THE RED THREAD
Just as conflict and crisis are greatly overrepresented in dreams, the ordinary stuff of life is underplayed. For example, researchers studied dream reports from four hundred people who spent an average of six hours per day absorbed in the minutiae of office and student life—typing, reading, calculating, working on a computer. And yet the workaday activities that dominated their waking hours almost never featured in their dreams. Instead, they dreamed of trouble. Trouble is the fat red thread that ties together the fantasies of pretend play, fiction, and dreams, and trouble provides a possible clue to a function they all share: giving us practice in dealing with the big dilemmas of human life.
A conservative estimate, accounting only for REM dreams, would suggest that we dream in a vivid and storylike way for about two hours per night, which comes to fifty-one thousand hours over an ordinary life span, or about six solid years of nonstop dreaming. During these years, our brains simulate many thousands of different responses to many thousands of different threats, problems, and crises. Crucially, there is usually no way for our brains to know that the dream is just a dream. As sleep researcher William Dement put it, “We experience a dream as real because,” from the brain’s perspective, “it is real.”
The University of Michigan psychologists Michael Franklin and Michael Zyphur think these facts have important implications:
When you consider the plasticity of the brain—with as little as 10–12 minutes of motor practice a day on a specific task [say, piano playing] the motor cortex reshapes itself in a matter of a few weeks—the time spent in our dreams would surely shape how our brains develop, and influence our future behavioral predispositions. The experiences we accrue from dreaming across our life span are sure to influence how we interact with the world and are bound to influence our overall fitness, not only as individuals but as a species.
But what about our poor memories? Franklin and Zyphur acknowledge that dream amnesia is a highly intuitive reason for dismissing dreams. Since memories of our dreams are usually burned away with the morning light, they can’t be worth much to us.
But as we’ve already seen, conscious knowledge can be overrated. There are two kinds of memory: implicit and explicit. The problem simulation model is based on implicit, unconscious memory. We learn when the brain rewires itself, and we don’t need to consciously remember for that rewiring to occur. The most spectacular proof of this comes from amnesia victims, who can improve by practicing tasks without retaining any conscious memory of the practice.
I recently “taught” my older daughter, Abby (six at the time), how to ride her bike without training wheels. I say “taught” because all I actually did was jog, dadlike, at her side as she wobbled down the road, teaching herself how to balance. Within a week or so, Abby pretty much had it down, and she was turning tight circles in the road. I was impressed that she had learned how to turn, and I asked her how she had done it. She answered confidently, “I just twist the handles, and it turns the wheel.”
A reasonable response, but that’s not how Abby turns her bike. As the Berkeley physicist Joel Fajans explains, turning a bike is actually a complex procedure: “If you attempt to make a right turn on your bicycle before first leaning your bicycle over to the right, centrifugal forces will cause you to crash by falling over to the left . . . Leaning the bicycle to the right allows gravity to cancel the centrifugal forces. But how do you get the bike to lean to the right? By countersteering, i.e. by turning the handlebars to the left. In other words to make a right turn, you first turn the handlebars left!”
Someday Abby may have no memory of learning to ride her bike—no memory of her fear or her pride, or of me puffing along at her side. But she’ll still know how to ride it. Bike riding is an example of how we can learn something, and learn it well, without our conscious minds having a clue. Our brains know a great deal that “we” don’t.
Skeptics such as the psychologist Harry Hunt raise what is, on the face of it, a more powerful objection to the problem simulation theory of dreams. If a simulator is going to be worth anything, it has to be realistic. For instance, a flight simulator that is insufficiently realistic will train aviators, but that training will be a curse, not a benefit. Hunt and others have argued that dreams can’t function as simulators because they are unrealistic. “It is difficult to see,” Hunt writes, “how our paralyzed fears, slow motion running, and escape tactics based on absurd reasoning could be a rehearsal of anything adaptive.”
But look at Hunt’s objection. He is not describing dreams generally; he is describing nightmares. Studies show that nightmares are more bizarre than other kinds of dreams and that we remember them better. So the idea that dreams are hopelessly bizarre may be a side effect of the sorts of dreams we are most likely to remember. Indeed, large samples of dream reports from multiple studies suggest that the majority of dreams are reasonably realistic. Valli and Revonsuo conclude that our responses to dream dilemmas are usually “relevant, reasonable, and appropriate to the dreamed situation.”
According to Revonsuo, the simulation model of dreams represents a gigantic breakthrough: “We are for the first time in a position to truly understand why we dream.” But as I’ve stressed throughout this book, identifying a function for dreams or pretend play or fiction doesn’t mean that we’ve identified the function. My desert nightmare may have been a way of priming me to take better care of what is most dear to me. But that’s not all it was. I’m ashamed to admit it, but the dream was an exaggerated version of a typical scene: my daughters trying, with only partial success, to get my attention as I read, write, or watch the big game on TV. My nightmare was, in part, a sharp rebuke. The dream was saying, The big game is not important. The book on your lap is not that important. Pay attention: it’s the girl who’s important.
5. The Mind Is a Storyteller
Man—let me offer you a definition—is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker buoys and trail signs of stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall—or when he’s about to drown—he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.
—GRAHAM SWIFT, Waterland
IT IS DECEMBER 30, 1796. A gang of criminals is gathered in a big, dank cellar deep below Bethlem Hospital in London. The gloomy leader of the gang, Bill the King, makes a circuit of the cellar, inspecting his terrible machine. He toes the big wooden kegs with their steel hoops. The kegs are full of nasty stuff such as human seminal fluid, dog feces, the stench of the cesspool, and horse farts. Bill the King presses his ear to the kegs and hears the stuff churning and percolating under pressure. He fingers the hissing tubes that run like black serpents from the kegs, spraying noxious fumes into the guts of the machine.
As Bill the King examines the device, he passes the other villains. He sees young Charlotte lying on the cold cobbles, half-naked, raw from her chains. He sees Jack the Schoolmaster penciling figures in his notebook. The Schoolmaster calls out to Bill with an inside joke, “I’m here to see fair play!” Bill the King walks on, scowling; no man or woman has ever yet made Bill smile. But Sir Archy smiles, and laughs, too, calling out to the Schoolmaster with a joke of his own—something about young Charlotte, something vile. Sir Archy has a high voice and always fakes an accent. The others suspect he’s a woman in drag.
Bill the King ignores the fools. He circles the great engine, running his hand along the oaken grain, eyeing every board and bolt. The machine is called an air loom. It is a great square box on squat legs. It is six feet tall and fifteen feet per side.
Bill the King reaches the air loom’s control panel, where a pockmarked hag is sitting. Sir Archy and Jack the Schoolmaster tease her mercilessly. They call her the Glove Woman. The Glove Woman sits at a stool and works the air loom’s controls with blurry speed. Her gloved hands are everywher
e at once, twisting and pulling at knobs, flipping switches, and tickling the ivory keys of an organ. Bill the King leans down and whispers into her ear, “Fluid locking.”
The Glove Woman twists the biggest brass knob. The pointer rattles past settings labeled as follows: KITEING (which suspends an idea in the mind for hours), LENGTHENING OF THE BRAIN (which twists the thoughts), GAZ-PLUCKING (which harvests the magnetic fluids in farts from the anus), BOMB-BURSTING (painful explosions in the head), THOUGHT-MAKING and FOOT-CURVING (which are what they sound like), VITAL-TEARING and FIBRE-RIPPING (which are very painful), and, gravest of all, LOBSTER-CRACKING (which is lethal). The Glove Woman settles the pointer on FLUID LOCKING, and Bill murmurs, “Proceed.”
The Glove Woman knows nothing of the science of the air loom, but she has spent many years playing the machine, and now she is a virtuoso. She works the levers and operates her organ. Each organ key regulates the valve to a different keg. Each setting of the air loom is like a song composed of electrochemical notes.
Inside the machine, under the vibrating influence of the magnets, the great loom begins to “weave” the chemical essences from the kegs directly into the air. The magnetized gas flows upward and fills the sails of a small, windmill-like device that sits on the air loom’s roof. The sails of the device begin to turn, projecting the unnatural gas outward and upward like a ray.
The magnetized gas exits through the cellar wall and rises through many fathoms of wet soil and rubble; it passes through the floor of the House of Commons and focuses on a certain young man sitting in the spectators gallery. That young man, James Tilly Matthews, suddenly feels the air churning around him. He tastes blood in his mouth. He knows what to do. He holds his breath for a long time. He randomizes his breathing pattern and, in so doing, hides from the air loom.
Matthews sits, breathing raggedly, watching the great men of his age bellowing and preening on the floor. Prime Minister William Pitt stands and rails against France, pounding the drums of war. Pitt’s performance confirms Matthews’s worst fears: the prime minister of England is the Air Loom Gang’s puppet.
Matthews is dismayed. He’s the only one who knows the truth: the government of England has been taken over by a powerful conspiracy. Matthews—a ruined tea merchant, a pauper—is living at the very center of history, and the Air Loom Gang knows it. That is why the Duke of York and the king of Prussia are moving darkly against him. That is why draconian laws have been passed to keep him quiet. That is why whole government agencies exist to intercept his mail.
Artist Rod Dickinson’s re-creation of the air loom, faithfully based on James Tilly Matthews’s own sketch.
Matthews makes a grave error. He lets his worries distract him. He forgets to hide from the machine. He breathes deeply and evenly, and the air loom finds him, brimming his lungs with the vile, prickly gas. Matthews knows it is fluid locking. He can feel the gas bubbling in his veins, curdling his fluids, freezing the muscles at the base of his tongue. In seconds, he will lose the power of speech. He must act now. He stands up and screams down at the members of Parliament, “Treason!”
THE CRAZED OF THE CRAFT
James Tilly Matthews was confined as an incurable lunatic in Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam, although he did have several doppelgängers who moved freely outside the hospital walls. While dodging air loom rays at Bedlam, Matthews realized that he was the emperor of the world, and he wrote bitter complaints against the kings and potentates who had usurped him.
Matthews’s doctor was named John Haslam, and he described Matthews’s case in a book called Illustrations of Madness. (The preceding account is drawn mainly from Haslam’s book and from Mike Jay’s fascinating study of Matthews, The Air Loom Gang.) Illustrations of Madness is a classic case study in the field of mental health, and the first clear description of paranoid schizophrenia in the annals of medicine.
Schizophrenia has been called “the central mystery of psychiatry.” Schizophrenics are prey to a variety of bizarre beliefs, delusions, and hallucinations. Like Matthews, they often hear alien voices muttering in their ears. They often believe that their actions are being orchestrated by outside forces—by extraterrestrials, gods, demons, or wicked conspiracies. And they often have delusions of grandeur: they think they are important enough for aliens, demons, and conspirators to target.
James Tilly Matthews’s vision of the Air Loom Gang was a bravura work of fiction. He made himself the struggling protagonist in a sweeping drama with world-historical implications, giving bit roles to real potentates and prime ministers. Matthews also invented a whole cast of fully realized villains. Bill the King, the Glove Woman, and Sir Archy have all the quirks and tics that turn flat characters round. If Matthews had fashioned his conspiratorial delusions into a novel, he might have made a lot of money. He might have been an eighteenth-century Dan Brown.
When Matthews was about thirty years old, his brain decided, without his permission, to create an intricate fiction, and Matthews spent the rest of his life living inside. It is tempting to draw analogies between the creativity of the delusional schizophrenic and that of the creative artist. And indeed, for hundreds of years, a relationship between madness and artistic genius has been a kind of cultural cliché. Lord Byron wrote of poets, “We of the craft are all crazy.” John Dryden’s poem “Absalom and Achitophel” proclaims, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.” And Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that lunatics and poets are “of imagination all compact.”
For a long time, it was possible to dismiss links between madness and creativity as purely anecdotal: Vincent van Gogh carving off his ear, Sylvia Plath gassing herself in her oven, Graham Greene playing Russian roulette, Virginia Woolf stuffing her pockets full of rocks and taking a last swim in the river Ouse. But over the past several decades, stronger evidence has accumulated.
The psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, who has written movingly about her own struggles with bipolar disorder, argues for a strong connection between mental illness and literary creativity in her classic book Touched with Fire. In studies of deceased writers—based on their letters, medical records, and published biographies—and in studies of talented living writers, mental illness is prevalent. For example, fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population, and poets are an amazing forty times more likely to struggle with the disorder. Based on statistics like these, psychologist Daniel Nettle writes, “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that most of the canon of Western culture was produced by people with a touch of madness.” Essayist Brooke Allen does Nettle one better: “The Western literary tradition, it seems, has been dominated by a sorry collection of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, manic-depressives, sexual predators, and various unfortunate combinations of two, three, or even all of the above.”
In psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig’s massive study of mental illness and creativity, The Price of Greatness, he found an 87 percent rate of psychiatric disorders in eminent poets and a 77 percent rate in eminent fiction writers—far higher than the rates he found among high achievers in nonartistic fields such as business, science, politics, and the military. Even college students who sign up for poetry-writing seminars have more bipolar traits than college students generally. Creative writers are also at increased risk of unipolar depression and are more likely to suffer from psychoses such as schizophrenia. It is, therefore, not surprising that eminent writers are also much more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs, spend time in psychiatric hospitals, and kill themselves.
Could it be that something about the writer’s life—the loneliness, the frustration, the long rambles through imagination—actually triggers mental illness? Possibly. But studies of the relatives of creative writers reveal an underlying genetic component. People who are mentally ill tend to have more artists in their families (especially among first-degree relatives). And artists tend to have more mental illness in theirs (along with higher rates o
f suicide, institutionalization, and drug addiction).
In the wild fantasies of James Tilly Matthews, we see a diseased mind franticly trying to weave sense into the gobbledygook it is inventing—a story that will give structure to the visions, the alien voices, the convictions of personal grandeur. We may shake our heads at Matthews’s bizarre delusions, but we are all more like him than we know. Our minds, too, constantly struggle to extract meaning from the data rivering through our senses. Although the stories that sound-minded people tell themselves rarely go awry in the spectacular fashion of paranoid schizophrenics’, they often do go awry. This is part of the price we pay for having storytelling minds.
In his memoir, Stephen King writes that he is skeptical of the “myth” associating substance abuse and literary creativity. Yet before getting sober, King drank a case of beer a day and wrote The Tommyknockers with cotton swabs stuffed up his nose to “stem the coke-induced bleeding.” At his intervention, King’s wife dumped his office trash can on the floor. The contents included “beercans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash.”
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Page 8