Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (7 page)

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.

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.

The discovery that dreams are often negative perked the interest of neurologists. Why would we have dreams if most of them tended to be unhappy? Are our brains depressed novelists? The answer, some said, comes from imagining the purpose of dreaming in the context of evolution. In a 2009 paper, a Finnish cognitive scientist named Antti Revonsuo argued that negative, anxiety-filled dreams were simply an ancient defense mechanism, letting us experience bad things in order to train our brains to react in case something similar happened while we are awake. Dreams, in this view, are the brain’s dress rehearsals. For evidence, Revonsuo pointed to data collected by Hall in which the dreamer is running away from something or being attacked. “Because adaptations presumably require hundreds of generations to change, currently living individuals still carry those adaptations that were designed to work in the ancestral environment, regardless of whether the adaptations serve their original functions in the radically different modern setting,” Revonsuo wrote. In other words, our ancient ancestors likely had negative dreams before a planned hunt or battle. Today, dreaming of getting attacked is how the brain prepares for the anxiety of a big sales presentation at work, and there is nothing we can do about it.

A problem with this theory is that not all unpleasant dreams are of the I-am-being-chased variety. Take, for instance, the dreams of a man named Ed, who kept a journal of his dreams about his wife, Mary, for twenty-two years after her death. Ed and Mary met on a boardwalk in 1947, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-two. She died of ovarian cancer three decades later. When Ed dreamed about Mary after she was gone, the plot often followed the same theme: Ed and Mary started off happily engaged in an activity before something happened that split them apart. Sometimes the stories were full of cinematic images. In one dream, for instance, Ed sees Mary sitting in a car across the road, but he can’t find a way to reach her. At other times, Ed’s dreams introduced absurd elements into vignettes of everyday life, such as the time when Ed and Mary bump into Jerry Seinfeld and ask him for directions. Before Ed knows it, Seinfeld has walked away with Mary, and Ed has been left alone. Ed goes behind a building to brood, where the ground beneath him turns into quicksand. Individually, all of the elements of the dream are recognizable from daily life. But add them together, and there isn’t a clear and present danger the brain is preparing for.

I am able to tell you the details of Ed’s dreams because of G. William Domhoff, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who collected dream journals alongside Calvin Hall and made their vast collection available to other researchers in the early 1990s. As he read countless accounts of dreams, Domhoff began to see that most people had dreams like Ed, featuring the same situations and characters for years on end. With enough reports from any one person, Domhoff argued, the stories in the dreams can give an accurate reading of the dreamer’s concerns, all without having to resort to Freud’s idea of interpreting symbols. Just look at Ed, he said. He had recurring dreams in which he was separated from the love of his life for two decades after her death. It doesn’t take an analyst’s couch to realize that he missed her.

I spent a sunny afternoon with Domhoff in Santa Cruz, sitting in a Yogurt Delite on the Pacific Coast Highway and talking about dreams. “None of Freud’s claims are true by any of our standards today,” Domhoff said, dipping his spoon into his yogurt. “If you look at dreams—if you really look at them like we have—then you see that it’s all there, out in the open. You don’t need any of these symbols.” He went on. “Freudians got all caught up in the idea that there were hidden meanings to our dreams. But their interpretations only worked because we share a system of figurative language and metaphor.”

As an example, he had me imagine that I had a fairly straightforward dream. “Let’s say you have this dream that you are on a bridge to an island and then the bridge starts to shake and then you run back. Now what would you say if I asked, ‘Now, what do you suppose that bridge is a symbol of?’ ”

“I don’t know,” I said, with my mouth full of yogurt.

“But you do,” Domhoff replied. “You have a metaphor system. You’ll ‘cross that bridge when you come to it.’ It’s a transition. So I say that you’re in the midst of a transition. But we’re
all
in the midst of some sort of transition in our lives. Then I can say that the dream means that you are afraid to take the next step. You want to stay with solid land instead of going onto the island. It all makes sense because I’ve assumed that the dream is metaphoric and I’m giving you a metaphoric interpretation. If I stay very general all of this works. Now that I know a little bit more about you, I can guess and get more specific. I can say that the island means that you’re writing a book and going out on your own. I’ve got a plausible interpretation. But really I’m just a fortune-teller going from a lot of clues.”

Looking at a history of a single person’s dreams reveals that the brain doesn’t construct such clear metaphors, he said. Instead, dreams are filled with images and settings that are familiar. If a woman dreams about walking over a bridge, it is more likely that she literally crosses a bridge during her daily commute, or that she can see one from her window at home, than that her brain has decided to broadcast her emotions using figurative images.

Freud, on the other hand, thought that a stranger dream signified a deeper meaning. In
The Interpretation of Dreams
, he argued that “dreams are often their most profound when they seem the most crazy” because they were more densely packed with symbols to unlock. I asked Domhoff how, even if they don’t happen as often, seemingly surreal dreams, such as of flying or getting trapped in a strange room, could possibly serve as a mirror to our daily lives and concerns.

He decided to answer my question with a story. One woman who sent him her dreams gave herself the code name Melora. Hall and Domhoff had asked the subjects to obscure their name before contributing to the dream bank. Melora, for those who don’t know, is the name of a character from a well-known episode of S
tar Trek: Deep Space Nine
, a television show that ran in the mid-1990s. Domhoff’s subject chose the code name because she was a big-time Trekkie who loved reading science fiction. On a less pleasant note, she was also a mother going through a divorce. In most of her dreams, she is concerned about her child or she is spending time with her ex-husband, doing such routine things as hiking together or spending a holiday at his parents’ house. But every once in while, she is charging through the cosmos. “Sure, sometimes she has a fantastic adventure, but she lives in that world because of her enormous amount of reading and love of science fiction,” Domhoff said. Just like work or family,
Star Trek
was another part of her life that showed up in her dreams. Trying to parse the meaning of why one of Melora’s dreams took place aboard a spacecraft and another took place in her office couldn’t tell you anything, Domhoff said. But, taken in context of hundreds of other dreams, the small number of intergalactic dreams reflected the fact that science fiction was important to her. The things that you care about are the things that you dream about.