freud publishes the interpretation of dreams

Since that experiment, we’ve learned a lot more about the dream rebound effect. Wegner called this the “dream rebound effect”. The results were clear: the participants who were instructed to suppress thoughts of a person dreamt of them much more than the participants who were instructed to focus their thoughts on the person and the participants who could think about whatever they wanted. When they woke up in the morning, they all recorded any dreams they could remember having that night.

A third group could think about whatever they wanted. The first group of these participants were told specifically not to think about the person during their five minutes of writing, whereas a second group were told to specifically think about them. In his experiment, participants were asked to identify a person they knew and then to spend five minutes writing a stream-of-consciousness (about whatever came to mind) before going to bed that night. Interestingly, he managed to test this idea in 2004.

We know that a large number of our dreams come from REM sleep, so Wegner hypothesised that we would see a lot of suppressed thoughts making a reappearance in dreams. During REM sleep parts of the brain that are needed for thought suppression – such as those involved in attention, control and working memory – are deactivated. Wegner suggested that these processes might fail during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. Thought suppression is therefore complicated and can only be achieved when the two processes are working together harmoniously. He suggested that this is because we have two psychological processes at work at the same time when we try to suppress a thought: an operating process that actively suppresses it, and a monitoring process that keeps an eye out for the suppressed thought. The first of these experiments was conducted by Daniel Wegner, who noticed that when we are trying hard to ignore or suppress a thought, it often just keeps coming back.

Freud publishes the interpretation of dreams