Dream Rebound Effect
Category: Sleep Science
From the White Bear Experiment to Dream Research
In an experiment run by the psychologist Daniel Wegner and colleagues in 1987, participants told not to think about a white bear found the white bear coming back to mind again and again. The 2004 dream rebound study carried that view, that the act of holding something down can work in reverse (the theory of ironic processes), over into dreams. Participants told before sleep not to think about one particular person went on to dream about that person to a greater degree than those who wrote freely. This is where the name Dream Rebound Effect comes from. Suppression works to some extent while a person is awake, but the prefrontal cortex that supports it is known to drop in activity during sleep, and the suggestion is that the held-down material comes out on the side of the dream instead. The part that ties this drop in activity directly to the contents of a dream, though, is still at the stage of a hypothesis.
Where Freud's Theory of Repression Meets Experimental Work
Freud took a dream as the fulfillment of a wish and argued that a repressed wish appears in altered form. That claim, however, was hard to check by experiment. The dream rebound effect can be placed as a partial rechecking of that intuition inside the framework of cognitive science. There is a difference here worth holding on to. What Freud had in mind was unconscious repression that the person does not notice, while what the experiments handled was conscious suppression the person carries out on purpose. Whether repression on the unconscious side has the same effect on dreams has not been settled, because the experiment itself is difficult to design. On this site we do not treat the two as one thing, and we build our reading on the plainer route: material pushed down on purpose comes back in a dream.
Why Dreams of a Former Partner Do Not Stop
Deciding not to think about someone anymore after a breakup, and then finding that person in a dream, is an experience that can be read alongside the dream rebound effect. Thought-suppression research has taken up the attempt to hold down thoughts of a past relationship as a subject in its own right. Every attempt at holding down calls for a check on whether the person has come to mind, which means staying in contact with the image. Once the holding down loosens during sleep, room opens for the image to come out on the side of the dream. Dream divination often reads a dream of a former partner as lingering attachment, but it can also be appearing as the rebound from an attempt to push the thought away, so a reading that does not settle on either one is the useful one. On this site, when dreams of the same person keep coming, we suggest not reading them as nothing but an inability to let go, and looking back as well at whether the daytime has been spent driving that person out of mind.
Turning the Rebound Effect Around - Guiding Dream Content on Purpose
Turn this view of the phenomenon over and a route appears for working on what shows up in a dream. If there is a dream you want, the straightforward move is not to hold the content down but to picture it calmly before sleep (dream incubation). The other way around, when frightening dreams are the trouble, the natural response of trying not to think about the subject may be working to call it back into the dream. Rather than avoiding it, writing it out while awake and giving it a shape can change how the night handles it. If frightening dreams keep coming and are getting in the way of daytime life, however, do not stop at reading the meaning of the dream: please consult a professional about sleep and about your state of mind. Working up to something in stages is a method to be carried out with a professional alongside, and stepping into a frightening scene on your own judgment is not something we recommend.
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