...by central heating?
I dreamed I was staying with my mother, played by Catherine Deneuve, in a two-story villa. At the first of the movie-dream, she was standing nude on the balcony enjoying the sun (like a scene in an old Sophia Loren movie, the title of which I cannot recall).
When I came downstairs to the kitchen where she was making coffee, she informed me that my former great love had just appeared and pushed his way past her, insisting that he had to see me because I had a pair of red panties and a red bra that belonged to him (!). That made me think, "Little Red Riding Hood." She said he had claimed to work in publishing, but she was sure it was him and that he was lying. She made her distaste for him clear to me.
Then I was suddenly in a room with a number of elderly people -- most of them married couples -- who were very sweet and I was trying to "make nice" with them as if it were a job duty to schmooze with them. They were talking about rental properties they owned and renovations they'd done to them. One part of the conversation was about a renovation that resulted in second, identically shaped and sized room being added on to mirror a kitchen, but without any appliances or sink, etc. So, in essence, they were speaking of a kitchen that wasn't a kitchen.
My goodness! What was this reflection on femininity and domesticity all about?!
Showing posts with label Dreams and Nightmares. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dreams and Nightmares. Show all posts
Monday, January 18, 2010
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Weather change. Time change. Continent change.
All these have conspired, or inspired, dreams.
I often claim not to dream, since I can hardly ever recall that I have dreamed upon awakening. And when I wake up in the middle of the night because my doggie has shifted around in the bed or because I have to get up to go to the bathroom, I seldom am awakened from a dream.
But I've been dreaming a lot since I returned from Paris. After I travel I often return to the places I've just visited for weeks after I come home, as if my psyche wants to prolong the pleasant experience.
But I've been having strange relationship dreams lately. Not sexual, but just recalling old loves. For instance, last night I dreamed -- and from out of nowhere -- of simply lying peacefully in the arms of my second husband, my head on his chest, listening to his heart. My cheek recalled the texture of his skin, its living moisture, his chest hair -- and I even dreamed his scent. In those fleeting seconds I dreamed how it felt to be very much in love with him, lying simply and peacefully in our white marital bed, my head resting on his chest, our legs intertwined and his soft, sleeping breathing pattern.
Where did THAT come from? And then I was thinking inside my dream: I'm in his arms. And then in French: en bras. Embrasse. Embrace.
I always wonder when I dream so intimately of an old love if they are also dreaming of me and if it's not a clue that love is indeed a kind of transcendence. Do we simultaneously haunt one another, me and my old loves?
To live is to live a mystery, I think.
In any case, today my emotions are tender, sweet and not just a little sad. It's autumn.
I often claim not to dream, since I can hardly ever recall that I have dreamed upon awakening. And when I wake up in the middle of the night because my doggie has shifted around in the bed or because I have to get up to go to the bathroom, I seldom am awakened from a dream.
But I've been dreaming a lot since I returned from Paris. After I travel I often return to the places I've just visited for weeks after I come home, as if my psyche wants to prolong the pleasant experience.
But I've been having strange relationship dreams lately. Not sexual, but just recalling old loves. For instance, last night I dreamed -- and from out of nowhere -- of simply lying peacefully in the arms of my second husband, my head on his chest, listening to his heart. My cheek recalled the texture of his skin, its living moisture, his chest hair -- and I even dreamed his scent. In those fleeting seconds I dreamed how it felt to be very much in love with him, lying simply and peacefully in our white marital bed, my head resting on his chest, our legs intertwined and his soft, sleeping breathing pattern.
Where did THAT come from? And then I was thinking inside my dream: I'm in his arms. And then in French: en bras. Embrasse. Embrace.
I always wonder when I dream so intimately of an old love if they are also dreaming of me and if it's not a clue that love is indeed a kind of transcendence. Do we simultaneously haunt one another, me and my old loves?
To live is to live a mystery, I think.
In any case, today my emotions are tender, sweet and not just a little sad. It's autumn.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Dreams and sleep have meaning.
Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning
By TIFFANY SHARPLES Tiffany Sharples Tue Jun 16, 4:15 am ET
Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams - and, more so, sleep - are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotions.
According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)
A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.
Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: "If it's getting food, if it's getting some kind of reward, finding a wife - those things are pretty good to pick up on."
Our daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives."
REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)
"It's not that you've forgotten. You haven't," he says. "It's a memory of an emotional episode, but it's no longer emotional itself."
That palliative safety-valve quality of sleep may be hampered when we fail to reach REM sleep or when REM sleep is disrupted, Walker says. "If you don't let go of the emotion, what results is a constant state of anxiety," he says.
The theory is consistent with new research conducted by Rebecca Bernert, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Florida State University who specializes in the relationship between sleep and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and who also presented her work at the sleep conference this week.
In her study of 82 men and women between the ages of 18 and 66 who were admitted into a mental-health hospital for emergency psychiatric evaluation, Bernert discovered that the presence of severe and frequent nightmares or insomnia was a strong predictor of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. More than half of the study participants had attempted suicide at least once in the past, and the 17% of the study group who had made an attempt within the previous month had dramatically higher scores in nightmare frequency and intensity than the rest. Bernert found that the relationship between nightmares or insomnia and suicide persisted, even when researchers controlled for other factors like depression.
Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.
If that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event.' "
At the biological level, Walker explains, the "emotional rind" translates to sympathetic nervous-system activity during sleep: faster heart rate and the release of stress chemicals. Understanding why nightmares recur and how REM sleep facilitates emotional processing - or hinders it, when nightmares take place and perpetuate the physical stress symptoms - may eventually provide clues to effective treatments of painful mental disorders. Perhaps, even, by simply addressing sleeping habits, doctors could potentially interrupt the emotional cycle that can lead to suicide. "There is an opportunity for prevention," Bernert says.
The new findings highlight what researchers are increasingly recognizing as a two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. "Modern medicine and psychiatry have consistently thought that psychological disorders seem to have co-occuring sleep problems and that it's the disorder perpetuating the sleep problems," says Walker. "Is it possible that, in fact, it's the sleep disruption contributing to the psychiatric disorder?"
By TIFFANY SHARPLES Tiffany Sharples Tue Jun 16, 4:15 am ET
Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams - and, more so, sleep - are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotions.
According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)
A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.
Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: "If it's getting food, if it's getting some kind of reward, finding a wife - those things are pretty good to pick up on."
Our daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives."
REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)
"It's not that you've forgotten. You haven't," he says. "It's a memory of an emotional episode, but it's no longer emotional itself."
That palliative safety-valve quality of sleep may be hampered when we fail to reach REM sleep or when REM sleep is disrupted, Walker says. "If you don't let go of the emotion, what results is a constant state of anxiety," he says.
The theory is consistent with new research conducted by Rebecca Bernert, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Florida State University who specializes in the relationship between sleep and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and who also presented her work at the sleep conference this week.
In her study of 82 men and women between the ages of 18 and 66 who were admitted into a mental-health hospital for emergency psychiatric evaluation, Bernert discovered that the presence of severe and frequent nightmares or insomnia was a strong predictor of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. More than half of the study participants had attempted suicide at least once in the past, and the 17% of the study group who had made an attempt within the previous month had dramatically higher scores in nightmare frequency and intensity than the rest. Bernert found that the relationship between nightmares or insomnia and suicide persisted, even when researchers controlled for other factors like depression.
Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.
If that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event.' "
At the biological level, Walker explains, the "emotional rind" translates to sympathetic nervous-system activity during sleep: faster heart rate and the release of stress chemicals. Understanding why nightmares recur and how REM sleep facilitates emotional processing - or hinders it, when nightmares take place and perpetuate the physical stress symptoms - may eventually provide clues to effective treatments of painful mental disorders. Perhaps, even, by simply addressing sleeping habits, doctors could potentially interrupt the emotional cycle that can lead to suicide. "There is an opportunity for prevention," Bernert says.
The new findings highlight what researchers are increasingly recognizing as a two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. "Modern medicine and psychiatry have consistently thought that psychological disorders seem to have co-occuring sleep problems and that it's the disorder perpetuating the sleep problems," says Walker. "Is it possible that, in fact, it's the sleep disruption contributing to the psychiatric disorder?"
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Can't shut my mind off = insomnia, followed by nightmares
A terrible dream last night:
Ali and I were doing a photo shoot in a long, narrow space, walls and floors like my apartment, but easily a hundred yards long and only about six yards wide. The dream had three passages to it, and we moved down the space in thirds.
1. People bundled up in coats and scarves came in as we arrived, as if coming into the space from winter weather. This seems to set my dream in Italy. And the people were all academics known to me from meetings at school or X's colleagues in Italy. Academia. They ignored us as we set our lights and began the shoot.
2. We moved on to the middle of the space. Today the second passage is wiped from my memory, although it was vivid and I didn't think I'd forget it when I awoke from the dream. I think it had to do with X and a tattered top hat in need of repairs. The photo shoot continued in the middle of the space.
3. At the far end of the room we continued the shoot but were having trouble getting my arms in the position needed for the picture. There was a small curtained window in the wall there, and the space behind it was dark, seemingly a deserted, cluttered storage room. It occurred to us that if I put one arm on the sill of the window we could get the shot.
My hand accidentally went into the space behind the curtain as I took the pose. Then, out of nowhere, a dry, hot hand seized my wrist violently and angrily held on. The hand's skin was old, papery. I was terrified and screamed for Ali to help me detach myself from the hand, which would not release its death-hold on my wrist no matter how I twisted and jerked. She couldn't force the hand to release me, either, so reluctantly I struck out with my nails at the person who attacked me behind the curtain. With a sickening feeling I realized I was scratching my attacker's face as my fingertips dug into eyes and a mouth. I didn't want to hurt this invisible attacker, but felt I had no choice since she wouldn't release my wrist and clearly meant me harm. I told myself to wake up so I could end the dream.
The hand belonged to X's friend J, I realized upon awakening.
Horrible! I could venture a psychological analysis but will abstain.
I hate the end of the semester when I am so stressed out at work that it carries over into my dreams!
Ali and I were doing a photo shoot in a long, narrow space, walls and floors like my apartment, but easily a hundred yards long and only about six yards wide. The dream had three passages to it, and we moved down the space in thirds.
1. People bundled up in coats and scarves came in as we arrived, as if coming into the space from winter weather. This seems to set my dream in Italy. And the people were all academics known to me from meetings at school or X's colleagues in Italy. Academia. They ignored us as we set our lights and began the shoot.
2. We moved on to the middle of the space. Today the second passage is wiped from my memory, although it was vivid and I didn't think I'd forget it when I awoke from the dream. I think it had to do with X and a tattered top hat in need of repairs. The photo shoot continued in the middle of the space.
3. At the far end of the room we continued the shoot but were having trouble getting my arms in the position needed for the picture. There was a small curtained window in the wall there, and the space behind it was dark, seemingly a deserted, cluttered storage room. It occurred to us that if I put one arm on the sill of the window we could get the shot.
My hand accidentally went into the space behind the curtain as I took the pose. Then, out of nowhere, a dry, hot hand seized my wrist violently and angrily held on. The hand's skin was old, papery. I was terrified and screamed for Ali to help me detach myself from the hand, which would not release its death-hold on my wrist no matter how I twisted and jerked. She couldn't force the hand to release me, either, so reluctantly I struck out with my nails at the person who attacked me behind the curtain. With a sickening feeling I realized I was scratching my attacker's face as my fingertips dug into eyes and a mouth. I didn't want to hurt this invisible attacker, but felt I had no choice since she wouldn't release my wrist and clearly meant me harm. I told myself to wake up so I could end the dream.
The hand belonged to X's friend J, I realized upon awakening.
Horrible! I could venture a psychological analysis but will abstain.
I hate the end of the semester when I am so stressed out at work that it carries over into my dreams!
Friday, February 13, 2009
My dreams these days
...seem frequently to be about my recently ended romance. About a week ago I dreamed I was riding in a car with his long-suffering wife (she was driving), who assured me everything I found troubling about my former lover's behavior was par for the course, his normal m.o. She sweetly thanked me for trying to help him and told me my efforts were, unfortunately, totally useless.
Last night I dreamed my former lover was played by some other man, like an actor would play a role -- but still, I knew it was him. He greeted me joyfully and seemed delighted to be with me again. I said, confused, "Are we still a couple? I don't understand. You seem so happy now, when before you often seemed so miserable and mopey. You seem like a new man!" Then the actor playing him beamed at me. And I said to him, "Wait! You ARE another man, not my former lover," and woke myself up.
Last night I dreamed my former lover was played by some other man, like an actor would play a role -- but still, I knew it was him. He greeted me joyfully and seemed delighted to be with me again. I said, confused, "Are we still a couple? I don't understand. You seem so happy now, when before you often seemed so miserable and mopey. You seem like a new man!" Then the actor playing him beamed at me. And I said to him, "Wait! You ARE another man, not my former lover," and woke myself up.
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