Dreams emotional salience

And the answer is yes if we emphasize the way the new findings enable us to revise Freud s necessarily speculative dream theory and replace it with one that gives a detailed alternative account of dream phenomenology and eliminates the very dubious disguise-censorship idea, but still retains the crucial concept of emotional salience as a major element in dream content elaboration. The model does not now specify regional shifts in neuronal activity and/or blood flow, but if both derive from the neuromodulatory ratio shift, then factor M would predict the enhancement of emotion in dreaming and its central role in shaping dream plots. 

Our dreams are emotional, and something that psychologists term hyperassociative , because our brains are activated by cholinergic rather than aminergic chemicals. Thus, we restore the most fundamental aspects of our cognitive capability - the capacity to order our memories in a way that serves survival. Emotional salience or relevance is a general mnemonic rule. Our level of emotional competence has a high survival value and underlies the more precise information needed to function socially. In other words, we need, first and foremost, to know when to approach, when to mate, when to be afraid, and when to run for cover. These... 

My dreams reveal how procedural and declarative memory systems intersect and interact in sleep. They always show respect for the universal aspects of my behavioural repertoire and they treat the orientational details in a relatively cavalier fashion in order to achieve efficiency - they trade precise historical accuracy for global emotional associativity. In other words, my dreams reveal how little detail of my daily experience - but how much of the emotional salience - gets mapped on to my procedural repertoire. After all, most of the details are redundant anyway. I already know who I am, who my key people are, where I live and work, and what I have done, am doing, and intend to do in the future. 

Thought (item 6) and orientation (item 7) are both impaired by disablement of the aminergic systems and regional deactivation of the global and local memory systems of the brain. We want to know more about why declarative memories, which are presumably stored in the hippocampus and then moved out to the cortex, are so seldom available to dream consciousness. Clearly, all cognitive functions that depend on memory, except possibly emotional salience, are weakened in REM sleep. Dream consciousness is therefore both a poor analyser and a poor organizer of its content. Hyperassociativity and emotional salience are the rules that govern... 

In this view, the so-called latent dream content is nothing more or less than the vast set of associations connected to each aspect of dream content. It could still be quite useful to investigate these as a way of learning more about parts of our mind that are important to us, whether or not we think of them as dream instigators or as elements that, precisely because they are of direct and undisguised emotional salience, get used in dream construction. 

Are these interpretations valid How can I know Certainly, I share the psychoanalytic patient s feeling that the interpretations ring true . But this is the tally argument so successfully demolished by Adolf Grunbaum. The fact that these associations are meaningful to me and that they possess compelling emotional salience confers no validity on them, either as dream instigators or accurate explanations of why I dreamed this dream, or that this is what this dream really means ... 

---