“Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder” by Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., Past President of The International Association for the Study of Dreams

December 12, 2014

Dreams in Multiple Personality 

Some novelists have spoken of dreams as being part of their creative process. Some of these experiences may be actual dreams (verifiable by EEG). But when you hear a story about a creative insight or inspiration in a dream, you often can’t be sure whether it was a dream or a dreamlike experience, since some people have very vivid, dreamlike experiences.

Dream as Clue to Multiple Personality

A person who was not yet in therapy, but who knew that she “lost time” (had memory gaps, amnesia) and heard voices (which later proved to be the voices of her alternate personalities, aka alters), had the following dream:

“I was sitting in a photo booth trying to get it to take a picture of me, but all the pictures that came out showed other people—or at least faint outlines of other people. In the mirror, where you see what will come out, the face kept changing, like ghosts” (1, p. 72).

Dream as Message from Alter to Host

In multiple personality disorder, the host personality usually doesn’t know about the multiple personality. The dream quoted above could have been a message from an alternate personality to the host personality, if an alter had wanted to begin to inform the host about the multiple personality.

As an alter of another person said, “I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming” (1, p. 77).

Mistaking Real Life for a Dream

A woman with no cats had recurring “nightmares” involving cats. When she awoke from one of these “dreams,” she was surprised to find “the velour jogging suit in which she slept covered with cat hair” (1, p. 72). The real life activity of one her alters had previously been mistaken for a dream.

1. Deirdre Barrett. “Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder,” pages 68-81 in Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Comment

Dr. Barrett took the above examples from people with clinical, multiple personality disorder, meaning that it was giving them distress and/or dysfunction for which they sought treatment.

In contrast, successful novelists with multiple personality trait will have incorporated real dreams, “waking dreams,” and alternate personalities (characters, narrators, muses, etc.) into their writing process.

Multiple personality disorder is a treatable problem. Multiple personality trait, when made use of, as in fiction writing, is a special ability.