“This cognitive view contrasts sharply with the clinically derived theories of Freud (1900) and Jung (1974).. For Jung the symbols in dreams often express neglected parts of the personality or shared human wisdom stored in a collective unconscious.”
Dreaming as the Embodiment of Thoughts: A Widower’s Dreams of His Deceased Wife
Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Chicago, Illinois
G. William Domhoff, 2008
University of California, Santa Cruz
This article first presents a blind quantitative content analysis of a widower’s 143 dreams about his deceased wife, which he wrote down over a period of 22 years as a form of solace and remembrance. His dream journal is therefore a nonreactive archival document, free of any biasing effects attributable to the investigator. The content analysis shows that the dreams portray his main conceptions and concerns in regard to his deceased wife, which supports the cognitive theory of dreams developed by Calvin S. Hall, David Foulkes, and John Antrobus.
There are some changes in dream content over the years, such as a disappearance of dreams in which he portrays her as alive even though he realizes in the dream that she is deceased, and of dreams in which she returns to give him various reassurances. Many dreams accurately portray his deceased wife in varying stages of her final illness. There are fewer positive dreams in the second part of the series.
The dreamer usually interacts in a friendly way with his wife in the dreams, but she is often aggressive towards him. Having established the coherence of these dreams through content analysis, the article then presents an analysis of the unusual (anomalous) elements in the dreams, suggesting that some of them can be understood metaphorically within the context of the quantitative findings, but that others seem to make no immediate sense.
Overall, the article concludes that the dreams in this journal are a psychologically revealing embodiment of the dreamer’s thoughts, as demonstrated by their consistency with (1) waking thoughts he wrote down at the time he recorded some of the dreams and (2) a reminiscence of his marriage that he wrote 16 years after he first began keeping a record of the dreams.
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