Dreams, hallucinations and daydreams (original) (raw)
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PERSONALITY AS A SUBJECT OF LIFE: PROBLEMS OF HEALTH AND DISEASE , 2021
Imagination, fantasies, dreams, and hallucinations are contiguous mental processes that reflect various forms of image processing at the internal level. The ability to maintain boundaries between them, reflecting as they do either external or profoundly internal, subjective reality (reality testing), is considered to be one of the most widely accepted criteria of mental health. Nevertheless, traditionally the s e proc e s s e s have be en inve s tiga t ed independently by different authors adopting different approaches, and there is a discernible lack of studies dedicated to the comparative analysis of these phenomena, both in their theoretical and empirical aspects. At the same time, such data could be used to develop diagnostic methods of investigating mental processes in normal conditions as well as in cases of mental disorders. The aim of this study is to investigate people's common ideas about imagination, fantasies, dreams and hallucinations, as well as the subjective experience of them in comparison with each other. The study's group of participants consisted of 45 nominally mentally healthy people (32 women and 13 men) aged between 17 and 29 years old. The following methods were used during the study: a semistructured interview aimed at studying the respondents' ideas about imagination, fantasy, dreams and hallucinations, and visual drawings of the forms, which these processes took. According to the results of the study, in the case of 15% of the respondents, their ideas about imagination, fantasies, dreams and hallucinations differed from their scientific definitions. The drawings of the images of imagination, fantasies, dreams and hallucinations varied in terms of emotional experience. The more the mental process is voluntary and subjectively controlled, the more these images are associated with positive emotions. In particular, images of imagination are mainly associated with a positive emotional charge, images of fantasy more often evoke positive emotions, but also ambivalent experiences, and drawings of the images of dreams and hallucinations are most often associated with negative emotions.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy
What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naive realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences.
THE LONG SOUGHT AFTER DREAM-MAKER
The Jungian school of Analytical Psychology has been, since its inception, trying to conceptualize why dream are a product of the unconscious mind. There’s an artistic matrix, which I have named the UNIVERSAL MATHEMATICAL MATRIX, which when discussing dreams I call the DREAM-MAKER. I will discuss this image extensively below. When I think about the dream I think of it as the product of the whole psyche: i.e. ego-consciousness and the unconscious mind not just the unconscious mind; for the reason that, ego-consciousness is needed in the process to discriminate what the unconscious mind is conveying to ego-consciousness. When a person is sleeping ego-consciousness is a captive audience. It is not allow too interact with the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind during sleep has total domination over the ego. Dreams are what the unconscious mind conveys, via chaos, to ego-consciousness about itself. Dreams are all about symbolism and the individual has to learn how to read his dreams via his understanding of symbolism: i.e. what do the symbols mean to ego-consciousness? Within mere seconds of awakening from sleep ego-consciousness has the knee-jerk reaction of putting the chaos of the phantasmagoria of the unconscious mind into concretize form, which is called the DREAM; therefore, it is both halves of the psyche: i.e. ego-consciousness and the unconscious mind that produces the dream. During the experience of the dream itself, while sleeping, ego-consciousness has absolutely no idea of what is being conveyed to it. Furthermore, ego-consciousness’ knee-jerk reaction to concretize the phantasmagoria of its experience of the unconscious mind is merely the bare bones of the dream. It is the individual’s interpretation and amplification of the dream, which is collectively called the dream. The school of Analytical Psychology developed by CG JUNG cannot be blamed for not having as yet found the elusive DREAM-MAKER; though, I had anticipated that Jungian psychoanalysts would have by now honed in on my researches and realized that the UNIVERSAL MATHEMATICAL MATRIX (10 x 10 matrix) is the sleeping psyche's DREAM-MAKER. This paper is not going to be long; for the reason that, my research papers that explain the development and use of this matrix in ancient literature, artworks and monuments, are online free, for those that want access to them. I have revised this paper extensively.
Dreams as Fictional Remembering
Psychoanalytuic Inquiry, 2018
During dreaming, the brain inhibits input from the senses and blocks motor output. The miracle is that, despite a lack of contact with the senses and a temporary paralysis, the brain continues to generate densely meaningful first-person scenarios. What justifies this purely imaginative procedure that leaves people so vulnerable to predators? A great deal of neuroanatomical evidence suggests that during REM sleep, the brain prunes exuberant synaptic connections. In so doing, the brain simplifies overly complex models of the world formed during the day to deal with noisy scenarios and renders them more generalizable to the future. Freud likened the mandate of dreaming to the task an illustrator faces in coming up with a single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. In my view, this process of condensation is not a method of disguise, as Freud believed, but the very function of dreaming, and it has a temporal signature. Dreams reveal and simplify past happenings by generating tight fictional narratives around similar schemas, exposing by analogy the deep invariant structures of the stories by which people organize their lives.
Creativity and Chaos in Waking and Dreaming States
NeuroQuantology, 2012
Dynamics of creative mental activity are examined in waking and dreaming processes which manifest beyond normative waking consciousness. Some consider such phenomena to be pathological or meaningless. Alternatively they may be viewed in new and healthier ways, in the context of adaptive mental controls, using nonlinear dynamical/chaos theory. The first example involves the innovativeness reported with mild mood elevation in bipolar mood disorders, linked to a compensatory advantage model of everyday creativity. With adequate controls, such mood elevation may open adaptive creative mental possibilities (in fact, for all of us). Tension between divergent and convergent thinking-as noted by J.P. Guilford, and common to many models of creative process-can further "edge of chaos" states and raise the odds of bifurcation to new and creative chaotic attractors. The second example involves REM sleep and dream phenomena, where the self-organizing brain coordinates the dream's component parts to generate unusual dream narratives. However fanciful, such divergent and condensed dream content may lead to creative insights and adaptive narratives (there are famous examples) in the light of day, when interpreted or further developed, by bringing convergent processing to divergent processing. In each case, one finds the abnormal is not necessarily pathological-and sometimes can be usefully exceptional. One consequence of a dynamical view and these examples is the need, in all of us, for greater openness to experience, and acceptance of a greater divergence of expression and behavior (vs. conformity) in ourselves, our culture, and our world. NeuroQuantology 2012; 2: 164-176 "The clown, the trickster, or shape changer becomes the personification of chaos for cultures all over the world….the trickster is also identified as the bringer of culture, the creator of order, a shaman or "super-shaman"….who defies convention, subverts the system, breaks down the power structure, and gives birth to new ideas."
For this project, I wanted to look at the ideas of Dreams and Nightmares. I knew this would be a challenging as it's definitely a very abstract theme with a very wide spectrum of things to consider; because of this, I decided to narrow down the breadth of the project to look at the power of water. This included thinking about how water has often been considered to be a living thing, or certainly to have the power of sustaining, bestowing and even restoring life-as well as being capable of taking it: maintaining its drowning/soothing capabilities. This certainly took a much darker turn when I did my photoshoot, as I started to think about potential dangers when relaxing in the bath. This motif has been used over and over again in popular culture, most famously in The Nightmare on Elm Street (fig.1), where sleep deprived Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub and almost drowns. On the other hand, the idea of relaxing in a bath is common to all of us, after a long day at school or at work the bath is the perfect place to wind down. So, in light of these two ideas, perhaps I concentrated more on the dark and light energies of a single element. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Symbolism and Expressionism introduced dream imagery into visual art. Expressionism was also a literary movement, and included the later work of the playwright August Strindberg, who coined the term "dream play" for a style of narrative that did not distinguish between fantasy and reality. I feel that I've incorporated this into my photographs especially, as although a rather mundane scene of a girl in a bathtub, I feel the light and editing of the photographs procure an eerie and dream-like vibe—the viewer could then continue to question the water, is it dangerous? is it healing? and then further ask themselves what she's doing there. This strongly reminded me of Millais' Ophelia (fig.2) which depicts a girl floating in water, at first the viewer is captivated by her beauty to the point where the ignore the idea of her having committed suicide, in considering this kind of concept I was convinced that playing with the idea of figures in ominously enigmatic water was what I wanted to explore and illustrate. Initially for observational drawing purposes, I drew portraits of other girls trying to depict subtle emotions, but I felt that this above everything in the entire project needed the most work and was the most difficult. I then looked at Egon Schiele's Harbour of Trieste (fig.3) and fell in love with the linear depiction of the water's movement. Egon Schiele (June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918) was a figurative painter and probably the most daring and avant-garde artist of his time, best known today for his unrestrained explorations of sexuality and therefore, considered a great figure of scandal. His unique artistry challenges the viewer with a new expressive pictorial language that was unique from Klimt and or Kokoschka's. He produced works that portrayed his rejection of morality in art, centralising his focus on prostitution, eroticism and pornography. However, Schiele was an excellent draftsman meaning that the pure delicacy of his line forces the viewer to accommodate his striking and provocative images. His still harbour scene is animated with the jagged yet sinuous lines flowing down the image. Having always been a fan of Schiele, I felt that this painting, even if land/seascapes weren't his speciality, still boasts his ability to combine technical virtuosity and aesthetic beauty which resolved the conflict between decorative abstraction and conventional realism that plagued Klimt's figural paintings. It was difficult to obtain the exact right colours for this copy, nonetheless it was a interesting exercise in attempting the subtle gradients of colours that make the water appear to be glowing. The verticality of the linear work in Schiele's image carried me to look at Max Uhlig's ink drawings (fig.4). Max Uhlig was a painter, graphic artist, draughtsman and printmaker from Dresden; his works consist of a wide range of motifs and techniques, with landscapes and portraits as the key subjects. He circumvented aesthetic norms by developing his own style based on the abstractive tendency of modern art. He
Philosophy International Journal, 2021
This short article analyses the relationship between dreams and stories and the underlying existential significance of both. Man is not the only animal who dreams, but he is the only living being who can communicate to his fellow creatures what he dreams and invents, through words and images.