The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  For thousands of years, dreams were explained as encrypted messages from the spirit world that could be decoded only by priests and shamans. And then, in the twentieth century, Freudians triumphantly announced that dreams were actually encrypted messages from the id, and only the priesthood of psychoanalysts could decode them. To get the flavor of psychoanalytic dream interpretation, consider Frederick Crews’s gloss of one of Freud’s most famous case studies, that of the Wolf Man, Sergei Pankeev (or Pankejeff).

  Freud was determined to find a primal scene to serve as the fountainhead of Pankeev’s symptoms. He made it materialize through a transparently arbitrary interpretation of a remembered dream of Pankeev’s from the suspiciously early age of four, about six or seven white wolves (actually dogs, as Freud was later compelled to admit) sitting in a tree outside his window. The wolves, Freud explained, were the parents; their whiteness meant bedclothes; their stillness meant the opposite, coital motion; their big tails signified, by the same indulgent logic, castration; daylight meant night; and all this could be traced most assuredly to a memory from age one of Pankeev’s mother and father copulating, doggy style, no fewer than three times in succession while he watched from the crib and soiled himself in horrified protest.

  Nowadays many dream scientists look with bald disdain on the Freudian legacy. The most prominent dream scientist of the modern era, J. Allan Hobson, calls psychoanalysis a “fortune cookie” model of dream interpretation. For researchers like Hobson, the search for a hidden symbolology of dreams has been a tragic waste of time. Taking up Freud’s contrast between the manifest (obvious) and the latent (symbolic) content of dreams, Hobson shouts, “The manifest dream is the dream, is the dream, is the dream!” But what are dreams for, if they are not coded messages from the gods or from one’s own psyche?

  Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). This photograph was taken around the time he published his most famous work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

  Dreams, like hands, may have multiple functions. For example, there is some evidence that dreams may help us file new experiences in the correct bins of short- and long-term memory. Many psychologists and psychiatrists believe that dreams may also be a form of autotherapy, helping us to cope with the anxieties of our waking lives. Or, as the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick proposed, dreams may help us weed useless information out of the mind. For Crick, dreams were a disposal system: “We dream to forget.”

  Still others believe that dreams have no purpose whatsoever. As the dream researcher Owen Flanagan puts it, “Our dreams were not designed by nature to serve any function . . . Nothing, nada, just noise, like the gurgling of the stomach or the sound of the heart.” The thudding sound of the heart is not the point of pumping the blood. As the children’s book says, everyone poops, but this is not the point of eating. Defecation is a side effect of our need to eat. In the same way—according to Flanagan and many other researchers—a dream is just brain waste. It is a useless by-product of all the useful work the sleeping brain does. Why did I dream my desert dream? For no reason at all.

  The by-product theory of dreams goes by the acronym RAT (random activation theory). RAT is based on the idea that the brain has serious work to do at night, especially during REM sleep. This night work may be one of the reasons we sleep in the first place: so the brain can finish all the housekeeping chores it can’t get to during the day.

  But as we will see in the next chapter, we all have brain circuits that pore over incoming information, filter for patterns, and arrange those patterns into narratives. According to RAT, these storytelling circuits have a flaw: they never learn that the clatter and noise of the sleeping brain is meaningless. Instead, they treat that clatter just like the information that streams in during waking hours, trying to turn it into a coherent narrative. Our inner storyteller does this for no practical reason. It just does it because it has a lifelong case of insomnia and because it is addicted to story—it simply can’t help it.

  RAT is a bold theory that, in defining dreams as mental garbage, challenges all the canons of psychology and folk wisdom. And RAT is also a clever theory that organizes a lot of chaotic data about dreams. Why are dreams so strange? Why do fathers sit placidly as their precious daughters pirouette on a cliff’s edge? Why do elves masturbate angrily in your bathroom? All of the bizarre elements of dreams can be chalked up to the mind’s desperate attempts to craft ordered narratives out of random input.

  While everyone agrees that some features of dreams may be by-products, support for RAT is far from unanimous. RAT critics argue that although dreams are certainly strange, they are not strange enough to be explained by RAT. The Finnish dream researcher Antti Revonsuo believes we are too easily impressed by the weirdness of dreams. We remember our bizarre dreams best, and so we fail to register that dreams are mainly realistic and coherent. Of RAT theory, Revonsuo writes:

  No random process could ever create such a complex simulation of the waking world. Bizarreness certainly is a regular feature of dreams, but it constitutes a relatively mild deviation against the solid background of sophisticated organization; a little noise within a highly organized signal. RAT can only explain the bizarreness—the small degree of noise—but it cannot explain the high degree of organization in which the bizarreness is embedded.

  Revonsuo also points out that RAT’s proponents have an unwarranted confidence in the arrow of causation. RAT simply assumes that certain brain states cause the properties of dreams. For instance, RAT advocates say that dreams are highly emotional because the limbic system and the amygdala—both of which are linked to emotion—happen to be aroused during REM sleep. RAT doesn’t allow for an equally plausible interpretation: the emotional centers of the brain are aroused because the dreamer is dreaming emotionally.

  And then you have atonia, the sleep paralysis that sets in during REM sleep. Why do we have it? It must be because, eons ago, our ancestors were harming themselves and others by acting out their dreams. When you have a dream brawl with a flesh-eating zombie, your brain doesn’t know it is dreaming. It thinks it is actually fighting the zombie. It is flooding the body with commands: Crouch! Left jab! Right cross! Poke it in the eye! Run for it! Run! The only reason our sleeping bodies do not obey these commands is that they never receive them. All the motor commands are being intercepted by a blockade in the brain stem.

  But the blockade doesn’t make good sense from a RAT perspective. In RAT, certain parts of our brains concoct crazy fictions out of the sleepy blabber generated by other parts of our brains. No problem, except that the motor centers of the brain have an alarming tendency to treat the night story as absolutely real and to respond appropriately—to leap when the dream says leap, to fight and flee when the dream calls for it. So, from the RAT point of view, dreams are actually much worse than merely worthless; they are dangerous.

  The simplest evolutionary solution to this problem would not be the drastic one of paralyzing the whole body during REM dreams. The simplest solution would be to silence our inner storyteller—to disable it for the night, or to temporarily block its access to the rest of the brain’s doings. Instead, evolution designed a solution that allows the mind to safely run its simulations, as though dreams serve an important purpose that needs to be protected.

  But perhaps most damaging to RAT is the evidence that dreaming is not limited to humans but is widespread in other animals. REM, dreams, and the brain blockades that make dreaming safe have apparently been conserved across widely differing species, suggesting that dreams have value.

  JOUVET’S CATS

  Back in the 1950s, the French dream scientist Michael Jouvet knew that many animals experience REM sleep and atonia. But did they actually dream? In hopes of finding out, Jouvet procured a large number of stray cats, along with bone saws, slicers, and stabbers. He cut open the heads of his cats, located the brain stems, and began screwing up the works.

  Jouvet was trying to destroy the blockade-making capacity of kitty atonia. If cats dreamed, he
reasoned, motor signals from the brain would reach the muscles, and the cats would act out their dreams. By trial and error, Jouvet had to do enough damage to the feline brain stem to destroy the machinery of atonia without otherwise impairing his cats or killing them.

  Jouvet placed his surviving cats in big Plexiglas boxes. He hooked them up to devices that monitored their vital signs and brain activity. A camera recorded them while they slept. Jouvet’s results were remarkable and unequivocal: kitties dream. Some minutes after entering REM sleep, Jouvet’s cats would appear to suddenly wake up. Their eyes would flutter open, and they would raise their heads and look around. Their eyes were open, but they couldn’t see. They did not respond to offers of delicious food. When the researchers flicked their hands toward the cats’ eyes, the cats did not flinch.

  The cats were far away in Dreamland, totally oblivious to the waking world. They were acting out their dreams. They moved around and reconnoitered. They took up the postures of stalking or lying in wait. They engaged in predatory behavior, springing on invisible prey and plunging their teeth into their victims. And the cats also exhibited defensive behavior: they would flee from threats by backpedaling with flattened ears, or they would fight threats with hisses and paw swipes.

  In short, Jouvet’s experiment showed not only that cats dream but also that they dream about very specific things. He pointed out the obvious: a cat “dreams of actions characteristic of its own species (lying in wait, attack, rage, fright, pursuit).” But look at Jouvet’s list. In fact, he didn’t find that cats dream about the “characteristic” actions of their own species. Instead, his cats seemed to dream about a narrower subset of problems in kitty life—namely, how to eat and not be eaten.

  For your average tomcat, Dreamland is not a world of catnip debauches, warm sunbeams, canned tuna fish, and yowling bitches in heat. Dreamland for cats is closer to kitty hell than kitty heaven, as feelings of fear and aggression predominate.

  Jouvet thought his research had implications beyond the feline. He considered it unlikely that dreams were rare in animals and that he had just happened to find them in the one species where he looked. Jouvet believed that dreams were probably common across the animal kingdom and that they serve a purpose.

  Scientists at MIT determined that rats probably dream, which is damaging to RAT.

  Jouvet raised the possibility that dreams are for practice. In dreams, animals rehearse their responses to the sorts of problems that are most germane to their survival. Kitties practice on kitty problems. Rats practice on rat problems. Humans practice on human problems. The dream is a virtual reality simulator where people and other animals hone responses to life’s big challenges.

  As a general theory of dreams, Jouvet’s idea did not immediately catch on, partly because, in the 1950s, the whole field of dream research was still overshadowed by Freud. For Freudians, dreams are disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes—thus Freud’s approving quotation of the proverb “The pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize.” But Jouvet’s theory, supported by a number of studies since, is close to the opposite of Freud’s wish fulfillment theory. Recent research suggests that if geese dream—and it is possible that they do—they probably don’t dream of maize. They probably dream of foxes. And cats dream of snarling dogs. And people dream of bad men, and of little girls losing their balance and falling through space.

  PEOPLE DREAM OF MONSTERS

  Dreamland is a lot different than most of us think. Freud’s theory of dreams as disguised wishes just formalizes the popular idea that Dreamland is, well, dreamy. “Did you enjoy yourself?” you ask your colleague upon her return from vacation, “Oh, yes, it was a dream!” A wonderful thing happens, and you call it “a dream come true.”

  But thank goodness dreams usually don’t come true. As J. Allan Hobson put it, “[In dreams] waves of strong emotion—notably fear and anger—urge us to run away or do battle with imaginary predators. Fight or flight is the rule in dreaming consciousness, and it goes on and on, night after night, with all too rare respites in the glorious lull of fictive elation.” Although there is some controversy about how to interpret the data, most dream researchers generally agree with Hobson: Dreamland is not a happy place.

  Dream reports are collected in two main ways. In the less controlled method, subjects keep a dream diary. When they wake up in the morning, they immediately roll over and record their dreams before they fade. In the more controlled method, sleeping subjects are jostled awake in the lab, and the researcher says, “Quick, what were you dreaming about?” Patterns in dream reports are then quantified using various techniques of analysis.

  Consider my dreams from the night of December 13, 2009, which I rushed to record upon waking:

  I dreamed it was Christmas morning. I woke up and realized that I had neglected to buy my wife a present. As we began to open presents everyone else in the family was happy, but I was perishing from anxiety: how do I get out of this one?

  Another anxiety dream: a writer scooped me on an important portion of this book, beating me to press and rendering my work useless.

  I was out jogging, pushing my sleeping daughter in her stroller. Annabel awoke, groggily rolled out of the stroller, and slid down a paved embankment. Terrified, I rushed down after her. Her back was scraped up, but she was otherwise fine. A rich woman in a fancy car pulled off the road and gave us a ride back to her huge mansion, where Annabel romped with other children in a spectacular indoor playground.

  I was at a resort, possibly the one where my wife and I honeymooned. An attractive woman was trying to have an affair with me. Before I could decide what to do, I learned that it was all a setup to blackmail me.

  None of the above dreams was quite a nightmare. None of them marked me in the way that my desert dream did. But they were intensely anxious dreams where the most important things in my life were threatened: the love of my wife; my work as a writer; the safety of my child; my reputation for basic decency (if not virtue).

  Although we obviously can’t perform Michael Jouvet’s experiments on people, nature has in fact performed the experiment many times. REM behavior disorder (RBD) mainly afflicts elderly men with certain neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The disease riddles the brain and prevents dream blockades from forming in the brain stem. While their brains sleep and dream, men with RBD rise from bed to act out their brains’ commands. As with Jouvet’s cats, the men seem very rarely to dream of happy things. They dream instead of trouble. In one study of four men with RBD, all four manifested dangerously aggressive behavior in their sleep, sometimes harming themselves or their wives.

  My miniature dream diary is consistent with research studies showing that Dreamland is rife with emotional and physical peril. In a 2009 review of the threatening aspects of dreams, Katja Valli and Antti Revonsuo lay out some astonishing statistics. Valli and Revonsuo estimate that an average person has 3 REM dreams per night and about 1,200 REM dreams per year. Based on analysis of dream reports across many large studies, they estimate that 860 of those 1,200 dreams feature at least one threatening event. (The researchers define “threat” broadly, but reasonably, as a physical threat, a social threat, or a threat to valuable possessions.) But since most threatening dreams portray more than one threatening event, the researchers estimate that people experience about 1,700 threatening REM dream episodes per year, or almost 5 per night. Projected over a seventy-year life span, the average person would suffer through about 60,000 threatening REM dreams featuring almost 120,000 distinct threats. In short, what Vivian Paley wrote of children’s pretend dramas seems to apply just as well to dreams: they are “the stage on which bad things are auditioned.”

  Valli and Revonsuo acknowledge that their statistics are far from ironclad. They are projections based on imperfect data. But whether these threat estimates are off by a little or a lot, they still establish an important point: Dreamland is, incontestably, far more threatening than the average person’s waking world. As Revon
suo writes, threats to life and limb “are so rare in real life that if they occur with almost any frequency at all in dreams, they are very likely to exceed the frequency of occurrence in real life.” For example, the Finnish college students who serve as subjects in Valli and Revonsuo’s research do not confront bodily threats on a daily basis, but they do confront them on a nightly basis.

  It is important to stress that the same threat patterns have emerged not only in Western college students but in all populations that have been studied—Asians, Middle Easterners, isolated hunter-gatherer tribes, children, and adults. Around the world, the most common dream type is being chased or attacked. Other universal themes include falling from a great height, drowning, being lost or trapped, being naked in public, getting injured, getting sick or dying, and being caught in a natural or manmade disaster.

  It’s therefore unsurprising that the dominant emotions in Dreamland are negative. When you are visiting Dreamland, you may sometimes feel happy, even elated, but mostly you feel dragged down by anger, fear, and sadness. While we sometimes dream of thrilling things, such as sex or flying like a bird, those happy dreams are much rarer than we think. People fly in only one out of every two hundred dreams, and erotic content of any kind occurs in only one in ten dreams. And even in dreams where sex is a major theme, it is rarely presented as a hedonistic throw down. Rather, like our other dreams, sex dreams are usually edged with anxiety, doubt, and regret.