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KIuft states that "dreams often monitor integration" and may represent "some
sort of healing process in which the mind mayor may not be assuming a new configuration" but he warns the published accounts have been too few so far to justify
clear conclusions about them. (Sizemore, 1979, p. 123)
Thigpen and Cleckley's (1957) The Three Faces of Eve and their patient's three
autobiographical books (Sizemore, 1973, 1989; Sizemore & Pittillo, 1977) all contain
IPlease address all correspondence concerning this article to Dr. Barrett at Harvard Medical School,
Behavioral Medicine Program, 1493 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02139.
165
10530797/94/0900-0165$07.00/1 1994 Association for the Study of Dreams
Barrett
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166
dreams, including a dramatic account (Sizemore, 1989) of her final integration occurring in a dream. Schreiber (1974) describes several of Sybil's dreams from early
in therapy as providing vivid metaphors for her multiple personalities. Jeans (1976)
describes a patients "host" personality (the one in control the majority of the time)
experiencing an alter (an auxiliary personality out less) as a character in the host's
dream. Gruenewald (1971) and Salley (1988) note that there are sometimes alters
who communicate with the host personality mainly in dreams and/or can create
dreams for the host. Marmer (1980) presents 15 dreams in which the host is experiencing perspectives of various alters. Paley (1993) describes a series of dreams
from an MPD (multiple personality disorder) patient that are both reflective and
facilitative of the host gaining control over the behavior of a persecuting alter. Terr
(1992) describes how a variety of dissociative disordered patients have retrieved
suppressed trauma memories in dreams.
SURVEY
For all dissociative disorders except MPD, the survey inquired specifically
about dreams recovering memories, either recent ones or those from childhood,
and also about any other dream phenomena that had been observed to be related
to the patients' dissociative disorder.
In Psychogenic Fugue, Psychogenic Amnesia, and Dissociative Disorder Not
Otherwise Specified, the majority of responses did report some dream-related memory recovery-it should be noted that "memory recovery" is being used in the
subjective sense here. Childhood and recent memories were recovered with similar
167
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Please complete one page for each patient with a dissociative disorder.
Pt age
gender M F
Optional Therapist Information:
-therapist name: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
If MPD, # of known
address
personalities
check if you would like survey results
Please complete this checklist if it is all you have time for. Check diagnostic category and any dream
phenomena related to the dissociative disorder that you have observed with this patient:
_ _ Multiple Personality:
--
Optimal: If you have time, please give any dream examples of above phenomena or any other comments
about how you use dreams in this patient's therapy on back of sheet or attach additional pages. Dreams
to summarize for general statements unless researcher contacts
and other comments will be used
therapist to pursue further permission to quote more directly.
frequencies. No survey forms were returned describing dreams of patients with Depersonalization Disorder. See Table 3.
A few of the dreams were undisguised recreation of real episodes, especially
for recent repressed events. More commonly, the dreams contained some distortions. One woman dreamed of being eight years old, pregnant, and very frightened
-with her mother nearby but not available for help. This led to her first memory
of a sexual assault at that age, the most vivid aspects of her recollection being the
belief that her belly would swell up, confusion about how a baby would get out,
and her inability to seek her mother's help.
168
Table 2. Survey Patients by DSMIH-R Diagnoses
N
Mean
Age
Gender
M/F
Mean
Yes in Rx
23
4
13
8
28
39
25
27
2/26
2/2
7/18
3/5
4
1
3
1
Total
48
28
14/34
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DSMHI-R Diagnosis
Childhood
Recent
Fugue
Amnesia
DD-NOS
4
13
8
3
11
5
75
85
63
2
7
4
50
54
50
1
9
25
69
Total
25
20
80
13
52
11
Diagnosis
13
44
In addition to memory recovery, other dream phenomena related to dissociative disorders included a hysterical conversion symptom resolving in a dream and
a trauma-related hallucination beginning after a dream of related content. Both of
these phenomena occurred in patients with diagnoses of DD-NOS.
MPD
Although DSMUI-R describes all dissociative disorders as "incidence unknown," other surveys (Putnam, 1989) suggest that MPD comprimises well under
half of all dissociative disorders and is therefore overrrepresented with 23 of 48
responses in the present study. The survey specified more possible categories to
check based on previous literature for MPD than other dissociative disorders.
Therapist survey respondents were especially eager to describe their MPD patients'
dreams and these surveys were longer and filled with three times more (2.5 versus
.8) dream examples on the average. As they are indeed the most interesting data
from any category, the MPD results will be described in greater detail than other
diagnostic categories.
The twenty-three patients with MPD in the survey had a mean age of 28
years old and averaged 17 known alters. Eight types of dream phenomena which
had been noted in the previous literature or observed in the author's practice were
included in survey questions and two more were described by survey respondents
in an "other" category. The frequencies of these ten types of dream phenomena
are presented in Table 4.
169
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
N of 23 S's
Percent
3
4
19
13
6
4
6
13
17
83
15
8
2
57
26
17
26
65
35
Barrett
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170
One woman who had recurring "nightmares" of catching evil cats by the throat
and stuffing them in garbage cans, awoke from one of these dreams to find the
velour jogging suit in which she slept covered in cat hair. She did not own a cat
and was so disturbed by the implication that she both brought in the top of the
jogging suit to ascertain that her therapist also saw it covered with the hair and
searched trash cans in her neighborhood.
Some patients were not so quickly aware of the nature of these experiences.
One had "dreams" of sitting on the bank of a river at night feeling very soothed
as she stared at it; many months later an alter owned up to these being real nocturnal jaunts.
Obviously this category may have a higher incidence than reproted because
such events could occur without the "dreamer" ever realizing they were real. There
are two previous reports of patients who initially appeared to be sleep walking who
were discovered to have a dissociative disorder when sleep lab polygraphs revealed
the episodes occurred when the patients were physiologically awake (Fleming, 1987;
Schenck et al. 1989).
3) Multiplicity Metaphors
Multiple Personality was symbolically depicted in dreams of 19 patients, or
83%, according to their therapists. This was often reported at a stage in therapy
when the patient was not fully aware of the diagnosis. It may be genuinely the
most frequent dream phenomena for MPD's as it is an issue of concern to all of
them. However, it also may be that as the most subjective of the 10 categories,
multiplicity metaphor estimates are inflated while harder to spot types may be underestimated.
One patient, not yet in therapy, was aware that she "lost time" and was hearing what later proved to be her alters as voices. She was not aware of the nature
of the voices or the blackouts when she recorded: I had a dream. I was sitting in
a photo booth trying to get it to take a picture of me, but all the pictures that
came out showed other people - or at least faint outlines of other people. In the
mirror, where you see what will come out, the face kept changing, like ghosts.
171
one vowing to kill the dreamer. These turned out to be alters responsible for much
cutting and one overdose.
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172
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folded my hands over my hear! and began to float downstream. That was death, this was
how it was done.
This dreamer had a child alter who had hallucinatory images of her father,
sometimes with a knife, sometimes cooking meat. Another alter was a would-be
"martyr" who, in her internal variation on Catholicism, intended to achieve martyrdom by suicide. She could communicate with these alters but awake she perceived them as "other." In the dream she experienced being first one and then,
with the scene shift, the other.
7) Dreammaker
Six (26%) of the patients had at least one personality able to design dreams
to be experienced by other personalities. The "dream maker" appears to be frequently
lucid while the host experiences a non-lucid dream. One common reason for designing dreams was to warn or influence the host away from certain people or situations; four patients had an alter who did this. George, one of the few male MPD
patients in the study, had a female alter Mary who trusted no one. Anytime George
was getting to like someone, Mary would orchestrate a dream where that person
would attack or ridicule George - or George would discover some horrible secret
about them. This had resulted in responses ranging from subtle unease to complete
avoidance on George's part after the dream. A female patient had a similar alter
who designed "rapist" dreams about any man the host was getting too friendly with.
The other common category of reasons for designing dreams was to introduce
memories that the alter wanted the host to begin dealing with but knew the host
wouldn't face awake. One "dreammaker" alter reported, "Dreams can test the waters for whether she's ready for a memory." More rarely dream maker alters used
this ability to urge the host toward a positive action or to communicate something
therapeutic. One alter described dreaming as part of a broader influence campaign:
"I show her images a lot, even while she's awake, of memories and things I feel
and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she's dreaming."
8) Retrieving Memodes
Fifteen (65%) of the patients had experienced one personality, usually the
host, gaining memories from a dream that had previously belonged only to another
personality. In many ways this is just like the dreams that any other trauma survivors
may have except that these memories have been held by the alter rather than being
completely repressed. As already mentioned, this can sometimes overlap category
7 above when the alter presents these memories intentionally. More often it seems
to happen naturally as the patient approaches integration. All but one of the reports
of this category involved an alter's memories being regained by the host; one example was from one alter to another alter with whom he had been in conflict,
resolving the conflict. Examples cited for MPD patients were similar to those already described above for other dissociative disorders.
173
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9) Different Dreams
Eight (35%) of the patients had different personalities who simply experienced
different dreams. This is, of course, quite analogous to their waking experience.
One patient had three alters who recalled dreams from the same night. The
host had a mild anxiety dream about arriving at school unprepared for an exam.
A male alter who had experienced much physical abuse had a fairly realistic posttraumatic nightmare about that abuse. A female child alter, who was usually the
happy one who could respond as if the trauma had not occurred, had a dream with
a castle and cute baby animals - content fairly typical of children' dreams. Another
female child alter who had suffered much of the sexual abuse reported she had
not slept in weeks because of terrible nightmares.
10) Integration in Dream
Very rarely, lasting integration of two personalities seems to take place in a
dream. This was reported to have occurred for two patients (9%) only one and
two times respectively. One dream was of a wedding in which only one person
stood at the altar at the end of the ceremony. Another involved a fairly literal
conversation saying goodbye, after which the alter moved forward toward the host
and "faded into me like mist." The third involved seeing someone who the host
knew to be the alter but who now looked exactly like the host. With both patients,
there had been much recent therapeutic work toward dismantling amnestic boundaries between these personalities. It is hard to say whether the integration truly occurred in the dream or was merely reflected by it.
DISCUSSION
As therapists, we can only experience our patients' dreams as second hand
accounts, with all the ensuing memory loss, censorship, and problems of articulation.
Research reports from subjects are sometimes collected in a sleep lab to lessen
(but not eliminate) memory loss, however they involve most of the same sources
of distortion. In this survey, dreams are experienced third hand: from patient to
therapist to researcher, so yet another filter is introduced. Obviously, the findings
in this study must be taken as preliminary and conclusion about the characteristics
of dream reports in therapy are likelier to be robust and those about the cognitive
processes of sleep in these disorders are more tentative.
For most people, the state of dreaming is characterized by a degree of hallucination, amnesia, discontinuity with normal experience, and projection of aspects
of ourselves onto others such as we experience at no other time. One of the most
striking observations of this survey is that dissociative disordered persons experience
much more of this dreamlike state in their waking life. These similarities of normal
dreaming and dissociative disorders and the implications they may have for the
etiology of MPD have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Barrett, 1994, in press).
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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