HD 3700 1st Edition Lecture 4 Outline of Last Lecture I What are dreams II How do you find out what a dream really means a Freud s 3 rules on associating to dreams b Have the dreamer interpret the dream Outline of Current Lecture I The opening scene of Hamlet II Dream Structure and Dream Work a How the Dream Work Works III The associative mind a Case study Sting s associations Current Lecture I The opening scene of Hamlet Written in Shakespeare s great year 1599 The first play to explore interiority of mental experience o A play about how hard it is to diagnose someone The play is too long for the performance time in pre electric Elizabethan theatre but when he revised it Shakespeare made it longer Always look to Shakespeare s first line First line in Hamlet Who s there o Who the hell are you o A play about a prince who cannot make up his mind but the first line suggests it is really a play about an audience that cannot make up its mind First scene Horatio Francisco Bernardo o Is Horatio there o A piece of him Horatio meaning he doesn t want to be there o While telling Horatio about the ghost the ghost appears The reality of the story interrupts the story being told about it o Upon seeing the ghost Horatio uses the word harrowing Because he initially said a piece of me and harrowing means breaking into pieces Example of the associative mind o This is a play of lying betrayal madness our hopes for a peaceful world will not be found in this play II Dream Structure and Dream Work Thoughts occur to the dreamer during dream states these are dream thoughts which Freud thought were always wishes These thoughts constitute the latent content of the dream Dream Work takes the dream thoughts and expresses them in hallucinatory images composed of related thoughts which nevertheless disguise and distort the dream thoughts o The thoughts might be too disturbing or vivid and might keep you awake So a dream disguises these disturbing thoughts In this way Dreams are the guardians of sleep And a nightmare is a dream that failed How the Dream Work works o Condensation compressing the latent dream thoughts in images that omit combine or reverse those meanings o Displacement a latent thought is replaced by a part of itself or a symbol of itself or by an allusion to it o Transformation into Visual Images these hallucinatory movies you experience every night o Language is often reversed or doubled the ambiguous meaning of primal words is often exploited in dreams such as cleave which means to cut apart and join together Freud argues that dreams rarely depict no but instead represent both sides of a wish or fear o Example Olivia dreamed that she was playing with her 5 year old self 5 year old self insisted that she play the mom the dream thought is I have to be my own mom now because at college she had to take care of herself Importance of REM dreaming o Creates a kind of rest for an expression that we clearly need o We always dream during REM o If we are deprived of REM one night we will get twice as much REM the next night o In lower mammals it s very clear that dreaming is important for memory consolidation In rats the neurons that light up during a maze will light up while dreaming they are consolidating the maze memory III The Associative Mind The mind is associative And it is associative when you re asleep When asleep it generates a world without rules Takeaway we are associative animals o I associate therefore I am Associate to past and future moments We are both the subject and object of our perceptions thoughts Case Study Sting s associations Notice how musically and thematically Sting s song Oh My God expresses a line of associations to the Beatles Day Tripper and his own song Everything She Does is Magic Day Tripper about a girl who won t stay with him angry tune Everything She Does is Magic about a man who can t tell a woman he loves her Oh My God about how alienated we are from one another uses the same riff as Day Tripper and uses the lines from Everything She Does is Magic o Associates to the rhythm of Day Tripper and at the end associates to the theme of Everything She Does is Magic