Reciting the dream to a small group of strangers doesn’t scare me. It is the fact that these nice people seem convinced that dreams have hidden meanings, and I’m not so sure. The idea that in the middle of the night the brain sends coded messages to itself that reveal deep secrets seems like a plot device out of a bad soap opera. I am of the mind that dreams are more or less random. Though there is no telling whether my view is ultimately the correct one, studies seem to support it. By injecting a solution into a subject’s bloodstream that made blood flow visible, for example, researchers found that the brain’s long-term and emotional memory centers are most active during REM sleep, the phase of the sleep cycle when most dreaming occurs. That could be one reason why dreams have little narrative cohesion but are laden with moments from the past.
However, the members of the dream group gathered here today would beg to differ. They have come to discuss their dreams because they are convinced there is something inherently important, and even life changing, about their experiences in dreamland. To them, looking at a dream only in terms of the mechanics of the brain misses the point, kind of like basing an evaluation of the Mona Lisa on the pH level of the paint used alone. Alice isn’t concerned with what part of her brain was responsible for allowing her to interact with her father again. She cares about the emotions she experienced in her dream, feelings that were so strong she remembered them for several days afterward. By definition, that makes them meaningful for her.
The question of whether the contents of dreams tell us anything deep about ourselves presents a dilemma for those who study how the brain works. On the one hand, dreaming is a fascinating biological phenomenon universal to every person and most mammals, as far as we can tell (scientists once tried to ask a gorilla who knew sign language whether she dreamed at night, but the gorilla’s attempt to rip the researcher’s pants off put a quick end to that). Each night, nearly everyone becomes paralyzed every ninety minutes or so during REM sleep. The brain starts working overtime, and the sexual system perks up. During this dreaming stage, a man’s penis will become erect while a woman will experience increased vaginal blood flow. The brain will then create images and stories that the body responds to as if the events in dreamland were actually happening, as anyone who has woken up sweating and out of breath from a particularly scary dream well knows. These dreams happen regardless of a person’s physical state. Those who have lost their sight after they were toddlers continue to dream with images, for instance, while those who were blind from birth dream with sounds. And yet any trance that feels so real during a dream disappears almost immediately upon waking, leading some to believe that they don’t dream at all and others, like me, to remember only fleeting pieces that make dreams seem all the more puzzling (a green-and-white puppy?). The fact that all mammals experience dreams in roughly the same way suggests there is something vitally important about this stage of sleep.
Yet here is where the paradox comes in. For professional researchers, announcing that you are investigating dreams goes over about as well as proclaiming that you are intent on finding the lost continent of Atlantis or uncovering a UFO conspiracy hidden by the Federal Reserve. “If you’re going to get tenure or make a spectacular career in science, dreams are probably not the thing you want to study,” Patrick McNamara told me with knowing understatement. McNamara is the head of the Boston University School of Medicine’s Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory, where he studies how the brain reacts in different situations. As part of his work, he has conducted research into dreams, nightmares, and what goes on in the brain during meditations and religious experiences. Even with a professorship and an impressive name for his lab, McNamara detects sideways glances from other neurologists. “Studying dreams is still considered a little New-Agey and not entirely respectable,” he said.
No matter its reputation now, the investigation of dreams is one of the foundations of sleep science. Dreams were what drew many early researchers to the field in the first place, driven by the chance to discover the mechanisms and meanings of a nightly experience that has intrigued us since humans scratched out the first written language. Most cultures, and nearly all major religions, have regarded dreams as omens at one time or another. Ancient Greeks thought that dreams were visions given to them by the gods. Early Muslims considered dream interpretation a religious discipline sanctioned by the Koran. And the Bible is a veritable dream fest. In Genesis, God speaks to Jacob in a dream and describes his plans for the Israelites. Later, Jacob’s son Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dreams after all of the magicians in Egypt have failed to do so, a feat for which he would later receive a Broadway musical. In the New Testament, a different Joseph gets a visit from an angel in a dream that tells him that his virgin wife is pregnant with God’s son and that he shouldn’t freak out.
By the start of the modern era, science had become convinced that dreams were essentially nonsense. Yet the suggestion that they revealed something hidden in an individual’s mind changed that. In 1900, Sigmund Freud was a forty-three-year-old son of a wool merchant who had a small medical practice in Vienna. That year, he published a book that became the linchpin of dream theory for half a century. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he argued that, far from being random events, dreams were full of hidden meanings that were projections of the dreamer’s secret hopes and wishes. In effect, Freud identified the subconscious, a realm of thought beyond the mind’s control that colors our desires and intentions. Every night when a person went to sleep, Freud said, the mind cloaked these thoughts in symbols that could be uncovered and interpreted with the help of a therapist. Without dreams, our unconscious concerns would be so overwhelming that few of us could function. Dreams were what allowed us to think the unthinkable. These “letters to ourselves,” as he called them, were an important safety valve for the mind. Take them away, and psychic pressure would then build and lead to neurosis.
To prove his point, he gave examples of his own dreams. In what would eventually become the most discussed dream in psychology, Freud described seeing one of his female patients among a number of guests in a large hall. He takes her aside and faults her for not accepting his prescribed treatment for her illness. She replies that the pain is spreading to her throat and starting to choke her. He sees that she is puffy and begins to worry, wondering if he missed something in his examination. Freud then takes her to the window and asks her to open her mouth. She is reluctant to do so, and Freud finds himself getting annoyed. Soon, his friends Dr. M and Otto arrive and help him examine the patient. Together, they discover that she has a rash on her left shoulder. Dr. M surmises that the woman’s pains are due to an infection, but a bout of dysentery will rid her body of the toxin. Freud and Dr. M come to the conclusion that the cause of the trouble was most likely Otto, who had recently given her an injection of a heavy drug through a syringe that had not been properly cleaned.
On reflection, Freud found this dream much more than a simple, albeit strange, story. “If the method of dream-interpretation . . . is followed, it will be found that dreams do really possess a meaning, and are by no means the expression of disintegrated cerebral activity, as the writers on the subject would have us believe,” he wrote. By looking at each aspect of his dream as a stand-in for an emotion or anxiety, Freud found that the dream allayed his concerns that he was responsible for the health of a particularly difficult patient. First, the woman puts up a fight throughout the dream, making it clear that he thinks that any caregiver would have difficulty quickly discovering her problem. This is confirmed when it takes three doctors examining her simultaneously to find the rash on her left shoulder. And with the help of Dr. M, Freud finds that it was Otto who foolishly gave the woman an injection and caused her illness. Taken together, the content of the dream suggests to Freud that he could walk away from his patient, blameless for what happens to her. “The whole plea—for this dream is nothing else—recalls vividly the defense offered by a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a
damaged condition,” he writes. “In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all. A complicated defense, but so much for the better; if only one of those three lines of defense is recognized as valid, the man must be acquitted.”
Wish fulfillment like this could come in many forms in a dream. Freud saw them as a release of anxiety—a condition that he linked with sex, though he described the connection in less-than-direct terms. “Anxiety is a libidinal impulse which has its origin in the unconscious and is inhibited by the preconscious,” he wrote. “When, therefore, the sensation of inhibition is linked with anxiety in a dream, it must be a question of an act of volition which was at one time capable of generating libido—that is, it must be a question of a sexual impulse.” Perhaps unfairly, Freud’s theories soon became reduced to the view that everything in a dream had a sexual meaning that reflected and uncovered long-repressed urges from childhood. One review of Freudian literature found that by the middle of the twentieth century, analysts had identified 102 stand-ins for the penis in dreams and ninety-five symbols for the vagina. Even opposites—flying and falling—were called symbols for sex. Freudians pointed out fifty-five images for the act of sex itself, twenty-five icons of masturbation, thirteen figures of breasts, and twelve symbols for castration.
Freud saw a patient’s resistance to this theory of dream interpretation as proof that it was valid. He explained that even he was initially put off by the seemingly absurd notion of his dreams. “When I recollected the dream in the course of the morning, I laughed outright and said, ‘The dream is nonsense,’” Freud wrote. “But I could not get it out of my mind, and I was pursued by it all day, until at least, in the evening, I reproached myself with these words: ‘If in the course of a dream-interpretation one of your patients could find nothing better to say than “That is nonsense,” you would reprove him, and you would suspect that behind the dream there was hidden some disagreeable affair, the exposure of which he wanted to spare himself. Apply the same thing to your own case; your opinion that the dream is nonsense probably signified merely an inner resistance to its interpretation.’ ”
The fact that Freud didn’t interpret the dream about his patient along psychosexual lines spurred a subschool of analysts devoted to unlocking additional meanings from that dream alone. In 1991, for instance, a paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis postulated that the dream actually reflected the fact that “Freud may have been haunted by the repressed memory of an incident of erotic aggression enacted by himself against his sister Anna when he was 5 years old and she 3 years old.”
The Freudian view of dreams held considerable sway among psychologists well into the early 1950s despite complaints that the theories were too focused on sex. In one scientific journal, a critic wrote, “We have seen that a multitude of symbols can stand for the same referent. Why is it necessary to have so many disguises for the genitals, for sexual intercourse and for masturbation?”
Freudian analysis became a popular part of culture by the 1920s, influencing everything from movies to the study of crime. William Dement, a professor at Stanford University who is considered one of the deans of sleep science, was attracted to the field in the 1950s because of the chance to immerse himself in the Freudian study of dreams. “There was a belief that Freudian psychoanalysis could explain every aspect of our problems: fears, anxieties, mental illnesses, and perhaps even physical illness,” he wrote.
But it was Dement, in part, who helped science lose an interest in dreams. As a medical student at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, Dement began some of the first systematic studies of REM sleep. This stage of sleep had been discovered only in 1952, when researchers in a laboratory at the same university believed that a malfunctioning machine created the appearance that a sleeping subject’s eyes were moving rapidly during the middle of the night. Unable to detect the cause of the problem, the researchers decided to go into the room and shine a flashlight on the subject’s eyes. They found that the eyes were in fact darting back and forth under the eyelids while the body lay still. This realization unearthed the fact that there were different stages of sleep. After finding that subjects woken up from REM sleep were the most likely to remember their dreams, Dement organized studies of this stage of sleep in infants, women, and those with mental illnesses, all in an attempt to see if time spent dreaming shed any light on Freud’s theories. “It is hard to convey how exciting it was to be doing this work,” Dement wrote in his memoir. “Here I was, a mere medical student, holed up in a nearly deserted building making one surprising discovery after another . . . I imagine that this was how the first man to discover gold in California must have felt in 1848.”
Dement’s discovery that the brain is as active during REM sleep as it is when a person is awake transformed sleep research. Here was a period of brain behavior that was unlike anything else. Dement proposed that science should recognize that the human brain rotates through three distinct time periods: sleep, awake, and REM sleep. Other researchers initially scoffed at the idea. Dement’s paper on the subject was rejected five times before it was published. “People reacted as if I were claiming that we don’t need air to breathe,” he later wrote. But his theory soon became an accepted fact, and led the view that REM sleep is perhaps the most important of any of the sleep stages.
Other experiments revealed how odd this dreaming stage of sleep truly is. In France, a researcher named Michel Jouvet called it paradoxical sleep because the body was immobilized while the brain looked to be fully awake. He then conducted one of the most famous experiments in sleep science. By making small lesions in a tiny part of a cat’s brain stem known as the reticular formation, Jouvet discovered that he could block the mechanisms that normally suppressed movement during REM sleep. The result was that he could watch the animals act out their dreams. While fully asleep, these cats arched their backs, hissed, and pounced on unseen rivals. The behavior “could be so fierce as to make the experimenter recoil,” he wrote. Once a cat pounced onto an object with enough force, it would jolt itself awake and look around dreamily, surprised at how it got there.
In a strange way, Jouvet’s discovery that it was possible to know exactly what a cat was dreaming about made the content of human dreams a lot less interesting to researchers. Once dreams could be identified and recorded by brain waves, they no longer seemed a mystical, complex reflection of the human subconscious. The dreaming stage of sleep was soon identified in almost all birds and mammals, lessening the importance of human dreams by comparison. As Jouvet later wrote, when describing why neurologists had turned away from dream studies, “What significance is there for a newly hatched chick to realize any desire other than to become a cock or a hen?” Eventually, researchers found that human babies in the womb also cycle through REM sleep—and presumably dreams.
REM sleep largely split the field of sleep from psychology, as neurologists moved to incorporate this stage of sleep into a better understanding of the brain. Freudian interpretations of the meaning of dreams still continued, but mostly on analysts’ couches. In research labs, however, the content and possible meanings of dreams were largely put to the side and ignored.
Dream research remained stagnant until a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland named Calvin Hall decided to catalog what people dream about. Hall spent more than thirty years gathering dream reports from everyone who would share them. By the time he died in 1985, Hall had synopses of more than fifty thousand dreams from people of all age groups and nationalities. From this large database, he created a coding system that essentially treated each dream like it was a short story. He recorded, among other things, the dream’s setting, its number of characters and their genders, any dialogue, and whether what happened in the dream was pleasant or frightening. He also noted basics about each dreamer as well, such as age, gender, and where the person lived.
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Hall introduced the world of dream interpretation to the world of data. He pored through his dream collection, bringing numbers and statistical rigor into a field that had been split into two extremes. He tested what was the most likely outcome of, say, dreaming about work. Would the dreamer be happy? Angry? And would the story hew close to reality or would the people in the dream act strange and out of character? If there were predictable outcomes, then maybe dreams followed some kind of pattern. Maybe they even mattered.
Hall’s conclusion was the opposite Freud’s: far from being full of hidden symbols, most dreams were remarkably straightforward and predictable. Dream plots were consistent enough that, just by knowing the cast of characters in a dream, Hall could forecast what would happen with surprising accuracy. A dream featuring a man whom the dreamer doesn’t know in real life, for instance, almost always entails a plot in which the stranger is aggressive. Adults tend to dream of other people they know, while kids usually dream of animals. About three out of every four characters in a man’s dream will be other men, while women tend to encounter an equal number of males and females. Most dreams take place in the dreamers’ homes or offices and, if they have to go somewhere, they drive cars or walk there. And not surprisingly, college students dream about sex more often than middle-aged adults.
Hall’s research deflated the idea that dreams are surreal. The plot may not follow any logical order and characters may have strange requests, but the dream world isn’t that far from reality. More important, dreams tend to be unpleasant. Hall found that the average dream is filled with characters who were aggressive, mean, or violent. Dreamland, in short, sounds a lot like the worst days of middle school.
Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep Page 7