Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
What is the theory of dreams made to explain?
I propose there are three key elements.
First of all, why is there any content of our nighttime sleep?
Secondly, why is it so different from our waking thinking?
Why so bizarre?
And lastly, do dreams have a function?
And if so, what?
In this talk, I am going to address those questions
with an emphasis on the last one.
I believe that research is beginning to converge on the idea
that dreams are simply thinking in a different biochemical state.
Some demands of our body in sleep
make certain areas of our brain more or less active.
But then we keep thinking about the same concerns -
our objective ones, our personal concerns -
through the night.
And it's this very different state,
even though it seems bizarre,
that gives us a different perspective,
which can be very helpful to problem solving.
And we can further help this process
by learning to focus our mind just before sleep on certain problems,
to encourage our brains to go to some of our unresolved ones.
All kinds of problems can get help in dreams,
but certain ones are more likely than others.
But anything, once in a while, gets a bit of help.
The surrealist poet saint Paul Eluard
used to hang a sign on his bedroom door at night
which read "Poet at Work."
And he wasn't alone in this belief.
I named one of my books on creative problem solving in dreams
"The Committee of Sleep,"
after a John Steinbeck quote in which he said,
"If the problem is too difficult by day,
I give it to the committee of sleep,
and in the morning the solution is there."
Anthropologists believe that some of the fantastic elements
in the ancient cave paintings were inspired by dreams.
The surrealists specifically advocated getting images from dreams.
This is Tennessee artist Jim Ann Howard's self-portrait
based on her recurring claustrophobic dream.
Mary Shelley dreamed the two key scenes in Frankenstein.
And Robert Louis Stevenson did the same
with "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
William Styron dreamed the title character of "Sophie's Choice."
August Kekule dreamed the structure of benzene.
Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed his final form of the periodic table of the elements.
Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize in medicine for an experiment he saw in a dream.
In the 14th century,
the Korean admiral dreamed of a turtle boat,
woke up and ordered it built -
the world's first armored battleship.
In modern times, Harvard engineer Paul Horowitz
dreamed his design for laser telescope controls.
Bell Labs' Alan Huang dreamed up a laser-,
as opposed to electric-, based computer.
Musicians from Beethoven to Paul McCartney and Billy Joel
dreamed tunes.
Gandhi's call for nonviolent protest of British rule of India
was inspired by a dream.
So, how can we do all of this in our dreams?
In the 1950s, researchers discovered that human sleep has 90-minute cycles,
each one containing a period of rapid eye movement sleep,
or REM sleep,
and that each period of REM is accompanied by a dream.
If researchers woke subjects right at the end of a REM period,
they got five dreams a night,
even though most of those would be lost by morning.
Within the last two decades,
PET scans have shown us more
about what's going on during the dreaming-brain REM sleep.
Parts of the cortex associated with visual imagery
are more active than awake.
Parts associated with movement
and some deep areas associated with emotion
are also even more active than awake.
The very front area of our brain -
associated with abstract thinking, planning and censorship -
is much less active.
These findings fit very neatly with the visual characteristics of dreams,
the bizarre characteristics of dreams,
and the fact that we don't censor as much,
both in the Freudian sense of sexual and socially inappropriate content,
but also in the sense of when problem solving,
we don't as quickly say, "That's not the correct way to do it."
So based on these neurological findings,
some theorists left to the assumption that everything about dreams was explained
and somehow came up with explained is meaningless,
that because we knew what the brain was doing,
that there was no meaning to the subjective content.
But, we can never think about waking thought that way -
the fact that we know what area of the brain
is associated with some difficult moral decision,
doesn't negate the subjective experience
that we're having as we struggle with this.
So, it's rather absurd to think of dreams that differently,
once we know their neurology.
I think within the last five to ten years,
researchers have come back around to that view
and begun investigating dreams again.
The first studies to do what we call dream incubation used brain teasers.
In the 1970s, William Dement, at Stanford,
gave 500 Stanford students brain teasers to solve.
They'd look over them just before they fell asleep,
and then they would record their dreams to see if there were answers in them.
He found 87 of the students had a dream on the topic of their brain teaser,
and seven had dreams that solved them.
Now, brain teasers are ideal, in a certain way,
because they lend themselves to that "aha" moment -
one moment you have no idea what the answer is,
usually because you're approaching the problem wrong,
and then, all of a sudden,
your perspective shifts and you see a different way of doing it.
That does seem to be something dreams are good at.
However, those problems have two drawbacks.
One is they may be harder than some of the subjects are capable of,
and secondly, there's no strong personal motivation.
Some people love brain teasers;
others are not very interested by them, and you don't have to solve them.
So, in my own research,
because that had already been done with brain teasers,
I decided to ask students in my study
to select an objective problem
that they already had to work on for some reason.
Some chose homework assignments.
Others chose problems from their regular life,
but objective ones, that had a correct answer.
And so, they incubated these problems for one week
by thinking about them at bedtime,
telling themselves they wanted to dream about them
and then recording all of their dreams.
And two research assistants,
who did not know which dreams went with which problems,
were also judging whether the dreams addressed or solved them.
And so my subjects selected a range of problems
that were probably easier than Dement's on average,
but whether because of this ease,
or because they were just more important to the subjects,
one-half of my students had a dream which solved the problem - sorry -
one-half of my students had a dream on the topic of the problem,
and one-fourth of them had a dream that solved the problem
as rated by the objective judges.
They actually rated somewhat more -
that's why I slipped and said half - of their own.
But as rated by the judges,
half were on topic; one-fourth solved the problem.
And although many students chose, as I said, homework
or very objective tasks
like arranging the furniture from a much larger apartment
in an acceptable way in a smaller apartment,
some of the most interesting examples were of personal dilemmas.
For instance, this dilemma was rated and solved by both the dreamer and judges:
Problem: I have applied to two clinical psychology programs
and two in industrial psychology
because I can't decide which field I want to go in to.
Dream: A map of the United States.
I'm in a plane, flying over this map.
The pilot says, "We're having engine trouble and need to land."
We look for a safe place on the map, indicated by a light.
I ask about Massachusetts, which we are right over,
but he says, "All of Massachusetts is very dangerous."
The lights seem to be further west.
Solution: I woke up and realized
that my two clinical schools are both in Massachusetts,
where I spent my whole life and where my parents live.
Both industrial programs are far away:
Texas and California.
This is because, originally, I was looking to stay close to home
and there were no good industrial programs nearby.
I realized that there's a lot wrong with staying at home
and, funny as it sounds,
getting away is probably more important than which kind of program I got in to.
Dreams seem to be particularly good at solutions
that involve thinking outside the box,
and looking back at the PET findings,
this makes sense.
The brain areas that normally inhibit it are much less active during REM sleep.
And many studies of creativity suggest
that exactly this sort of disinhibition of the front areas,
especially when it contains a variety of ideas,
is a crucial component of creative thought.
Dreams are also especially useful
when a problem lends itself to being visualized.
And again, that's one of the areas
that are even more active during REM sleep
than during our waking state.
The most famous of all examples involves both of these elements.
When August Kekule was working on the structure of benzene,
all known molecules were some sort of straight line
with side chains at right angles.
He was trying to fit the known atoms into this sort of framework -
and failing.
And so, he finally, after he had been struggling with it,
dozed off in front of the fireplace and dreamed,
first that he saw atoms dancing around in front of him,
then that the atoms began to form what he called, "snakes,"
straight lines made of atoms that looked like snakes.
And then, lo and behold, after a while, one of the snakes reached around
and took its tail in its mouth, forming a closed ring.
And he woke up realizing that the core of the benzene molecule was a ring,
not a straight line.
And my research tends to confirm that either of those characteristics,
visualization or thinking outside the box,
are especially likely to be solved in a dream.
I scoured the existing literature on dreams that had solved problems -
in history of science books, biographies -
looking for examples of historic problem solving dreams.
And then I surveyed modern working professionals
as to whether they'd ever had a dream
that was significantly useful in their jobs.
And patterns emerged from these two series of dreamers.
Well over half of the visual artists said
that they have had a useful dream for their work.
About half of the fiction novelists and playwrights said so.
And then from there, the numbers dropped off
as the professions became more abstract,
with scientists, inventors, engineers,
it was mainly the ones
that really benefited from 3D visualization
that were very likely to report helpful dreams.
And many times, a problem-solving dream was a one-time event for someone,
but other dreamers had learned to ask for help any time they were stuck.
Paul Horowitz, who I already mentioned in terms of the telescope,
says that he just always keeps a pad and pen by his bed,
and when he's working on designing a telescope,
every couple of weeks there's some stage where he's stuck -
on the optics or how to design the chip that controls something -
and he'll have a dream that shows him how to do it.
So, many of the people that got the most help had, on their own,
come up with an informal sort of dream incubation procedure,
similar to what I did with my research subjects.
So, if you want to try enhancing
focusing your dreams on particular problems you're stuck on -
either ones that you're working on professionally or at school,
or personal problems that you are stuck on in a similar way -
the techniques that work best -
the outline that I used in my research -
is, basically, write down the problem as a brief phrase or sentence
and place this note next to your bed.
Also, keep your pen and paper,
perhaps also a flashlight or pen with a lit tip,
on your night table.
Review the problem for a few minutes just before going to bed.
Once in bed, visualize the problem as a concrete image.
Tell yourself you want to dream about the problem
just as you are drifting off to sleep.
Upon awakening, lie quietly before getting out of bed.
Note whether there's any trace of a recalled dream
and invite more of the dream to return, if possible.
And write it down.
If you want to be more elaborate,
add these steps to your incubation routine:
At bedtime, visualize yourself dreaming about the problem,
awakening and writing it on your bedside notepad.
Arrange objects connected to the problem on your night table
or on the wall across from your bed if they lend themselves to a poster.
But even if you choose to leave your dreaming mind completely alone,
pay attention to it.
It's probably already working
on the problems that your waking mind has been struggling with.