Dreams about the Outer World
Although dreams integrate multiple mental processes from the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional, a dream typically has a dominant focus. A common type of dream aims at representing or “problem solving” about the objective world. The more focused and attentive one is to the outer world, the more likely dreams about the outer world occur.
“Representatives of this major family group have received relatively little attention in the clinical literature, perhaps because such dreams oftentimes may be given little clinical import. Dreams which belong to this category appear to make frequent appearance in the dream samples obtained in sleep laboratory investigations. The defining feature of exogenous dreams is that these dreams address external reality or objectively defined problems. Exogenous dreams that address sensory-motor transactions may be infused with affect or emotion appropriate to physical encounters, but otherwise dreams that engage more abstract objective issues often possess a quality that Ernest Hilgard described for the “hidden observer”. That is, the dreams tend to relatively disinterested, emotionally neutral assessments and evaluations of objective reality. Information conveyed in these dreams may be known or unknown to the conscious mind. Exogenous dreams are provisionally divided into seven general dream types (van den Daele, 1992).”
Dreams about Exercise, Engagement, or Understanding the Perceptual, Physical, Mechanical, Mathematical, or Abstract World
Dream Type by Order of Complexity |
Brief Description |
| Movement | Motor actions and action tendencies experienced in kinetic form. |
| Action | Enactment of sensory motor coordination’s. |
| Excitation | Delight in speed, motion, physical prowess and agility. |
| Mastery | Aims at mastery of external reality by anticipation, practice, or development of new stratagems through rehearsal. |
| Outer-Realistic | Examines contingency relations between physical actions and external elements. |
| Assessment | Represents schematic relations that hold for adaptive behavior. Compares objective performance or attributes to some criterion. |
| Inferential | Provides an analogue in images to some process of induction, deduction, or inference about thought or things which coordinates multiple rules and/or perspectives. |
Table reproduced from van den Daele, L.D. (1992). Direct interpretation of dreams: Typology. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52, 307-326.
The order of dreams in the table corresponds to the developmental emergence of “exogenous” dreams. Simple movement dreams are least complex and suggest basic dispositions to action-oriented behavior. Excitation dreams engage surprise and “rough and tumble” activities. Mastery dreams implicate aims directed toward adaptation to the objective world. Outer-realistic dreams involve coordination of action and events. Diagnostic and assessment dreams require about the same minimum level of developmental maturity with evaluation of state, action, or behavior in relation to some criterion or norm. Finally, inferential dreams involve the coordination of still more complex lines of observation and implication (van den Daele, 1992).