Reinhardt Dreamwork

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream that I was in the hallways and classrooms, with only my underwear on, and nobody noticed.


Today, I have recurring dreams that I am enrolled in college, and attending classes, but have basically dropped out and don't know a thing about what I'm supposed to be doing. I also recently dreamed that I socked my boss in the mouth.

One of my classmates reports that he has a daydream of moving back into Reinhardt, converted into an old folks home:

Hey, maybe the DISD would just turn Reinhardt into an old folks home for alumni!!!!!

Another classmate reveals a weird dream:

[The] idea of Reinhardt as a retirement community for alumni . . . really struck home, because when I was a student at Reinhardt, I had a semi-recurring dream about LIVING in the school, not as a transient, but having the school retro-fitted as my house. What if we DID end up there after all? Would that finally be a dream come true? Or terminal detention?

My best waking dream would be to be sitting again as a child at my kitchen table (it was yellow formica with chrome legs and with matching yellow vinyl-covered chairs—would be worth a fortune today) and having my mother offer to mash up my potatoes and mix with the ground hamburger.



So goes our pitiful lives and desire to return to the Reinhardt womb.

Here’s some recent explanations:

Freud’s theory [dreams are wish fulfillment] has real difficulties explaining why people so often have anxiety dreams. Dreams also involve being angry a lot of the time. Freud said dreams were for fulfilling wishes. But who would want nightmares? Who would want to get beaten up or sexually assaulted in their dreams? So Freud’s theory just didn’t explain in any coherent fashion the fact that dreams involve far more than wishes and that only a minority of them can be characterised as wishes. And his claim that all dreams are sexually motivated is no longer given any credence. Freud claimed that we dream to protect sleep, to prevent us being awakened by threatening, sub-conscious wishes. However, the REM state, in which most dreams occur, is a regularly occurring biological programme in humans and other mammals, and not something which arises to protect sleep.

To recap, expectation pathways activate conscious, not subconscious, experience. There is no evidence at all that dreams are sexually motivated and Freud can’t plausibly explain why we would wish for anxiety dreams. The REM state occurs in all mammals, so it is not just a human activity, protecting sleep, as Freud suggested. A cat is unlikely to be dreaming about its Oedipus complex. So the attempt to revive Freud’s theory seems to be based more on wishful thinking than on realistic
considerations of its defects.

. . .
It was the first time in scientific dream research, I believe, that someone set out to predict their own dreams, with the hypothesis that dreams relate to emotional experiences of the day before – a hypothesis that has since been well validated. Dreams do involve waking emotional material. I set up an experiment using my own dreams, waking myself up every two hours, and, for a period of a week, predicted the emotional concerns that would feature in the dreams. I found that the dreams always reflected my waking emotional concerns of the previous day, but not necessarily the most important of these. By analysing the data, I was able to show that dreams dealt not with emotional concerns per se but with those emotional concerns that had not been dealt with satisfactorily. No matter how important the emotional concern, if it got dealt with while awake, it was over and did not reappear in a dream. The only emotional concerns that became dreams were those that I was still aroused about, for which I still had expectations that I couldn’t complete. Dreams are the fulfilment of those emotional expectations that have not been met prior to waking. They always act out the fulfilment in metaphor – ie a matching sensory pattern to the original expectation. For example, if a man feels like hitting his boss but restrains the impulse, that night he might dream of attacking another authority figure. The hypothesis was derived from a scientific experiment, which anyone can replicate, should they wish.

http://www.why-we-dream.com/

And so we old folks should wish for many and sweet dreams, but the bad ones are good too--helping us to deal with emotional concerns that had not been dealt with satisfactorily during the day.