Abstract Index Conference Index

ABSTRACT

Personality and Psychopathological Correlates of Contextualized Images in Dreams
Ross Levin & Ernest Hartmann

 Ross Levin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology

Author of over two dozen articles on various dimensions of dreaming. Current interests include understanding the etiology of nightmares (and particularly their relationship to waking psychopathology), the relation of waking to dreaming cognition, and dreaming as a dissociated state of consciousness.

Ernest Hartmann, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Tufts University School of Medicine
Director of Sleep Disorders Center
Newton-Wellesley Hospital

Dr. Hartmann is a past president of ASD and was the first editor of the journal Dreaming. He is the author of 300 published articles and eight books, most recently, Dreams and Nightmares:
The New Theory on the Origin and Meaning of Dreams (Plenum, 1998).

4) A contextualized image (CI) is a powerful central image in a dream which provides a picture-context for the dominant emotion of the dreamer. This study examined the personality, psychopathological and psychological testing correlates of CI's in a community-based sample of 400 respondents.

5) Attendees will be provided with an overview of:
A) What is a Contextualizing Image (CI)?
B) Under what conditions are CI's especially predominant?
C) Clinical implications of the presence of CI's in dreams.

Personality and Psychopathological Correlates
of Contextualized Images in Dreams
Ross Levin & Ernest Hartmann

A contextualized image (CI) is a powerful central image in a dream which can be seen as picturing, or providing a picture-context for, the dominant emotion of the dreamer (Hartmann, 1998; Hartmann, Kunzendorf, Rosen, & Grace, 1998; Hartmann, Zborowski, McNamara, Rosen, & Grace, 1999). Thus, the paradigmatic dream, "I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave", contextualizes the dominant emotion of fear/terror and/or helplessness.

CIs can be reliably scored based on a recently developed scoring system which asks a rater, examining a written report of a dream or other material to identify the presence of an outstanding image (Hartmann et al., 1999). Once identified, these images are then rated on a 8-point intensity scale. Raters are also asked to guess which specific emotions are represented by the CI. Recent studies (Hartmann et al., 1998; Hartmann et al., 1999; Hartmann, et al., 1999) have investigated the presence of CI scores and cognitive activation in sleep (REM dreams versus NREM mentation) (Hartmann & Strickhold, 2000) and daydreams (Hartmann et al., 1998) as well as the relationship between CI scores and various dimensions of the dreaming experience, boundary scores and self-reported histories of physical or sexual abuse in college student samples (Hartmann et al., 1999).

The present study seeks to expand and extend these findings by looking at the relationship between CI scores based on "a most recent dream" and various dimensions of personality, psychopathology and two broad measures of psychological testing, the WAIS (a broadly used adult intelligence measure which breaks down into 11 subtests measuring different dimensions of cognitive functioning) and the Rorschach Inkblot, a commonly used measure of personality.
At the present time, we have collected data from almost 400 nonpatient respondents ranging in age from 17-77 from a widely diverse range of ethnic backgrounds. These individuals were all administered a WAIS or a Rorschach as part of their participation in a doctoral-level clinical assessment practicum in the New York City metropolitan area. Participants also completed self-report measures of fantasy proneness (ICMI), psychological absorption (TAS), daydreaming and fantasy immersion (SIPI), boundaries (HBQ), depression (BDI), state and trait anxiety (STAI), dissociation (DES), psychosis-proneness (Per-Mag), and a widely-used psychiatric symptom checklist (SCL-90-R). Subjects also completed a sleep and dream questionnaire (SDQ) and a nightmare distress index (NMD).

As the CI is a recently-developed construct, much of our study is exploratory in nature. However, based on previous research connecting the presence of intense CIs to a history of trauma, we expect correspondences between CIs and measures of psychopathology related to trauma and/or faulty emotional processing (dissociation, anxiety, depression) as well as fantasy access.

References
Hartmann, E. (1998). Dreams and nightmares: The new theory on the origin and meaning of dreams. NY: Plenum Press
Hartmann, E., Kunzendorf, R., Rosen, R., & Grace, N. (1998). Contextualizing images in dreams and daydreams. Sleep, 21S, 279.
Hartmann, E., & Stickgold, R. (2000). Contextualizing images in content obtained from different sleep and waking states. Sleep, 23S, A172.
Hartmann, E., Zborowski, M., McNamara, P., & Rosen, R., & Grace, N. (1999). Contextualizing images in dreams: Relationship to the emotional state of the dreamer. Sleep, 22S, 131.

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