Thread: MPD

Do you think having multiple personality disorder would drasticaly alter your dreams and if so in what way ?

I would guess so, but not having experienced this, or knowing anyone who has (quite), it's hard to guess exactly in what way dreams would be affected.

Interesting question.
Perhaps the dominant personality at that time would have dreams
that would differ from the other personalities.
Anyone willing to forfeit their sanity for science ?

I would gladly forfeit my sanity if there was a way. I know I would regreat it afterwords but I'd still do it there was a way.

Oh! Interesting question! As odd as this may sound to you guys, I’m quite fascinated by social disorders (particularly ones that lead to crime). I’ve only done a small amount of research on multiple personality disorders, so I did a quick look-up to find out how the personalities correspond with dreams. I only came up with a few things.

First, I found that Dissociative Identity Disorder is a kind of M.P.D in which the ‘main personality’ (or the person themselves) falls into a dream-like state as their other personality(ies) go about their business. Whatever the alternate personality does during that time is regarded as a dream to the main personality. But that wasn’t what you asked…

Second, I found that some of those suffering from M.P.D. also dream with each of their personalities. It’s interesting to note that in a true case of M.P.D., neither personality is aware of the other. An alternate personality is ‘normal’. In other words, it will act exactly like any other personality would act if it had the same memories. I imagine that makes for a very busy night as the dreams attend to both personalities.

This brings up the question of dream recall. If neither personality is aware of the other, yet they share dreams and memories, what must that be like when one wakes up in the morning? I’d love to see that guy’s dream journal.

Originally posted by A Lost Soul
This brings up the question of dream recall. If neither personality is aware of the other, yet they share dreams and memories, what must that be like when one wakes up in the morning? I’d love to see that guy’s dream journal.

Now THAT would be weird. Maybe each personality would record its own dreams since they act independently of each other. Trippy to think about.

There's actually some debate as to whether or not TRUE mpd exists.

It could be that the disorder is merely formed by those who semi-intentionally choose to forget who they are as more a defense mechanism to avoid stress/grief, etc. You know how if you are really stressed out you have sort of a different personality then when you are chill? The theory is that this is just a REALLY intense version of that. Also think of when you go into the kitchen but forget what you were going in there for. It was obviously important enough for you to get up and go there, but once you got in your brain switched to something else and blanked out what you were doing. Similar is the theory for MPD, which explains why people can forget years of events that were prior to them having the disorder, and why they usually "shift" during stressful points in their lives and the disorder usually occurs after a traumatic event.

As with most anything you do on a daily and regular basis I imagine this would also carry over into dreaming, a person switching personalities. However, hypnosis, a type of dreaming, is often used to force the personalilities to confront each other, which I imagine could also occur in a dream, as well as one personality reliving the memories of other personalilities, but I would suspeect that the person would usually be unaware of other personalities in the dreams just like in real life, and perhaps more so because of the lack of skepticism and general gullability of the dreamer.

Anyway, that's my two cents.