe someone will create such a new word in a dream.

I will no longer wait for “someone.” I have decided to take the linguistic bull by the horns, coin the new word, and use it over and over. You may ask, “How far is mindbrain from mind/brain?” My answer is,

Very far. Get rid of the forward slash, and you may free human thought from the semantic trap of dualism. By the time you reach the end of this book, see whether you have gotten used to “mindbrain” and have found your thinking about the mind and brain restructured.

Semantic liberation is conceptual liberation.

“Mindbrain” is not just a new word. It is what Foucault called an episteme. Foucault wrote (1972, p. 197): “I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within.” New epistemes allow or restrict new thoughts and new statements; this is the case with “mindbrain.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us (Smart, 2017):

Idiomatically we do use “She has a good mind” and “She has a good brain” interchangeably, but we would hardly say “Her mind weighs fifty ounces”.

But consider this: we can say “She has a good mindbrain” and we can say “Her mindbrain weighs fifty ounces.” As stated above, the lack of a unifying term propagates the dualism of mind and brain, and my hope is that my neologism of “mindbrain” will allow us to think in new ways.²

I would like in this book also to outline new ways of understanding dreams and what they can tell us about the operation of the mindbrain. Dreams are given short shrift or neglected completely by most cognitive neuroscientists. Why is dreaming so ignored?

One reason is that it is hard to study people while they are asleep. No one has reported the content of a dream while it is happening. Part of the dreaming mindbrain is set up to inhibit motor action while we are dreaming; this is a good thing, for it prevents us from acting out our dreams while they are happening. But so far, we only have reports of dreams after the fact. Sometimes, if we are awakened in the middle of a dream, there is virtually no time lag between dream and report; but even then, we do not know how close the dream report is to the actual dream experience. Therefore, research psychologists have been skittish about studying dreams and incorporating observations about dreams into general psychological theories; their rationale is that the data may not be very reliable. We have access to memories of dreams, they claimed, but not the dreams themselves as they are happening.

This may no longer be true. I wrote in The Dream Frontier (Blechner, 2001) that we only had access to memories of dreams. No one had been able to observe another person’s dream as it is happening, except in the science-fiction film Brainstorm. Since then, however, a group of Japanese neuroscientists (Horikawa et al., 2013) have been able to record magnetic resonance images (MRI) while someone is asleep and determine from the brain scans some of the content that the person is dreaming. The prospect of being able to track the actual narrative of a person’s dream in real time seems a possibility in the not-too-distant future.

In the meantime, if the content and structure of dreams are subject to uncertainty, they are nevertheless important. About one third of our lives is spent asleep, and much of that time is spent dreaming. It is risky to exclude all that mental activity from our psychological theories. I would like in this book to address some of the essential characteristics of dreams and dream thinking. In my view, they are essential to our theories of thinking, experiencing, consciousness, emotion, metaphor, defenses, and problem solving. I will try to address some of the ways that dreams expand our understanding of all these subfields in psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

How the mindbrain transforms the world

Freud believed that the dream starts with the latent dream thought, which can often be an unacceptable wish that emerges during the night while we are sleeping. In order to stay asleep, the mindbrain disguises the latent dream thought by transforming it through what Freud called “the mechanisms of the dreamwork.” These mechanisms include condensation, displacement, symbolization, and pictorialization.

Yet many dreams are not very disguised. People who work with dreams clinically day after day are astonished at how little disguise is applied to some of the themes that are important to the dreamer and would be expected to be taboo. Freud did not know, as we do today, that we dream regularly through the night, much more often than we consciously realize. Dreaming occurs during most REM periods and also occurs during non-REM periods. Since dreams are such a regular occurrence during the night, it seems less sensible to look for a unitary cause of dreaming. If we keep asking “Why do we dream?” then we shall have to ask also “Why do we think?” In neither case can we expect a single answer. We know that disguise occurs in some waking thought, through ego defenses (A. Freud, 1936; McWilliams, 1994) and what Sullivan (1953) called “selective inattention,” but we do not assume a high level of disguise and censorship in all waking thoughts. The same may well be true of dreams.

The main source of the difficulty we have in understanding dreams is that dreams are not concerned with communicability (Blechner, 2001). This view of dreams shifts our view of the unconscious; it is not only a place of churning drives that are kept out of awareness by repression. That may be a part of it, but not the main part of it. The bulk of our thinking is unconscious, and part of what keeps it unconscious, besides dynamic repression, is that it has meaning without communicability.

If we do not agree with Freud that the mechanisms of the dreamwork serve to disguise a hidden wish, we nevertheless can appreciate Freud’s extraordinary documentation and analysis of the mechanisms of the dreamwork, which laid the groundwork for our understanding how the mindbrain can register and transform reality. In dreams, we see the mindbrain reconstructing the world – in condensation, different objects can be chunked together. In displacement, important things are minimized, and small details are put in the foreground. Things, body parts, emotions, and almost anything else can be symbolized in a different form. Words, their homonyms, and pictures are interchanged. Freud (1900a) listed many ways these processes appear in dreams.

In this book, I will extend Freud’s observations of how the mindbrain perceives, distorts, and transforms the world. In doing so, I will review and update Freud’s mechanisms of the dreamwork, such as condensation, displacement, rebus,³ and symbolization, but add mechanisms that Freud did not address by name, such as the many forms of metaphor and metonymy. How does the mindbrain, especially in dreams, represent meaning metaphorically? How does the mindbrain create new metaphors and compound metaphors? How is the dreaming mindbrain a natural punster?

Dreams are connected with all the arts, especially literary, musical, and visual arts. The kinds of transformations that come naturally to artists often appear in dreams, even the dreams of people who have no inclination in waking life toward artistic creation. As the poet Jean Paul Richter observed, when we dream, we are “involuntary artists” (Darwin, 1902).

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the human mindbrain was called an information processor – it is that, but the mindbrain is also an information transformer that re-represents the world (Dror, 2005). These processes are vividly seen in dreams and artworks.

Linguistic and nonlinguistic thoughts and transformations of the world

There is a tendency in many models of intellectual development to see the first years of mental life as preverbal or prelinguistic, that is, involving images and emotions before we have the words to describe them. When humans develop the capacity for language, the preverbal is thought to give way to the predominance of linguistic thoughts and communication of those thoughts with words.

In my view, nonlinguistic thought is not superseded by linguistic thought (Blechner et al., 1976; Gardner, 1983, 1985). Instead, nonlinguistic thought continues to evolve well into adulthood, and the mindbrain becomes increasingly adept at representing the world, making calculations, and developing ideas without the intervention of language. These nonlinguistic mechanisms of thought evolve into high levels of complexity and sophistication. They are most easily seen in our dreams and in artworks, but they permeate all our mental activity. Musicians are especially attuned to the mindbrain’s ability for complex thoughts without words. As composer Ned Rorem wrote:

Dreams are dreams, with their own integrity, not symbols designed to keep us asleep. Like music, whose sense and strength and very reason-for-being can never be explained by mere intelligence, the meaning of dreams forever evades us, not because that meaning is too vague for words but because it is too precise for words.

(Rorem, 1994, p. 517)

One of the aims of this book is to document and analyze many forms of nonlinguistic thought. In The Dream Frontier (Blechner, 2001), I made the claim that dreams can produce ideas that are “extralinguistic.” Dreams can be reflective not just of early modes of thought (prelinguistic), but of fully developed, advanced kinds of thinking that are not constrained by language (extralinguistic) and may be difficult or impossible to express in words.

Dreams can be extralinguistic in several ways. They can create objects for which we have no name. They can also be extralinguistic in that they can step beyond the bounds of conventional metaphor. They can create entirely new metaphors, and they can also extend and combine commonly used metaphors in brand new ways. These complex compound metaphors can be represented in a dream without any words, but packed together into a single image (see Chapter 5, p. 61 for a dream that combines four metaphors).

Metaphors and puns are usually thought to be linguistic, but in dreams and artworks, we also see the mindbrain creating nonlinguistic metaphors and puns, including what I call homoforms (in the visual realm) and homomelodies (in the musical realm). There can also be metaphors from one sensory modality to another, “cross-modal” metaphors. We will look into synesthesia and synkinesia, which may be the mindbrain’s wired-in mechanisms of cross-modal metaphor.

Psychological defenses

Psychological defenses transform the world through many mental processes, including hiding information, separating emotions and thoughts, transforming an emotion into its opposite, and many other processes. The defenses may look like a different subject matter from the dreamwork, but the dreamwork and defenses may be part of a larger group of mental mechanisms that transform the world and our experience of it. Erik Erikson (1954) led the way on this subject, as I show in Chapter 10. Erikson taught us how to chart dreams according to several precise dimensions (population, affect, time, and space), a very valuable approach to exploring a person’s unique way of organizing the world in dreams and waking life.

Erikson’s approach leads logically into a consideration of the operation of psychological defenses in dreams. Anna Freud, who wrote a classic text on psychological defenses, thought that most defenses could not be observed in dreams, except for the mechanisms of the dreamwork described by her father, Sigmund Freud. I think she was wrong, and I explore how the mindbrain represents defensive operations three ways in dreams (see Chapter 11).

Dream translators, dream immersers, and dream doubters

This book also has a clinical side, and the second section of the book addresses clinical matters. Freud and Jung were the twentieth century’s pioneers in exploring how dreams are important in human psychology. Together, they led us to wonder about what dreams mean and how best to discover that meaning.

Freud was a dream translator. He said that dreams were meant to hide their meaning. One needed a procedure to decode them, and he thought that the waking thoughts tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I How the mindbrain transforms the world
• PART II Working with dreams clinically
• PART III Dreams, knowledge, memory, emotion, and the mindbrain
• List of dreams in The Mindbrain and Dreams
• References
• Index