The Multiplicity of Dreams

Abstract

What I’d like to do today is to try to place lucid dreaming within the context of overall dream studies and dream research—and within the multiplicity of dreams. I want to show how a cross-comparison of the different forms or types of dreaming might give clues to the cognitive processes that may be involved in all dream formation. And in that context I want to look especially at the place of lucid dreaming, namely the special relation of lucid dreams to nightmares and so-called archetypal-mythological dreams. I will try to show, both descriptively and in terms of a small research study, that these three kinds of dreams seem to be the points where the process of dreaming is maximally intensified. Such maximal intensifications may help to show fundamental dimensions of all dreaming that get crystallized in these relatively infrequent special forms.