Manifestations of emotional memories in written and visual dream reports recurrences

Psychotherapy often aims at updating implicit emotional memories that maintain clients’ symptoms and unwanted behaviors. Evidence suggests that rapid eye movement sleep may play a role in implicit emotional memory processing and that dreams may reflect the reactivation of memory traces during sleep. This qualitative research describes and illustrates how implicit emotional memories may be reflected in the written and visual dream reports of five art therapy clients during five weeks. Written dream reports (N = 80) recurrent themes have been classified into four categories (context, problem, solution, emotion) inspired by the narrative structure of implicit emotional memories as formulated in reconsolidation-informed psychotherapy. An observation grid was used to analyse visual dream reports (N = 29), and it included both symbols and formal elements of the images. The results indicate how clinicians and dreamers may benefit from analyzing recurrent themes in a dream series, beyond working with a dream at the time. Considering the exploratory nature of this research, further research is needed on the manifestations of implicit emotional memories in dream reports.