Purpose, feeling and preparation for action
Alfred Adler and Dreams as Rehearsal
Alfred Adler understood dreams as purposeful movements between a present problem and an imagined future. A dream could create the feeling needed to approach, avoid or postpone a waking task, rehearsing an attitude before it became action.
Individual psychology and the direction of a life
How to approach Adler on dreams
Alfred Adler (1870 to 1937) was an Austrian physician, psychotherapist and founder of Individual Psychology. He treated personality as an organised whole moving towards goals, not as a collection of separate forces. Dreams, memories, symptoms, emotions and waking behaviour were therefore interpreted in relation to the same overall direction.
The phrase dreams as rehearsal is a useful modern summary, but it needs qualification. Adler did not propose that dreams accurately practise a future event like an athlete repeating a movement. He argued that dreams anticipate life problems, dramatise an attitude and produce feelings that can prepare the dreamer for a chosen line of action.
The Adlerian question is not simply “What caused this dream?” It is also “What attitude does this dream help the person carry into tomorrow?”
A future-oriented psychology
Past experience
Childhood, family relationships, bodily experience and remembered successes or defeats provide material.
Present problem
A current life task challenges the person’s established way of securing significance, belonging or safety.
Imagined future
An anticipated outcome or guiding goal gives direction to perception, emotion and action.
Adler called this approach teleological, meaning that behaviour is understood partly through the end towards which it moves. This does not mean that the future reaches backwards and causes the present. An imagined goal operates now by shaping attention, interpretation and choice.
The organising pattern
Style of life
Adler’s style of life is the characteristic way a person perceives self, other people and the world while pursuing significance and belonging. It includes expectations, preferred strategies, emotional habits and conclusions about what must be done to remain safe or worthwhile.
For Adler, waking behaviour and dreaming do not belong to two different personalities. Both express the same direction. A person who habitually meets uncertainty through avoidance, control, competition or cooperation is likely to construct dream situations shaped by the same pattern.
The dream does not stand outside the person’s life. It is another scene in which the same characteristic movement may become visible.
What “rehearsal” means here
A dream can stage a possible encounter before waking action occurs. More importantly for Adler, it can rehearse a stance: courageous or discouraged, cooperative or isolated, flexible or rigid, ready to engage or prepared to withdraw.
The dream need not resemble the future situation literally. An approaching examination may become a war, a collapsing bridge or an impossible mountain. The imagery creates a felt relation to difficulty. That mood may persist after the narrative is forgotten.
Four ways a dream may prepare action
Encouragement
The dreamer experiences competence, support or successful movement towards a task.
Discouragement
The task becomes enormous, hostile or impossible, supporting an expectation of defeat.
Justification
The dream provides an emotional reason to continue an established strategy or avoid a change.
Experiment
The dream combines memory fragments into a novel possibility not yet attempted while awake.
The first three are strongly Adlerian formulations. The fourth connects Adler’s future orientation with contemporary research on constructive episodic simulation, but should not be attributed to Adler as a neuroscientific claim.
Feeling as the bridge to waking life
Adler placed unusual emphasis on the emotional atmosphere left by a dream. The narrative may fade quickly, yet anxiety, confidence, resentment, relief or reluctance can remain. This feeling prepares the person to meet the waking situation in a particular way.
| Waking feeling | Possible preparation | Question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Anxiety | Approach cautiously, delay, seek protection or avoid exposure. | What action becomes easier to justify when the situation feels dangerous? |
| Anger | Confront, accuse, dominate or defend a threatened position. | What relationship does anger create between self and others? |
| Shame | Withdraw, hide, appease or abandon an attempt. | Which imagined audience is judging the dreamer? |
| Relief | Release responsibility, accept an outcome or continue without change. | What burden has the dream removed? |
| Courage | Engage, cooperate, experiment or tolerate imperfection. | What becomes possible when success is not required in advance? |
The examination dream
Imagine someone facing an important interview who dreams of being returned to school and discovering that an examination has already begun. The room is unfamiliar, the questions are unreadable, and everyone else appears prepared.
One Adlerian reading might be that the dream produces discouragement and supplies an emotional case for withdrawal. Another dreamer might remember having passed difficult examinations before and experience the dream as preparation for another test. The image alone does not decide between them.
The relevant evidence includes the dreamer’s feeling on waking, current task, habitual response to evaluation and actual subsequent behaviour. Adler’s method is contextual rather than dictionary-based.
Private logic and common sense
Private logic
Personal conclusions that feel self-evident: “If I cannot be certain, I must not begin”; “If another person succeeds, I become less valuable”; “Asking for help proves weakness.”
Common sense
Meanings tested within shared reality and social cooperation: uncertainty can be tolerated, worth is not a ranking, and interdependence is part of communal life.
Adler believed dreams often support private logic when shared reality threatens an established style of life. This makes the theory critical rather than romantic. A dream is not automatically wise, healing or more truthful than waking thought. It may strengthen a mistaken conclusion.
Safeguarding and self-deception
Safeguarding tendencies protect a person’s sense of significance from anticipated failure, humiliation or responsibility. Symptoms, excuses, hesitation, accusation and withdrawal may all preserve the existing position. Adler sometimes interpreted dreams as serving the same function.
A frightening dream before a difficult task may create sincere distress while also making avoidance feel necessary. The dreamer need not be consciously manufacturing an excuse. In Adler’s account, purpose does not imply deliberate deception.
Ethical caution: describing a dream as safeguarding must not become a way to accuse a distressed person of secretly wanting their difficulty.
Life tasks and social interest
Adler located psychological life within relationship and community. Dreams may be explored in relation to the tasks of work, friendship, intimacy and contribution. The question is not only whether the dreamer succeeds, but how success is imagined in relation to other people.
Work and contribution
Does the dream imagine useful participation, unbearable testing, competition or escape from responsibility?
Friendship and belonging
Are others companions, judges, servants, rivals, rescuers or people whose needs also matter?
Love and intimacy
Does closeness require equality and trust, or is it organised through possession, dependency, distance or proof?
Social interest refers to felt participation in a shared human world. It should not be used as a moral score applied to a single dream. It raises the question of whether the imagined solution expands cooperation or preserves isolation and superiority.
Freud, Jung and Adler compared
| Question | Freud | Jung | Adler |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary emphasis | Disguised wish fulfilment. | Compensation and symbolic self-representation. | Preparation of feeling and attitude towards a life problem. |
| Direction of explanation | From manifest dream towards latent sources and infantile wishes. | Between conscious attitude, unconscious material and possible integration. | From current problem towards an imagined goal and likely action. |
| Why imagery? | Dream-work transforms latent thought. | Symbol is the natural language of unconscious psychic activity. | Pictorial comparison creates emotion and makes a line of action persuasive. |
| Role of the dreamer | Associations reveal latent thoughts. | Associations and amplification unfold symbolic meaning. | Lifestyle, present task and waking response reveal the dream’s possible use. |
| Main scientific problem | Hidden wishes and censorship are difficult to test independently. | Compensation and archetypal purpose allow flexible retrospective readings. | Purposes and safeguarding strategies can be inferred after behaviour is known. |
Personal symbols, not fixed meanings
Adler did not require a universal dream dictionary. Flying could express ambitious movement for one person, relief from burden for another and fear of losing contact with the ground for someone else. Falling could enact loss of status, surrender, bodily sensation or a specific recent experience.
The useful question is functional: how does this particular image help create this particular mood in relation to this particular task? Symbolic content matters, but its role within movement and purpose matters more than an isolated definition.
The same dream image can support different directions. Interpretation depends upon the life in which the image is being used.
Recurring dreams and repeated strategies
A recurring dream may show a stable way of approaching difficulty. The setting changes, but the dreamer is repeatedly too late, unable to find the room, chased without turning, responsible for something impossible or waiting for permission that never arrives.
Repetition
Which relationship between self, obstacle and other people remains constant?
Variation
Does the dreamer gain agency, accept help, notice alternatives or respond differently over time?
Recurrence does not prove an Adlerian purpose, but it provides stronger material for examining a repeated pattern than a single isolated dream.
What contemporary research can support
Adler’s specific theory of dream purpose has received far less empirical investigation than modern accounts of memory, simulation and continuity. Some findings resemble parts of his model without confirming it in its entirety.
| Adlerian proposition | Relevant contemporary finding | What remains unproven |
|---|---|---|
| Dreams connect present problems with anticipated action. | Partly compatible. More than a quarter of dreams in one diary study were judged related to specific impending events. | The dreams were often recombinations rather than deliberate rehearsals, and their adaptive effect was not established. |
| Dream content reflects the person’s characteristic concerns. | Well supported in broad form. Continuity research repeatedly links dreams with waking relationships, concerns and emotional life. | Continuity does not show that each dream supports a stable style of life or hidden goal. |
| Dreams produce emotion that influences waking orientation. | Plausible. Emotional waking experiences are preferentially incorporated, and dream affect can persist after waking. | A specific purpose such as encouragement, avoidance or self-deception cannot usually be inferred from affect alone. |
| Dreams rehearse difficult or threatening situations. | Supported as a content pattern, debated as a function. Threats and social interactions are common in dreams. | Frequent simulation does not prove evolved rehearsal, improved performance or Adlerian safeguarding. |
| Dreams can contribute to problem solving. | Possible but variable. Experimental and observational work suggests benefits for some creative problems. | Most dreams are not realistic solutions, and remembered successes are vulnerable to selection bias. |
| Dreams protect private logic against common sense. | A clinical interpretation rather than an established dream mechanism. | Private goals and defensive purposes need independent measures and prospective tests. |
Adler and modern simulation theories
Modern theories describe dreams as simulations of threats, social situations or possible futures. These proposals overlap with Adler’s view that dreams prepare people for coming problems, but their explanatory levels differ.
| Account | Main proposal | Difference from Adler |
|---|---|---|
| Threat simulation | Dreaming evolved to practise recognising and avoiding danger. | Adler focused upon personal goals and style of life, not an evolved biological programme. |
| Social simulation | Dreams exercise social perception, interaction and bonding. | Adler judged social movement through cooperation, belonging and private purpose. |
| Constructive episodic simulation | Memory fragments combine into imagined scenarios related to possible futures. | This can emerge from memory processes without a dream selecting a goal or emotional strategy. |
| Adlerian preparation | The dream creates a mood that supports a personally characteristic response to a life task. | It is an interpretive theory of individual purpose rather than a demonstrated neural mechanism. |
Claims that require caution
| Popular claim | More accurate wording |
|---|---|
| “Dreams rehearse what will happen.” | Some dreams construct scenarios related to anticipated events, but they are rarely literal forecasts or accurate practice runs. |
| “Your dream is preparing you to fail.” | The dream may create discouragement that fits an avoidant response, but purpose should not be asserted without contextual evidence. |
| “Bad dreams are excuses.” | Nightmares are genuine experiences that may reflect stress, trauma, medication, illness or sleep disturbance. Adlerian interpretation is only one possible perspective. |
| “Every symbol reveals style of life.” | Patterns across dreams and waking behaviour may be informative; isolated images remain ambiguous. |
| “If the dream is forgotten, only the mood mattered.” | Dream forgetting has many cognitive and neurophysiological explanations. Adler’s functional reading is not sufficient on its own. |
| “Dream interpretation reveals unconscious goals.” | Interpretation proposes a possible relationship among imagery, feeling, current task and later action. |
Dreams as enacted metaphor
What Adler contributes to dream exploration
Adler directs attention from symbolic objects towards the movement of the whole dream. What difficulty is approached? Which position does the dreamer occupy? How are other people recruited or excluded? What feeling makes the ending seem inevitable?
A dream of an endless staircase does not merely contain a staircase symbol. It enacts a world in which effort has no arrival. A dream of missing every train creates a world in which opportunity always leaves first. The metaphorical arrangement rehearses a relationship with possibility.
The dream can be explored as a rehearsal of relationship, position and mood without assuming that it predicts the future or contains one hidden answer.
Questions for exploring a dream
- What current task or decision might this dream address?
- What future event or outcome is being anticipated?
- What feeling remains after waking, even if the story fades?
- Which action becomes more likely when that feeling is present?
- Does the dream encourage engagement, cooperation, delay, control or retreat?
- How does the dreamer’s position resemble a recurring waking strategy?
- What private rule seems to govern the dream world?
- How are other people positioned: as partners, judges, obstacles, rescuers or dependants?
- What would a more courageous or cooperative rehearsal look like?
- Which evidence would show that the preferred interpretation is mistaken?
These questions use Adler’s theory as an exploratory framework. They do not diagnose a style of life, establish an unconscious purpose or turn distress into evidence of personal unwillingness.
Further reading and research
These sources provide Adler’s original framework, later Individual Psychology approaches and contemporary research relevant to prospective and rehearsal accounts of dreaming.
- Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature, Open Library record and available editions.
- Routledge: Adler’s Understanding Human Nature.
- The Journal of Individual Psychology.
- Oberst, 2002: an Adlerian-constructivist approach to dreams.
- Drescher, 2021: the meaning and use of dreams from an Individual Psychology perspective.
- Fassino and Gramaglia, 2008: dreams in Individual Psychology and references to neuroscience.
- Wamsley and colleagues, 2022: constructive episodic simulation in dreams.
- Eldredge and colleagues, 2016: rehearsal and other functions of imagined interactions in night dreams.
- Zadra and colleagues, 2006: threat simulation in recurrent dreams.
- Mathes and Schredl, 2016: threats in dreams and waking life.
- Malinowski and Horton, 2014: emotional waking experiences incorporated into dreams.
- Navara and DeCicco, 2021: relational concerns and continuity in dreams during life transitions.
- Stumbrys and Daniels, 2010: exploratory research on creative problem solving in lucid dreams.
A final perspective
Adler shifted dream interpretation from buried causes towards movement and use. A dream can connect memory, present difficulty and anticipated action by creating a mood in which one response feels natural. Modern research supports the presence of future-related, emotional and simulated situations in dreams, but it does not establish that each dream strategically protects a style of life. Rehearsal remains a valuable question, not a universal answer.
This page is for education and critical discussion. Dream interpretation is exploratory rather than diagnostic. Disturbing, recurrent or trauma-related dreams may warrant support from an appropriately qualified health professional.