October 1, 1998
Dream Analysis: Meaning of the Monitor
By TINA KELLEY
Can dreams tell people something about their relationship to technology? Many people who report having such dreams say they can. Following are a computer-related dream and several interpretations of it:
THE DREAM:
"I have experienced a high-anxiety dream in which the walls of a room are computer screens," Tanya Tabachnikoff, director of media relations at Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vt., said in an e-mail message describing a dream she had had about six months ago. "When I use the keyboard to try to go to a Web site, the computer interrupts me with moving messages of new software programs that I must download before proceeding, or else it is deluging me with products I must purchase -- demanding my credit card number, expiration date, etc. Even when I refuse to enter any information, it starts racking up the bill in front of my eyes.
"I feel completely trapped by the room, completely at the mercy of these enormous monitors surrounding me. The computer 'persona' (which is definitely masculine) is overpowering and relentless, verging on cruel, and I am struggling to regain control as it attempts to take control of me."
Ms. Tabachnikoff, responding to an electronic posting in search of computer-related dreams, said her dream might be related to her pregnancy -- a condition that she says leads to vivid dreams -- and to her college's growing reliance on technology. She said Marlboro had embraced computers as a tool for education, offering master's degrees in Internet Technology Management and Teaching With the Internet, programs she has helped promote. And she often uses e-mail to communicate with her boss and co-workers.
"I guess all the emphasis on technology has had some anxiety-provoking effect on my unconscious," she wrote. "The dream obviously conveys a fear of computers taking over our lives."
Circuits asked a number of dream interpreters, amateur and professional, to analyze Ms. Tabachnikoff's dream.
THE INTERPRETATIONS:
John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University, said: "You have the masculine, father-type image of the computer as a masculine, controlling force. It's a turnaround because usually we think of computers as servants.
This is a source of anxiety: you're thinking you're in control, but there's a kind of betrayal by them in that dream."
One dream (a computer run amok), four interpretations.
Thomas Wear, a Jungian clinical psychologist in Seattle, said: "Now the machine has all the information, all the data, and you're just the operator, still a tool tender. You're tending the machine and nothing more. Suddenly this impersonal thing obviously overwhelms her and surrounds her, and she feels attacked by its masculine energy. Computers are totally masculine in the sense that they are totally objective."Hillary Butler, a certified social worker with a Freudian bent at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health in New York, said: "Certainly there's a fear/wish to be submissive and to be dominated. There's a sense absolutely of being overwhelmed, being out of control, being at the mercy of another, which again can be a fear and a wish. I think it's both. So the college, the job, the boss are all representations of a father, and the fear and the wish to give in to a powerful father. I don't know that this was particularly about computers, except that that's her life, that's the language that she would use to express her deepest desires and fears."
Dr. Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said: "It's a classic REM-sleep dream in that it has anxiety, a fair amount of bizarreness, incongruity and things that are probably very unlikely if not physically impossible. What it doesn't have is scene changes or action. It feels like a kind of relatively static preawakening experience.
"The problem with dream interpretation is it was never scientific and can never be scientific, but that doesn't mean we won't do it. We interpret everything. My guess is that you'd still have as many interpretations as you have people. That's an inexact process and should be left outside the realm of science."
