Possible explanations
Interobjects may have an elementary function in human thought. By transgressing the normal mental categories described by Eleanor Rosch, interobjects may be the origin of new ideas that would be harder to come by using only fully formed, secondary process formations. They may be one example of "Oneiric Darwinism" [7] in which new thought-mutations are created during dream-life and rejected or retained in waking life depending on their usefulness.
Jung [8] held that if the dreamer walked about and acted like a person awake, we would have the clinical picture of schizophrenia. Hobson [9] concluded that dreams are more like delirium than schizophrenia. Both Jung and Hobson focus on how dreams are defective forms of normal waking life, but in dreams, our minds are in some ways able to function better than in waking life. Interobjects show the ability of the dreaming mind to notice how things that are very different nevertheless have features in common. The mind then creates a new category, which we might never have noticed in our waking life. The woman who dreamed of a "cellphone-baby" was creating a new category: small objects that are held close to the body and that make noise at surprising and embarrassing times.
Interobjects have been used in advertising. A set of rules, known as a "Replacement template," enabled a computer to create interobjects:
"Given a product (P) with a trait (T), the subject is asked to come up with a creative idea for an ad that conveys the message that P has T. In a visual format, an object S (symbol), which is universally identified with T, is replaced with P. The effect is enhanced if S is placed in a situation in which T is essential. Moreover, the replacement operation can be iterated: Rather than P one can use parts of it, or aspects of it, or objects associated with it, to replace the corresponding elements associated with S." [10] When asked to produce an ad for the World Tennis Cup tournament in Jerusalem, the computer generated a mosque with a dome that had a tennis ball texture. In advertising on-time performance for an airline, the computer generated a cuckoo-clock in which a jumbo jet pops out of the clock instead of a cuckoo. Both of these creations – the mosque/tennis ball and the jumbo jet/cuckoo clock – are interobjects.
Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks underlying principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science.
A lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment. Lucid dreaming has been studied and reported for many years. Prominent figures from ancient to modern times have been fascinated by lucid dreams and have sought ways to better understand their causes and purpose.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedia article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's students Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and Analytical Psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
The unconscious mind consists of processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings and desires, memories, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. Although associated with some forms of psychotherapy, there is no reliable evidence that understanding or interpreting dreams has a positive impact on one's mental health.
Collective unconscious refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious.
The Quiet Earth is a 1981 science fiction novel by New Zealand writer Craig Harrison. The novel was adapted into a 1985 New Zealand science fiction film of the same name directed by Geoff Murphy.
Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic mark of the mental by many philosophers. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.
Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. In this sense, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.
Problem solving is the process of achieving a goal by overcoming obstacles, a frequent part of most activities. Problems in need of solutions range from simple personal tasks to complex issues in business and technical fields. The former is an example of simple problem solving (SPS) addressing one issue, whereas the latter is complex problem solving (CPS) with multiple interrelated obstacles. Another classification is into well-defined problems with specific obstacles and goals, and ill-defined problems in which the current situation is troublesome but it is not clear what kind of resolution to aim for. Similarly, one may distinguish formal or fact-based problems requiring psychometric intelligence, versus socio-emotional problems which depend on the changeable emotions of individuals or groups, such as tactful behavior, fashion, or gift choices.
Archetypal psychology was initiated as a distinct movement in the early 1970s by James Hillman, a psychologist who trained in analytical psychology and became the first Director of the Jung Institute in Zurich. Hillman reports that archetypal psychology emerged partly from the Jungian tradition whilst drawing also from other traditions and authorities such as Henry Corbin, Giambattista Vico, and Plotinus.
A visual language is a system of communication using visual elements. Speech as a means of communication cannot strictly be separated from the whole of human communicative activity which includes the visual and the term 'language' in relation to vision is an extension of its use to describe the perception, comprehension and production of visible signs.
Dreamwork differs from classical dream interpretation in that the aim is to explore the various images and emotions that a dream presents and evokes, while not attempting to come up with a unique dream meaning. In this way the dream remains "alive" whereas if it has been assigned a specific meaning, it is "finished". Dreamworkers take the position that a dream may have a variety of meanings depending on the levels that are being explored.
Imagination is the production or simulation of novel objects, sensations, and ideas in the mind without any immediate input of the senses. Stefan Szczelkun characterises it as the forming of experiences in one's mind, which can be re-creations of past experiences, such as vivid memories with imagined changes, or completely invented and possibly fantastic scenes. Imagination helps make knowledge applicable in solving problems and is fundamental to integrating experience and the learning process. As an approach to build theory, it is called "disciplined imagination". A basic training for imagination is listening to storytelling (narrative), in which the exactness of the chosen words is the fundamental factor to "evoke worlds".
John Allan Hobson was an American psychiatrist and dream researcher. He was known for his research on rapid eye movement sleep. He was Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Hypnopompia is the state of consciousness leading out of sleep, a term coined by the psychical researcher Frederic Myers. Its mirror is the hypnagogic state at sleep onset; though often conflated, the two states are not identical and have a different phenomenological character. Hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations are frequently accompanied by sleep paralysis, which is a state wherein one is consciously aware of one's surroundings but unable to move or speak.
Disjunctive cognition is a common phenomenon in dreams, first identified by psychoanalyst Mark Blechner, in which two aspects of cognition do not match each other. The dreamer is aware of the disjunction, yet that does not prevent it from remaining. From Dr. Mark Blechner's The Dream Frontier, it states "The specifics of bizarre dream experiences may be a source of data about the different levels of perceptual processing".By careful examination of the experiences in dreams, we may gain insight into the workings of our mind/brains. The most frequent disjunction is between appearance and identity, such as "I knew it was my mother, even though it didn't look like her." The dreamer recognizes a character's identity, even though the appearance does not match the identity. Character identity relates to facial recognition. In Blechner's The Dream Frontier he says "One theory of facial recognition is that the visual information passes from the retina through the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus and thence to the cortex, for discrimination of the features by the feature discrimination area". This is one example of data that can help validate Blechner's idea. He stated it is "a far-reaching hypothesis and will require a great deal of research to test it." But, another piece of data to support it is that people almost always start off a recollection of a dream as "It was the strangest thing" Such dreams are usually not experienced as bizarre, despite the fact that such a statement in waking life would be considered psychotic. In waking life, most people would assume that they misidentified the person and correct for it, but not in dreams. An example of disjunctive cognition is "I was the opposite of what I actually look like. I was tall and lanky like Katharine Hepburn, but not particularly attractive .”
Content in Freudian dream analysis refers to two closely connected aspects of the dream: the manifest content, and the latent content. Impulses and drives residing in the unconscious press toward consciousness during sleep, but are only able to evade the censorship mechanism of repression by associating themselves with words, ideas and images that are acceptable to consciousness. Thus the dream as consciously remembered upon waking is interpreted in psychoanalysis as a disguised or distorted representation of repressed desires.
The activation-synthesis hypothesis, proposed by Harvard University psychiatrists John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, is a neurobiological theory of dreams first published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in December 1977. The differences in neuronal activity of the brainstem during waking and REM sleep were observed, and the hypothesis proposes that dreams result from brain activation during REM sleep. Since then, the hypothesis has undergone an evolution as technology and experimental equipment has become more precise. Currently, a three-dimensional model called AIM Model, described below, is used to determine the different states of the brain over the course of the day and night. The AIM Model introduces a new hypothesis that primary consciousness is an important building block on which secondary consciousness is constructed.
Dream consciousness is a term defined by the theorist of dreaming science J. Allan Hobson, M.D. as the memory of subjective awareness during sleep.
