- For 22 years, while Norman Gulko slept, his dreaming
brain went on dates with his late wife. Her name was Flo, and they had
been married more than three decades when cancer claimed her life in the
summer of 1980. Two weeks later, she showed up in his dreams. She was standing
in profile, her brown eyes young again, urging him to be happy.
-
- Mr. Gulko had never much bothered with the scenes that
ran through his head at night. Now he starting writing them on numbered
scraps of paper he'd file away. He didn't want to lose them.
-
- "I was thrilled to see her," he said. "It
was a real love affair between us, and I wanted to hold on to the moment."
-
- While he grieved, the dreams kept coming: Flo raising
her lips for a kiss, or holding his hand, or nestled in the crook of his
arm in the backseat of a car. She looked beautiful, even when the dreaming
Norman knew she was ill. Sometimes, she was just a presence in a room while
he occupied himself with a chore; he spent other dreams fruitlessly searching
for her.
-
- One night in April, 1993, when he was tossing in bed
over an upcoming medical test, his dream found them standing together in
a field, and Flo placed her hand gently on his pounding heart. That one,
Dream No. 80, he would mull over for days: Could her spirit have visited,
or did he just want to think she did?
-
- In all, he had 150 dreams of Flo. And then on, Aug. 8,
2002, he dreamt that she came wearily home from the hospital, hugged him
and asked for a cup of tea. He went to brew it, and woke up in his bed.
That was last time he remembers dreaming about her. Now 81, having accepted
that he may never have another, he feels grateful for the comfort the dreams
offered. "I am very glad I had them."x
-
- Adult human beings are believed to dream for more than
two hours every night.
-
- In the average lifetime, that's roughly six years wandering
naked or chased by shadows or bringing loved ones to life, all the while
nestled safely in our beds. American dream researcher Robert Stickgold
described it as a nightly bout of clinical insanity.
-
- Studies tell us what human beings, as a species, most
commonly conjure in that madness - misfortune more than fortune, attacks
more than affection, humiliation more than glory.
-
- Neuroscientists can point to the parts of our brains
that are busy churning out those dreams. But 50 years since REM sleep was
discovered, and heralded as the new door to the unconscious, research has
yet to crack the reason why we dream in the first place.
-
- Could these fuzzy nighttime movies simply be random "fireworks"
in the brain with no real life-sustaining purpose, a kind of biological
white noise to get us through the night? Or do we need them - and should
we become more skilled at using them - to learn and remember, to reconcile
our darkest secrets, our deepest griefs?
-
- "Dreams are like smoke," said Mr. Gulko. "When
you try to grab them, they just sort of disappear into the air."
-
- Scientists have made the same frustrating discovery.
Faced with declining funding and the pitfalls of a research area that must
rely largely on the recall of groggy subjects prodded awake in the middle
of the night, only a small group of full-time, genuinely scientific and
professional dream chasers remain.
-
- Meanwhile, the Internet has fostered whole communities
of people who debate and ponder their dreams. Dream dictionaries, churned
out by the dozens, will tell you that a tidal wave means emotional upheaval,
that rats symbolize poverty and filth, but rabbits running on grass is
a good omen.
-
- Technology also has hopped into the dream business. In
California, a scientist-turned-seminar-instructor named Stephen La Berge
will sell you a mask called the Nova Dreamer for $500 (U.S.). It is designed
to emit flashing red light during REM sleep to alert users to the fact
that they are dreaming, purportedly so they can manipulate the events.
The tag line: "Stop sleeping through your dreams."
-
- Next month, a Japanese toy company starts selling the
Dream Workshop, which claims to allow people to choose - using mood music,
photos and recorded prompts - the subjects of their dreams before they
doze off.
-
- It sells for $200, and for the near future is available
only in Japan. Even the manufacturers don't claim it works more than 20
per cent of the time - one employee who wanted to play for Japan in the
World Cup reportedly ended up dreaming about watching the game at home
alone with a bowl of chips.
-
- Some might argue that we shouldn't go messing around
with our dreams. Even setting aside psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud's
century-old claim that dreams are repressed sexual desires (although Freud's
admirers emphasize that is only part of the theory), most of us would probably
accept that dreams whisper some kind of message, if only that we've been
stressing out too much at the office.
-
- Even in these modern, secular times, dream conferences
draw people who believe the soul is transported to another plane of existence
while we sleep. But it's that blend of mysticism and reality, the chance
that dreams might hold the key to human consciousness, that keeps scientists
searching.
-
- Said Antti Revonsuo, a researcher at the University of
Turku in Finland: "How does the brain make this kind of miracle happen
that neural activity is transformed into a subjective experience, of colour
and objects and emotions?"
-
- One popular story places Paul McCartney on a May morning
in 1965, waking up with a tune that his brain had composed while he slept.
Convinced he had heard it somewhere else, he went hunting for its origin.
But the melody was his own creation, born apparently of a dream ó
and Yesterday eventually became the most played and recorded song of all
time.
-
- Similarly, American inventor Elias Howe said he figured
out where to put the eye of the needle in the first sewing machine after
dreaming of men with spears.
-
- But most dreams are the sort of everyday scenario that
interests the dreamer alone. The evidence is convincing that dreams, however
bizarre, and for reasons hotly debated, are a nighttime retelling of our
daytime living.
-
- Decades of sorting through laboratory recollections and
dream x journals have revealed that the most commonly shared themes - falling,
flying, fleeing - are surprisingly consistent across generations and between
cultures.
-
- Content analysis has reached a consensus on format: Dreams,
at least the ones we remember, are more likely to be negative in mood than
positive. They are set most often in the present, believed to happen in
real time and, the Dream Workshop notwithstanding, have proved generally
impervious to outside influence - as researchers found in one study when
they taped open the eyes of sleeping patients and showed them objects to
try to shape their dreams.
-
- Aggression, in general, is a more frequent storyline
of men than women, and more often the subject of American dreams than,
say, Swedish ones. And contrary to myth, you can die in your dreams with
no real-life consequences - people have reported being blown to pieces
and then sleeping peacefully until morning.
-
- But most of our dreams are lost. The average person remembers
only one dream every two or three days, although with a little practice,
and pre-sleep concentration - just telling yourself "I will remember
my dream" - dreamers can significantly boost their recall.
-
- It is rare, but lab experiments have captured people
having "lucid dreams," in which they become aware they are dreaming,
and may even manipulate the dream. This is not a common occurrence, and
has its own limitations; Tore Nielsen, director of the Dream and Nightmare
lab at Montreal's Sacre-Coeur Hospital, says lucid dreamers have trouble
getting off the ground when they try to fly and, in one experiment, were
unable to kill themselves. In those cases, the gun misfires or the leap
off of a cliff ends in an easy landing, as if the brain steps in with its
own bodyguard.
-
- While the harvesting of dreams continues, neuroscientists
have tried to resolve, at least, the mechanics of dreaming. In 1953, a
pair of researchers discovered rapid eye movement, the stage of sleep that
cycles around roughly every 90 minutes, when the brain becomes as busy
as it is during the day. The discovery launched a new line of dream research.
-
- In those early experiments, when the lab subjects were
awakened during REM sleep, they were significantly more likely to recall
their dreams, than in earlier stages of the night, and the dreams themselves
were more vivid and lasted longer. The theory evolved that dreams and REM
were synonymous.
-
- And if dreams were the byproduct of a preprogrammed automatic
process, generated out of the brain stem - the part of the brain that keeps
the body running but serves no higher mental function - then Freudian or
psychoanalytic theories that dreams were thoughtful and motivated fell
apart.
-
- But in the mid-1980s, a South African researcher named
Mark Solms began to study the dream patterns of brain-injury patients,
and found a different answer.
-
- First of all, he found subjects who did not dream but
had REM sleep, and others who had no REM sleep but dreamed, all depending
on the nature of their brain damage. He also found evidence that the motivational
parts of the brain were necessary for dreaming.
-
- As the research set off in a new direction, brain scans
offered a clearer picture. It is now accepted that human beings dream throughout
the night. The creative cores of our brains, controlling our desires and
emotions, stay busy; our executive offices, the planning, reflective and
scheming sections, go off line. It explains why, one researcher suggested,
our first instinct is to run when we see a werewolf in our dreams rather
than question the existence of werewolves.
-
- But all this research has left the big question dangling:
Why do we dream at all? Theories abound, hotly contested. Rosalind Cartwright,
a Canadian researcher who has studied the dreams of depressed subjects,
proposes that we dream as a form of therapy, to work through the issue
troubling us.
-
- Dr. Revonsuo, in Finland, has developed a "threat-simulation"
theory that dreams (particularly attack or chase dreams) are rehearsals
the brain runs to prepare for danger, an evolutionary remnant from the
days when human beings lived in caves and had to worry about being eaten
by wild beasts.
-
- Other scientists believed the dreams may foster learning
and consolidate memory. A few years ago, Dr. Stickgold at Harvard Medical
School monitored the dreams of people learning to play the video game Tetris
for the first time. In the game, players have to fit falling blocks into
a geometrical pattern. By the second night, those falling blocks began
to show up in the dreams of a majority of the participants, even those
suffering from amnesia, who had no memory of the game itself.
-
- Around the same time, researchers at MIT discovered the
brain activity of rats running mazes was exactly duplicated when the rodents
were sleeping - which suggested that animals dream, while bolstering the
theory that dreams are a mental tool to rehearse new skills.
-
- Another study at Trent University observed people who
were asked to perform a rotor pursuit task, in which they had to keep a
pencil between two zigzagging parallel lines. The subjects who performed
best, reported dreams about cars that swerved off roads, or jogs that landed
them in ditches - as though perhaps the brain were practising an unfamiliar
skill in a familiar environment.
-
- "Our brains tend to put us in difficult positions,"
speculates Dr. Nielsen. And perhaps that is the point: The brain is generating
its own errors to figure out how to correct them.
-
- But these are only theories. Other research suggests
that dreams may be more like the appendix of the brain - they don't do
much harm, but neither are they necessary.
-
- California researcher William Domhoff spent his life
cataloguing dream content; 40 years in, he has decided that dreams, while
useful to an individual who chooses to listen to them, serve no real biological
purpose - that if we stopped dreaming today, the quality of our lives and
sleep would not decline.
-
- Dr. Domhoff cites the case of a young Israeli man who
stopped dreaming almost completely after a shrapnel injury to his head,
and went on to graduate from law school, with no apparent memory or reasoning
deficiencies.
-
- He points to the work of David Foulkes, who analyzed
hundreds of dreams from children between 3 and 11, and discovered they
didn't dream often, and when they did, not very well. If dreaming is a
function of learning and remembering, he asked, then how could children
not be better dreamers?
-
- Critics like Dr. Domhoff suggest that researchers continue
to mistake REM - a widely accepted memory booster - with dreams, which
may just be a byproduct of brain activity, like the smoke, as Dr. Solms
puts it, from a warming fire.
-
- Ongoing research, Dr. Solms says, will try to pin down
an explanation for the smoke - with MRI experiments studying dreams outside
REM sleep, and continued work exploring the functional abilities of non-dreamers.
-
- Dr. Solms's own theory is that dreams result when the
brain can't physically act out its still active motivations. But that only
leads to another door he can't open: Why do the motivational parts of the
brain bother staying busy in sleep?
-
- Still, in some way, the question of why we dream is too
simplistic. Drs. Domhoff and Solms agree that, even if dreams eventually
are proved to have no function, humanity has certainly found a purpose
for them, in religion and culture and personal introspection.
-
- "It's not one of medical science's great necessities
that everybody's dreams should be interpreted," says Dr. Solms. "But
I do think there is reason in them. It's perfectly plausible that you will
find something about a person's concerns, interests and desires."
-
- Some researchers challenge why we even feel the need
to ask the question - do we waste time debating the purpose of waking thought?
-
- For many dreamers, like Norman Gulko, it matters not
whether dreams exist to resolve our personal trauma or simply mirror, by
some fortunate accident, the state of our conscious minds. It is not about
brain function and neural networks. It is enough just to revel in the magic
of a dream, and take what you can from it.
-
- - Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and
Mail.
-
- © Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
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- http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.
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