Transcriber: Ludovica Ballarin Reviewer: Hélène VERNET
Hi, everyone.
So, when people ask me about my research,
and I tell them I study dreams, they ask questions like:
"Where do dreams come from?" and "Why do we dream?"
and "What does it means if I have a dream where my teeth are falling out?"
Then I have to become an ad hoc dream interpreter right there,
which is okay,
but one of the prevailing scientific perspectives on dreams
is the "continuity hypothesis,"
the idea that we dream about things that we experience while we're awake.
So last night, I had a dream about basketball.
Guess what I was doing before I went to sleep?
Watching the NBA playoffs.
Or, as cleverly illustrated in this cartoon, the guy says,
"I think my dream catcher needs some sort of filter.
I'm getting a lot of dreams about hot stock investments,
low-cost air fares, and products promising to enhance my sexual performance."
(Laughter)
But my research actually examines the opposite question:
"How are our dreams associated with behavior after we wake up?"
So let me ask you a question.
How many of you have ever had a dream about someone that you know?
All right.
Keep your hand up if you've ever had a dream,
and then you were upset at the person in your dream
for something they did to you in that dream,
or if someone was upset at you
for something you did to them in their dream.
Keep your hands up. Take a look around.
This was also captured in an episode of Friends
where Phoebe was mad at Ross for something
that she couldn't figure out what it was at first.
She was mad at him the all day and then finally realized
it was because of something mean that he said about her in a dream.
My colleagues and I wanted to investigate this.
This is when I was working on my PhD at Stony Brook.
In our study, we asked 61 participants
to keep track of their dreams each night for a two-week period.
We also asked them to keep track
of their daily activity with their romantic partners,
their significant others.
In this study, we collected almost 850 total dream reports.
Out of that sample, about one-quarter contains their romantic partners.
So people are dreaming about their romantic partners
about 25% of the time.
Of those dreams, a little bit less than half
have some kind of positive interaction in them,
and about one-quarter of those have some kind of conflicts in them.
People are also having dreams about other people,
what I would call "infidelity dreams"
or dreams with romantic cheating behavior in them.
Let's take a look at some of these dreams.
I'll show you two happy ones first, with positive interaction in them.
This dream goes: "I dreamt I was at a carnival with my girlfriend.
She likes them, so we decided to go to one that stopped in our town.
We were having fun running around, kissing, tickling each other.
She kept beating me at the whack-a-mole game
even though I thought I was winning by a lot...
In the end, she won a big teddy bear as a prize
which is apparently what she wanted, so I was happy."
That's cute.
(Laughter)
"This dream was a memory.
It was our first date, and we were watching Saw II around November.
I was so scared of the movie, I kept ducking my head into his shoulder
and squeaking when some gory part appeared.
He laughed and comforted me.
In the middle of the movie I rested my head on his shoulder,
and he put his arm around me and kissed me.
He was very sweet, and I remember feeling tingly.
We continued to kiss and hug each other."
Aw!
(Laughter)
So what we're seeing in these dreams is a lot of the same kinds of behaviors
that people would exhibit with their romantic partners
in their waking lives.
They're going on dates, to the carnival, to the movies.
There's kissing, affectionate behaviour, there's comforting.
If I showed you these dreams in some regular diary reports,
you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
So that shows evidence for the continuity hypothesis.
That being said, not all dreams are sunshine and roses.
I'm going to show you some negative dreams now, so fair warning:
if you're sensitive to conflicts, these get a little rough.
"A girl left a message on my boyfriend's Facebook page,
saying that she loved him.
I find out he called her, they were talking,
even though he knows how I feel about her.
On top of that, he tells her that he loves her.
After badgering him about what they talked about,
he finally says that he told her he loved her without meaning it.
I become even more upset and start smacking him across the face,
yelling and crying how could he do this to me.
He just says 'I don't know' and I keep yelling and crying
until finally waking myself out of the dream."
Ouch!
So, think about if you have this type of dream,
and you wake up and your partner is sleeping right next to you,
what might you say and do in that situation?
Also, this shows how ubiquitous Facebook has become:
now it even infiltrates our dreams.
Let's do another one. This involves a little bit of jealousy.
"In this dream, I was friends with my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend.
We were hanging out at my house, having fun, singing karaoke.
Every time I looked at her,
I thought very few girls are as beautiful as she is.
Then my boyfriend comes over. He wanted a picture with her.
Then I got all jealous and pulled him aside
to ask him if he thought she was prettier than me.
I was giving him a lot of attitude, I knew it,
but I didn't care because of our situation.
I had every right to be jealous and bitchy.
He ignored both my question and me for the night.
I confronted him again, he told me he was very turned off
by my attitude and behavior.
I questioned my behavior and wondered if maybe I overreacted."
There we're seeing more evidence that a dream like this
might prompt someone when they wake up to reconsider their actions,
to reconsider their interpersonal relationships.
Let's do an example of infidelity in dreams.
"I had met this wonderful, cute affectionate guy.
He gave me attention, gifts, and wanted to meet my parents.
He even said he wanted to marry me some day.
One particular part I remember best.
He took me to this extravagant store, all gold and silver.
He gave me jewelry to try on with this beautiful champagne dress.
I felt so happy the entire dream that I didn't want to wake up."
It's important to keep in mind
this person is in a relationship with somebody else -
a completely different person who she's not having a dream about.
I'll do one more infidelity dream.
"I was at a party with my fraternity brothers
with a bunch of sorority girls I know from school.
I remember being called constantly from my girlfriend checking up on me.
It got to the point where we got into a fight
because I told her she didn't trust me.
I got beyond drunk and hooked up with some random girl.
I brought her to my house and we had sex.
I remember feeling guilty before it went down, but satisfied after."
I know some of these dreams look like
they're from deleted episodes of the Jersey Shore,
(Laughter)
but what we're seeing
is that when people have these types of dreams
with arguments or conflict or betrayal or jealousy,
they have more conflict with their partners the next day,
and that's controlling for the previous day's conflict.
So it is not part of some day-to-day mechanism,
there's something unique about the dream.
When people have an infidelity dream,
cheating on their partner, hooking up with someone else,
they feel significantly less love and closeness the next day.
What about sex dreams?
In case you're curious, we do have some. I'll show you two examples.
"I guess to write my dream is embarrassing,
but I'll try to describe it.
It was a sexual dream where me and my loved one had sex.
Oddly, it was in my bathroom on the counter sink top.
I felt happy and excited in my dream,
and with the look on his face, I'd say he felt the same."
So this is a relatively good sex dream.
Here's one that's a little bit, crazy.
"I was having sex with my girlfriend,
and my ex-girlfriend kept calling my phone.
I picked up, told her to leave me alone and to go on with her life.
I went to my girl,
and we started to have an intense Kama Sutra kind of sex.
She kept asking why I'm so mad,
and I told her that my ex-girl kept harassing me.
She took my phone, called her, and they started to curse each other.
We were still naked, she hung up,
and we went back to bed, still making love.
And then I woke up."
Sex dreams are associated with the next day's behavior,
but it depends on whether the relationship is going well.
So if the relationship is good and everyone's happy,
then having a sex dream
is associated with more love and intimacy and closeness the next day.
But if the relationship is not going well and they're unhappy,
then sex dreams are associated with less love and closeness the next day.
So I want to pause here and just reflect
because I'm sure some of you might be thinking,
"Okay, dreams are associated with the behavior the next day, why?
Why do dreams have this association? Why do they have this effect?"
The short answer is we still don't know.
Dreams are one of the big, unsolved mysteries of science.
There are several competing theories that might explain what's going on here.
Patrick McNamara proposed the theory
that dreams evolved in order to facilitate social attachment bonds,
especially between parents and children and romantic partners,
and we do see some limited evidence for that here,
especially with sex dreams associated with more love and intimacy.
What about conflict dreams that would suggest the opposite,
that it is almost hurting the attachment bonds?
And there is another theory that might address this,
which is more along the lines
that dreams evolved in order to help us solve problems,
in order to see difficult issues from a new perspective
and maybe come to conclusions or have solutions
that we wouldn't otherwise be able to see
to adapt to emotionally difficult situations.
I want to show you a few examples from other studies
that might support this theory.
A lot of this research is summarized by Deidre Barrett
in a chapter she wrote for "The New Science of Dreaming."
This is a study from William Dement, published in the early 1970s.
He gave 500 students a brainteaser,
and he told them to think about it for 15 min before they went to sleep.
How many of you have seen this brainteaser before?
" The letters O, T, T, F, F form the beginning of an infinite sequence.
Find a simple rule for determining any or all successive letters.
According to your rule, what would the next two letters be?"
Now out of the 500 students,
there were 87 dreams that were actually about the brainteaser,
and a handful of them solved it.
Here's one example of that dream.
"I was walking down the hall of an art gallery.
I began to count the paintings: one, two, three, four, five,
but as I came to the sixth and seventh,
the paintings had been ripped from their frames.
I stared at the empty frame...
Suddenly I realized the sixth and seventh spaces
were the solution to the problem.
O, T, T, F, F stands for One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.
Six and seven are the next two in the sequence.
So S and S would be the two letters that follow."
Here's another study, from Erin Wamsley and Bob Stickgold
in their lab at the Harvard Med School Division of Sleep Research.
They gave participants in their study this maze,
trained them on it, then tested their ability to navigate it five hours later.
They let some of the participants sleep in between during that five hours.
And the sleep did help performance a little bit,
but not nearly as much as if they reported having a dream about the maze.
Having a dream about the maze
improved their performance on the retest tenfold
compared to the people who did not have a dream.
It's almost as if the dream allows our minds
to examine different kinds of solutions in a creative way,
and then we wake up, and we've something to work with we didn't have before.
Here's some research by Rosalind Cartwright
that shows when you look at women
who are suffering from depression after going through a divorce.
They are actually less depressed,
more mentally healthy in the future at a follow-up
if they dream about their ex-partner, about their former spouse.
This might seem counterintuitive, you might be thinking
"How can you get over someone if you're dreaming about them?"
Rosalind Cartwright calls these "dreams that work:"
those people who incorporated the thing that stressed them out
into their dream were better off, even if the dream content was negative.
Another example of this.
Former smokers who were trying to quit were less likely to relapse,
less likely to start smoking again if they dreamt about smoking.
Again, we are seeing this evidence
that dreams help us to navigate emotionally difficult situations
and to adapt and solve problems in a way that we would not otherwise be able to do.
So dreams have this incredible power to help us heal.
As Bob Stickgold said,
"When you sleep, your brain is figuring it out
and holding on to relevant information and throwing out the rest."
Dreams might also allow for a creative spark.
They're responsible for some of the greatest innovations ever known to man.
Remember the periodic table of the elements,
from high school chemistry class perhaps for some of you.
Dmitri Mendeleev dreamt the periodic table.
He had a dream that the elements appeared before him
and organized themselves according to their atomic mass,
and he woke up and drew that,
and that became what we now know as the periodic table.
Paul McCartney famously dreamt the song "Yesterday."
Everybody knows that song? ♫ Yesterday ...
Okay, I won't sing.
But he dreamt the song, woke up, went to his piano,
thought "Great tune! Let me see if I can figure it out,"
and he found the chords, and that became
one of the most beautiful songs ever written.
Now, I think it's unfortunate
most of us probably won't have one of these deep, profound dreams
that lead us to these insights.
And I don't think it's because we're not capable.
I think it's because most of the time,
we're not really paying attention to our dreams.
We don't take them seriously.
People think that dreams are just a bunch of nonsense and garbage.
We wake up, we shrug it off,
we go about our day as if it never happens.
There's a great quote from my favorite film,
"Waking Life" by Richard Linklater:
"Most people are either sleep walking through their waking life
or wake walking through their sleeping life.
Either way, they're not going to get that much out of it."
If I asked you right now to tell me
whether or not you're dreaming in this very moment,
most of you probably say, "Of course not. I'm obviously awake."
My response would be: "How do you know?"
How do you know this is not a dream right now?
Most of us can't tell the difference.
Can you tell when you're dreaming
or only when you wake up and realize that it was a dream
do you understand what was going on?
So I want to conclude
if you get anything from this talk, I want you to take this home:
dreams are worth your time.
They're an important piece of your life and worth paying attention to.
Dreams represent this great, untapped reservoir of information and insight
that you can gain about yourself,
your relationships, your work, your physical health.
So start tonight, keep a dream journal.
Put a pad of paper and a pen next to your bed,
and when you wake up,
write down whatever was in your head while you were asleep.
You might be surprised at what you find.
And your dreams might be trying to tell you something really important.
All right, thank you.
(Applause)