What Dreams Are Made Of - New technology is helping brain scientists
unravel the mysteries of the night. Their work could show us all how
to make the most of our time in bed

Aug. 9 issue - In the middle of the night, we are all Fellini—the
creator of a parade of fleeting images intended for an audience of
one. At times, it's an action flick, with a chase scene that seems
endless ... until it dissolves and we're falling, falling, falling
into ... is it a field of flowers? And who is the gardener waving at
us over there? Could it be our old high-school English teacher? No,
it's Jon Stewart. He wants us to sit on the couch right next to him.
Are those TV cameras? And what happened to our clothes? In the
morning, when the alarm rudely arouses us, we might remember none of
this—or maybe only a fraction, perhaps the feeling of lying naked in
a bed of daisies or an inexplicable urge to watch "The Daily Show."

This, then, is the essence of dreaming—reality and unreality in a
nonsensical, often mundane but sometimes bizarre mix. Dreams have
captivated thinkers since ancient times, but their mystery is now
closer than ever to resolution, thanks to new technology that allows
scientists to watch the sleeping brain at work. Although there are
still many more questions than answers, researchers are now able to
see how different parts of the brain work at night, and they're
figuring out how that division of labor influences our dreams. In one
sense, it's the closest we've come to recording the soul. "If you're
going to understand human behavior," says Rosalind Cartwright, a
chairman of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in
Chicago, "here's a big piece of it. Dreaming is our own storytelling
time—to help us know who we are, where we're going and how we're
going to get there."

The long-range goal of dream research is a comprehensive explanation
of the connections between sleeping and waking, a multidimensional
picture of consciousness and thought 24 hours a day. In the meantime,
dream science is helping us understand and treat depression,
posttraumatic stress, anxiety and a whole range of other problems.
Neuroscientists are gleaning insights into how we learn by studying
the physiology of dreaming in adults and children. Psychologists are
also studying dreams to learn how both ordinary people and great
artists resolve problems in their life and work by "sleeping on it."
For many of these researchers, accounts of ordinary dreams are a rich
resource. Psychologist G. William Domhoff and his colleagues at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, have meticulously cataloged and
posted more than 17,000 dreams. That database (dreambank.net) is the
source of the dreams printed here.

1. History Of Dream Research

I am with an older, "lecherous-looking" Freudian analyst who wants me
to lie on the couch and recall the moment of my birth while he counts
1, 2, 3. I pretend and then tell him the truth. Then he gets
undressed and wants to make love to me but just then Mother looks in
by the door! And I lie very still; she closes the door. I awaken.
(Then I remember wishing that I was still with my analyst.)

Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods,
and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic. In ancient
Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of
medicine, in order to receive dreams that would heal them. Modern
dream science really begins at the end of the 19th century with
Sigmund Freud, who theorized that dreams were the expression of
unconscious desires often stemming from childhood. He believed that
exploring these hidden emotions through analysis could help cure
mental illness. The Freudian model of psychoanalysis dominated until
the 1970s, when new research into the chemistry of the brain showed
that emotional problems could have biological or chemical roots, as
well as environmental ones. In other words, we weren't sick just
because of something our mothers did (or didn't do), but because of
some imbalance that might be cured with medication.

After Freud, the most important event in dream science was the
discovery in the early 1950s of a phase of sleep characterized by
intense brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM). People awakened
in the midst of REM sleep reported vivid dreams, which led
researchers to conclude that most dreaming took place during REM.
Using the electroencephalograph (EEG), researchers could see that
brain activity during REM resembled that of the waking brain. That
told them that a lot more was going on at night than anyone had
suspected. But what, exactly?

Scientists still don't know for sure, although they have lots of
theories. On one side are scientists like Harvard's Allan Hobson, who
believes that dreams are essentially random. In the 1970s, Hobson and
his colleague Robert McCarley proposed what they called
the "activation-synthesis hypothesis," which describes how dreams are
formed by nerve signals sent out during REM sleep from a small area
at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals, the
researchers said, activate the images that we call dreams. That put a
crimp in dream research; if dreams were meaningless nocturnal
firings, what was the point of studying them? More recently, new
theories have made some scientists take dreams more seriously. In
1997, Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa
published the results of his study of people with damage to different
parts of the brain; he found that there was more than one mechanism
in the brain for activating dreams. Since then, Solms has argued that
technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and
positron emission tomography (PET) might actually lend new weight to
Freud's ideas because the parts of the brain that are most active
during dreaming control emotion, the core of Freud's dream theory.
Today, many therapists have a looser view of Freud, accepting that
dreams may express unconscious thoughts, although not necessarily
childhood conflicts.

Many others think the answer ultimately lies in a reconciliation of
the different disciplines that study dreaming: neurobiology and
psychology. "Both are useful, but they're different," says Glen
Gabbard, professor of psychoanalysis and psychiatry at Baylor College
of Medicine in Houston. "To have a truly comprehensive understanding
of dreams, you have to be bilingual. You have to speak the language
of the mind and the language of the brain."

2. The Biology Of Dreaming

Doctors are on the roof talking to people, saying they shouldn't be
up there because it's dangerous. One doctor gives shots to immobilize
the brain, rather than fixing ailments. I say if I fall to fix me up
but leave my brain so I can dream.

Adult humans spend about a quarter of their sleep time in REM, much
of it dreaming. During that time, the body is essentially paralyzed
but the brain is buzzing. Scientists using PET and fMRI technology to
watch the dreaming brain have found that one of the most active areas
during REM is the limbic system, which controls our emotions. Much
less active is the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with
logical thinking. That could explain why dreams in REM sleep often
lack a coherent story line. (Some researchers have also found that
people dream in non-REM sleep as well, although those dreams
generally are less vivid.) Another active part of the brain in REM
sleep is the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects discrepancies.
Eric Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Program at the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, thinks that could be why
people often figure out thorny problems in their dreams. "It's as if
the brain surveys the internal milieu and tries to figure out what it
should be doing, and whether our actions conflict with who we are,"
he says.

These may seem like vital mental functions, but no one has yet been
able to say that REM sleep or dreaming is essential to life or even
sanity. MAO inhibitors, an older class of antidepressants,
essentially block REM sleep without any detectable effects, although
people do get a "REM rebound"—extra REM—if they stop the medication.
That's also true of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
like Prozac, which reduce dreaming by a third to a half. Even
permanently losing the ability to dream doesn't have to be disabling.
Israeli researcher Peretz Lavie has been observing a patient named
Yuval Chamtzani, who was injured by a fragment of shrapnel that
penetrated his brain when he was 19. As a result, he gets no REM
sleep and doesn't remember any dreams. But Lavie says that Chamtzani,
now 55, "is probably the most normal person I know and one of the
most successful ones." (He's a lawyer, a painter and the editor of a
puzzle column in a popular Israeli newspaper.)

The mystery of REM sleep is that even though it may not be essential,
it is ubiquitous—at least in mammals and birds. But that doesn't mean
all mammals and birds dream (or if they do, they're certainly not
talking about it). Some researchers think REM may have evolved for
physiological reasons. "One thing that's unique about mammals and
birds is that they regulate body temperature," says neuroscientist
Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA's Center for Sleep Research. "There's
no good evidence that any coldblooded animal has REM sleep." REM
sleep heats up the brain and non-REM cools it off, Siegel says, and
that could mean that the changing sleep cycles allow the brain to
repair itself. "It seems likely that REM sleep is filling a basic
physiological function and that dreams are a kind of epiphenomenon,"
Siegel says—an extraneous byproduct, like foam on beer.

But dreaming may also fulfill many functions that we don't yet
understand. Allan Rechtschaffen, a longtime sleep researcher and
professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, compares dreaming to
breathing. "We need to breathe to get oxygen," he says. "That's a
physiological must. That's why the breathing apparatus evolved. But
once it evolved, you can put it to other uses, like for speech or
laughing or playing the saxophone." Perhaps dreaming, too, adapted to
other uses. "There's no reason dreams have to be any one thing," he
says. "Is our waking consciousness any one thing?"

3. Different Dreamers: Age And Gender

All night long, Jared is drunk and talking in his incoherent mumbly
monotone. Finally, I have enough and tell him off. I call him a
boring bastard. Then I notice a baby girl standing inside a flaming
fireplace. I go up to her and say sympathetically, "You must be very
hot and uncomfortable." She agrees. I pick her up and I hold her,
taking her away from the fire.

We're born to be dreamers—although it apparently takes a while to get
all the equipment working. While parents-to-be fantasize about their
babies, fetuses probably aren't dreaming about Mom and Dad. "Almost
the entire state of being before we're born is REM sleep," says Mark
Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center
in Minneapolis. "I can't imagine that there's a lot of conflict
resolution going on in utero." Young children get a lot of REM sleep
as well, which scientists think is probably stimulation for brain
growth, not real dreaming. Researchers believe children have to reach
a certain level of intellectual maturity, around the age of 8 or 9,
before their dreams resemble adults'.

Inge Strauch, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich, has
collected 550 dreams from a group of twenty-four 9- to 15-year-olds
she studied in her lab over a period of two years. She found that
children dreamed about animals more often than adults and were more
likely to report being victims than aggressors. They were also more
likely to have "fantastic" dreams, while adults' dreams tend to
contain more elements of reality. A typical fantastic dream from a 10-
year-old Strauch studied included a cat asking for directions to
the "cat bathroom." Similarly, an 11-year-old boy dreamed that a
snake wanted to go up a ski lift.

Gender differences in dream content show up in studies of adults as
well. The biggest myth? That adult dreams are "full of sex," says
Domhoff, author of "The Scientific Study of Dreams." When they do
have dreams that include sex, they're often about someone they're not
really attracted to or some conflict, he says. "They are not often
joyful occasions." In fact, about two thirds of the characters in
men's dreams are men; gender is more evenly divided in women's
dreams. These differences appear to be true in many different
cultures. Men's dreams also involve more physical aggression than
women's dreams; they're more likely to be about chasing, punching,
breaking, stealing or killing, Domhoff says. A more typical
expression of aggression in women's dreams would be rejection or an
insult ("That dress makes you look fat").

A favorite topic for women: weddings. But they're not always happily-
ever-after dreams. "Something always goes wrong," Domhoff says. "It's
the wrong dress, the wrong guy, the wrong church." In one recorded on
dreambank.net, a woman is about to get married and doesn't have
anything to wear. "I ended up wearing a genie outfit, genie pants, a
gauze orange top, slippers, a belt with bells on it, lots of jewelry
and my hair in a ponytail," she wrote. "I remember reassuring myself
by thinking it was close to Halloween."

Not surprisingly, new mothers frequently dream about their babies,
says Tore Nielsen, associate professor of psychiatry at the
University of Montreal, who has analyzed the content of 20,000 dreams
collected over the Web. In a separate study of 220 new mothers'
dreams, he found that "a lot of bad things happen to their infants—
the cat eating them, or they're suddenly lost, or they left them in
the care of a relative who left them in a shopping center."

4. How We Use Dreams

There is a man talking calmly on a pay phone. He is a gunman. He
talks casually as he blasts a machine gun up the stairs next to the
pay phone, killing people. When he is out of bullets, he casually
alters his weapon to use shotgun shells. He is poised, cold like
steel, calm, and he kills.

People who don't remember their dreams can learn to recall them. In
general, more introverted, psychologically oriented people naturally
remember their dreams. Practical, concrete thinkers probably won't.
It also helps to get enough sleep so you have time to dream. If you
want to remember more, try to keep the REM state going by lying still
and keeping your eyes closed while you repeat the dream scenario in
your head to solidify it in your memory. Cartwright even suggests
giving it a title, like "My Date With Brad Pitt." Keep a notebook by
your bed and write down what's in your head as soon as you wake up.

Why should you care what happens in your head at night? Although
there's lots of disagreement about the psychological function of
dreams, researchers in recent years have come up with some
tantalizing theories. One possibility is that dreaming helps the mind
run tests of its Emergency Broadcast System, a way to prepare for
potential disaster. So, for example, when new mothers dream about
losing their babies, they may actually be rehearsing what they would
do or how they would react if their worst fears were realized.
There's also evidence that dreaming helps certain kinds of learning.
Some researchers have found that dreaming about physical tasks, like
a gymnast's floor routine, enhances performance. Dreaming can also
help people find solutions to elusive problems. "Anything that is
very visual may get extra help from dreams," says Deirdre Barrett,
assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and editor of the
journal Dreaming. In her book "The Committee of Sleep," she describes
how artists like Jasper Johns and Salvador Dali found inspiration in
their dreams. In her own research on problem solving through dreams,
Barrett has found that even ordinary people can solve simple problems
in their lives (like how to fit old furniture into a new apartment)
if they focus on the dilemma before they fall asleep.

Whatever the function of dreams at night, they clearly can play a
role in therapy during the day. The University of Maryland's Clara
Hill, who has studied the use of dreams in therapy, says that dreams
are a "back door" into a patient's thinking. "Dreams reveal stuff
about you that you didn't know was there," she says. The therapists
she trains to work with patients' dreams are, in essence, heirs to
Freud, using dream imagery to uncover hidden emotions and feelings.
Dreams provide clues to the nature of more serious mental illness.
Schizophrenics, for example, have poor-quality dreams, usually about
objects rather than people. Cartwright has been studying depression
in divorced men and women, and she is finding that "good dreamers,"
people who have vivid dreams with strong story lines, are less likely
to remain depressed. She thinks that dreaming helps diffuse strong
emotions. "Dreaming is a mental-health activity," she says.

People often deal with traumatic events through dreams. Tufts
University psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, author of "Dreams and
Nightmares," analyzed dreams from the same group of people before and
after September 11 (none of them lived in New York). He found that
the later dreams were not necessarily more negative, but they were
more intense. "The intensity is a measure of emotional arousal," he
says. For people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
dream content can be a marker of the level of distress, says
psychiatrist Thomas Mellman of the Howard University School of
Medicine, who studies PTSD. Dreams that mimic the real-life trauma
indicate that the patient may be "stuck" in the experience. He thinks
one way to help people move past the memory is through an "injury
rehearsal," where they imagine a more positive scenario.

All this has led to a rethinking of Freud's great insight, that
dreams are a "royal road" to the unconscious. Mapping that royal road
is a daunting task for scientists who are using sophisticated imaging
techniques and psychological studies in an attempt to synthesize what
we know about the inner workings of the mind and the brain. Dreaming,
like thinking, is what makes us human—whether we're evoking old
terrors or imaging new pleasures. "We dream about unfinished
business," says Domhoff. And, if we're lucky, we wake up with a
little more insight to carry the day.

With Pat Wingert and Josh Ulick


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