On Dreams
I've been thinking about dreams, and their apparent meaningfulness. Are they really meaningful?
short answer: they're useful, so they're meaningful
long answer:
It seems to me an undeniable experiential fact that they may appear meaningful, they may appear to bear some urgent symbolic message from the unconscious. One needs only look at the amount of effort spent on interpreting dreams in order to confirm this. But are they really meaningful? Or are they just mental detritus, random bits and pieces floating up from the depths? I'm sure the more materialistic of you would rather not ascribe autonomous agency to the unconscious mind, and I have a certain sympathy for that. It seems to me naively enthusiastic to take dreams as messages in the same way we read bird-signs as messages directly from personified gods 3000 years ago.
Let us suppose then, that dreams are simply bits of mental imagery and feelings produced by the unconscious mind. I think it still makes sense to interperet them as meaningful, and that in some sense they remain truly meaningful.
On the most mundane, materialistic possible view of the mind, the brain encodes a set of associations between stimuli which constitutes your subjectivity. Those associations are unique to you, and in fact make up who you are. Dreams are then produced by this network of associations that makes up your innermost self. A metaphore that occured to me in this context is that dreams would therefore be like keys, produced by the lock itself. They are pretty much guaranteed to 'fit', to correspond to whatever it is that makes up your personality. Pondering your own dream therefore remains a way of gaining a window into your unconscious mind, of activating that network of associations in ways that would not otherwise have been accessible to your conscious mind, or perhaps would just never have occured to you.
Dreams then, on this account, are not straightforwardly messages. There is no one correct interpretation of a dream, such that it is exactly what the unconscious "meant". But how do we judge the correctness of interpretation anyway? We fish around, until an interpretation goes "click", and unlocks some emotional or cognitive content. It seems to me that there is nothing preventing a single dream from producing several "clicks", several useful interpretations. The wiser the dream interpreter, the more able they will be to use a dream to gain access to unconscious material, and the better they will use that access.
Why then, does it seem like the more we pay attention to dreams the more meaningful they become? That has certainly been my own experience. This, I believe, is best explained in terms of conscious engagement with unconscious content. If you make it a habit of paying attention to your dreams, your dream life will be more integrated with your conscious life, and therefore more relevant to it. Those associations that make up your conscious life will be more involved in producing the "key", and therefore more issues relevant to your conscious life will be unlocked by dream interpretation.
Is the unconscious therefore robbed of it's autonomous agency on this view? I'm not sure. There is nothing here which speaks against the agency of the unconscious. There is at least one point that speaks for it: how exactly do we ascribe agency? This is a question plauging artificial intelligence research... how will we know if we produce a computer with agency? Personally, I favour a pragmatic view, a la Dennett. That has agency which is it useful to ascribe agency to. The degree to which it is useful to ascribe agency to your supercomputer is exactly the degree to which it actually has agency. And on this view, since dream interepretation really has use value, there is a sense in which the unconscious has autonomous agency. We treat dreams as messages, and lo and behold! messages come tumbling out. This is not the agency which we would ascribe to the conscious mind exactly, but that makes perfect sense to me. The unconscious does not have the same kind of agency that conscious minds does; it has agency in some ways less keen, but in some ways more profound.