DREAMS
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN TM
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Dream States: A Peek into Consciousness
Although we rarely remember our nighttime reveries, they may hold the key to consciousness
By Christof Koch | Friday, October 29, 2010 | 24
If you have seen the recent Hollywood blockbuster Inception, a movie that does to dreaming what The Matrix did for virtual reality, you may have been holding your breath as Ariadne, an architecture student, folded the streets of Paris over herself like a blanket. This stunning sequence, an homage to M. C. Escher, is testimony to the bizarre nature of dreams. Watching it made the neuroscientist in me reflect on what dreams are and how they relate to the brain.
The first question is easy to answer. Dreams are vivid, sensorimotor hallucinations with a narrative structure. We experience them consciously—seeing, hearing and touching within environments that appear completely real (though curiously, we do not smell in our dreams). Nor are we mere passive observers: we speak, fight, love and run.
Dream consciousness is not the same as wakeful consciousness. We are for the most part unable to introspect—to wonder about our uncanny ability to fly or to meet somebody long dead. Only rarely do we control our dreams; rather things happen, and we go along for the ride.
Everyone dreams, including dogs, cats and other mammals. But sleep lab data reveal that people consistently underreport how often and how much. The reason is that dreams are ephemeral. Memory for dreams is very limited and largely restricted to the period before awakening. The only way to remember a dream is to immediately recall it on waking and then write it down or describe it to another person. Only then does its content become encoded in memory.
Although we often have trouble remembering dreams, our dreaming selves have full access to our pasts. In dreams we recall earlier episodes from our lives, and we often experience intense feelings of sadness, fear, anxiety or joy. Perhaps it was this heightened emotionality that led Sigmund Freud to speculate that dreams serve as wish fulfillment. Regardless, the answer to my second question—how and why does the brain manufacture dreams?—remains a fundamental mystery. But psychologists and brain scientists have recently renewed their interest in this everyday surreal activity.
Perchance to Dream
In 1953 Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago and his graduate student Eugene Aserinsky discovered that slumber, which had been considered a single continuous period of downtime, contains recurring periods in which the sleeper’s eyes move about, heartbeat and breathing become irregular, most voluntary muscles are paralyzed and brain activity (as measured by electroencephalography) is heightened. These fast, low-voltage brain waves resemble the ones that occur during wakefulness. This state became known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, to distinguish it from deep sleep.
When people are woken from REM sleep, they usually report vivid dreams. Such reports do not occur when people are roused from non-REM sleep. Thus arose the close association between REM sleep and the oneiric state. For many years experts associated dream consciousness with the distinct physiology of the brain during REM sleep.
But in the past several decades that understanding has begun to slowly shift. When people who are woken from deep sleep are asked “What was passing through your mind just before you woke up?” rather than the more biased “Have you been dreaming?” a more nuanced picture emerges.
In the early phases of deep sleep, and during short daytime naps, which consist of pure non-REM sleep, people report vivid hallucinations that are shorter, more static and more thoughtlike than the dreams that occur during REM sleep. These visions are typically more like snapshots than narratives and do not include a self. Yet a minority of non-REM dream reports are indistinguishable from REM dreams. It is also notable that sleepwalking and nightmares occur in deep, not REM, sleep. Thus, scientists have had to revise the belief that the REM state is an external manifestation of the subjective dream state.
Further evidence comes from the study of brain-damaged patients by neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. When a part of the brain stem known as the pons is destroyed, people no longer experience REM sleep. But only one in 26 of such patients reports a loss of dreaming, and nobody has ever reported loss of dreaming from limited pons damage.
The regions critical for dreaming are not in the pons. They include the visual and audiovisual regions in and near the temporoparietal-occipital junction in the neocortex. Destruction of small portions of these areas leads to the loss of specific dreaming dimensions. For example, a stroke, tumor or other calamity in the cortical region necessary for color or motion perception will leach hue or movement from dreams.
Moreover, medications that manipulate dopamine levels strongly affect dreaming while leaving the REM sleep cycle unaffected. L-dopa, the most popular medication for Parkinson’s disease, increases the frequency and vividness of dreams, whereas antipsychotic drugs that block dopamine reduce dreaming.
The dissociation of dreaming from REM sleep serves as a conceptual clearing of the deck for neuroscientists such as myself. Now we can focus on the neuronal causes of conscious mental activity, whether in a dreaming or wakeful state, without being confused by extraneous factors such as REM or non-REM sleep that, it turns out, do not pertain to subjective experience per se.
The Mind-Body Problem
Why am I so confident I experience anything while dreaming? Maybe I am unconscious while slumbering and confabulate my dreams when I awaken.
This is unlikely for many reasons. The bizarreness and vividness of dreams are distinct from normal experience and therefore unlikely to be “retrofitted.” Indeed, people with memory deficits do not report fewer dreams. Additionally, the length of dream reports correlates well with time elapsed in REM dreams.
More evidence comes from people with REM sleep behavior disorder, who lack the muscle paralysis, known as atonia, typical of REM sleep. They act out their dreams, sometimes even harming themselves or bed partners, and their actions match their dream reports. They might, for instance, move their legs while asleep and later report that they dreamed of walking.
Dreams are of great interest to the student of the mind-body problem, because they bear witness that the brain alone is sufficient to generate consciousness. We dream with eyes shut in the dark, disconnected from the outside world. The brain regions responsible for basic sensory perception are deactivated. Nor is behavior necessary, as we are motionless except for our breathing and eye movements. Thus, dreaming supports the old philosophical brain-in-the-vat idea that saw its modern renaissance in The Matrix.
Cognitive neuroscientists have recently learned to decode some simple mental states—in essence, a primitive form of mind reading. When scientists ask people to view one of two images—a portrait or a photograph of a house—or to imagine either a face or a house, they can tell from brain analyses which of the two the person is seeing or imagining.
Once such techniques become more sophisticated, they could be put to use in dream work, so that in addition to studying the physiology of the dreaming brain, investigators will be able to read out the content of the dream itself. Then neuroscience will be in a much better position to answer the age-old questions that have fascinated everyone from oracles and shamans to Freud and, more recently, science-fiction enthusiasts: Why do we dream, and what do dreams mean?
Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission
© 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Dream States: A Peek into Consciousness
Although we rarely remember our nighttime reveries, they may hold the key to consciousness
By Christof Koch | Friday, October 29, 2010 | 24
If you have seen the recent Hollywood blockbuster Inception, a movie that does to dreaming what The Matrix did for virtual reality, you may have been holding your breath as Ariadne, an architecture student, folded the streets of Paris over herself like a blanket. This stunning sequence, an homage to M. C. Escher, is testimony to the bizarre nature of dreams. Watching it made the neuroscientist in me reflect on what dreams are and how they relate to the brain.
The first question is easy to answer. Dreams are vivid, sensorimotor hallucinations with a narrative structure. We experience them consciously—seeing, hearing and touching within environments that appear completely real (though curiously, we do not smell in our dreams). Nor are we mere passive observers: we speak, fight, love and run.
Dream consciousness is not the same as wakeful consciousness. We are for the most part unable to introspect—to wonder about our uncanny ability to fly or to meet somebody long dead. Only rarely do we control our dreams; rather things happen, and we go along for the ride.
Everyone dreams, including dogs, cats and other mammals. But sleep lab data reveal that people consistently underreport how often and how much. The reason is that dreams are ephemeral. Memory for dreams is very limited and largely restricted to the period before awakening. The only way to remember a dream is to immediately recall it on waking and then write it down or describe it to another person. Only then does its content become encoded in memory.
Although we often have trouble remembering dreams, our dreaming selves have full access to our pasts. In dreams we recall earlier episodes from our lives, and we often experience intense feelings of sadness, fear, anxiety or joy. Perhaps it was this heightened emotionality that led Sigmund Freud to speculate that dreams serve as wish fulfillment. Regardless, the answer to my second question—how and why does the brain manufacture dreams?—remains a fundamental mystery. But psychologists and brain scientists have recently renewed their interest in this everyday surreal activity.
Perchance to Dream
In 1953 Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago and his graduate student Eugene Aserinsky discovered that slumber, which had been considered a single continuous period of downtime, contains recurring periods in which the sleeper’s eyes move about, heartbeat and breathing become irregular, most voluntary muscles are paralyzed and brain activity (as measured by electroencephalography) is heightened. These fast, low-voltage brain waves resemble the ones that occur during wakefulness. This state became known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, to distinguish it from deep sleep.
When people are woken from REM sleep, they usually report vivid dreams. Such reports do not occur when people are roused from non-REM sleep. Thus arose the close association between REM sleep and the oneiric state. For many years experts associated dream consciousness with the distinct physiology of the brain during REM sleep.
But in the past several decades that understanding has begun to slowly shift. When people who are woken from deep sleep are asked “What was passing through your mind just before you woke up?” rather than the more biased “Have you been dreaming?” a more nuanced picture emerges.
In the early phases of deep sleep, and during short daytime naps, which consist of pure non-REM sleep, people report vivid hallucinations that are shorter, more static and more thoughtlike than the dreams that occur during REM sleep. These visions are typically more like snapshots than narratives and do not include a self. Yet a minority of non-REM dream reports are indistinguishable from REM dreams. It is also notable that sleepwalking and nightmares occur in deep, not REM, sleep. Thus, scientists have had to revise the belief that the REM state is an external manifestation of the subjective dream state.
Further evidence comes from the study of brain-damaged patients by neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. When a part of the brain stem known as the pons is destroyed, people no longer experience REM sleep. But only one in 26 of such patients reports a loss of dreaming, and nobody has ever reported loss of dreaming from limited pons damage.
The regions critical for dreaming are not in the pons. They include the visual and audiovisual regions in and near the temporoparietal-occipital junction in the neocortex. Destruction of small portions of these areas leads to the loss of specific dreaming dimensions. For example, a stroke, tumor or other calamity in the cortical region necessary for color or motion perception will leach hue or movement from dreams.
Moreover, medications that manipulate dopamine levels strongly affect dreaming while leaving the REM sleep cycle unaffected. L-dopa, the most popular medication for Parkinson’s disease, increases the frequency and vividness of dreams, whereas antipsychotic drugs that block dopamine reduce dreaming.
The dissociation of dreaming from REM sleep serves as a conceptual clearing of the deck for neuroscientists such as myself. Now we can focus on the neuronal causes of conscious mental activity, whether in a dreaming or wakeful state, without being confused by extraneous factors such as REM or non-REM sleep that, it turns out, do not pertain to subjective experience per se.
The Mind-Body Problem
Why am I so confident I experience anything while dreaming? Maybe I am unconscious while slumbering and confabulate my dreams when I awaken.
This is unlikely for many reasons. The bizarreness and vividness of dreams are distinct from normal experience and therefore unlikely to be “retrofitted.” Indeed, people with memory deficits do not report fewer dreams. Additionally, the length of dream reports correlates well with time elapsed in REM dreams.
More evidence comes from people with REM sleep behavior disorder, who lack the muscle paralysis, known as atonia, typical of REM sleep. They act out their dreams, sometimes even harming themselves or bed partners, and their actions match their dream reports. They might, for instance, move their legs while asleep and later report that they dreamed of walking.
Dreams are of great interest to the student of the mind-body problem, because they bear witness that the brain alone is sufficient to generate consciousness. We dream with eyes shut in the dark, disconnected from the outside world. The brain regions responsible for basic sensory perception are deactivated. Nor is behavior necessary, as we are motionless except for our breathing and eye movements. Thus, dreaming supports the old philosophical brain-in-the-vat idea that saw its modern renaissance in The Matrix.
Cognitive neuroscientists have recently learned to decode some simple mental states—in essence, a primitive form of mind reading. When scientists ask people to view one of two images—a portrait or a photograph of a house—or to imagine either a face or a house, they can tell from brain analyses which of the two the person is seeing or imagining.
Once such techniques become more sophisticated, they could be put to use in dream work, so that in addition to studying the physiology of the dreaming brain, investigators will be able to read out the content of the dream itself. Then neuroscience will be in a much better position to answer the age-old questions that have fascinated everyone from oracles and shamans to Freud and, more recently, science-fiction enthusiasts: Why do we dream, and what do dreams mean?
Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission
© 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Sparks in Your Sleep
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND TM
Inspiration often seems to pop up unpredictably—in the shower, on a long walk or even at the grocery store. But one place I never expect it is during sleep. I tend to think of myself as a computer: at bedtime I power myself down with teeth brushing and pillow fluffing, and soon enough my brain switches off.
That analogy, however, is dead wrong. Your sleeping brain has simply entered an alternative mode of thinking, as psychologist Deirdre Barrett writes in “Answers in Your Dreams,” on page 26. With your eyes closed and limbs immobilized, your brain spins fanciful webs of ideas that your waking mind might have filtered out. In that rich environment, your creativity and problem-solving skills can blossom.
You can even sometimes steer the course of a dream. Along with the high entertainment value of, say, suddenly gaining the ability to fly, this control could prove useful for overcoming anxiety and other troubles, as psychologist Ursula Voss explains in “Unlocking the Lucid Dream,” on page 33.
Dreaming is not the only state the brain inhabits outside the boundaries of our awareness. Even when you sit quietly doing nothing, your brain bustles with activity. Groups of neurons continue to fire unbidden, forming patterns of activity that neuroscientists are now using to produce stunning maps of the mind. Scientific American Mind’s Ann Chin and I collaborated to bring you “Head Shots,” on page 42.
As you take in those colorful images, reflect for a moment on the marvel of your eyes—another example of how the brain works behind the scenes. When your eyes focus, they do not zero in on one spot: they actually dart around, using tiny subconscious movements called microsaccades. These motions keep your vision healthy, but they can also reveal your hidden desires, as Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik write in “Shifting Focus,” on page 48. Paradoxically enough, although we strive—and sometimes manage—to control our thoughts and actions, our brain of- ten seems to have a mind of its own.
Sandra Upson Managing Editor [email protected]
4 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND
© 2011 Scientific American
November/December 2011
Answers in Your Dreams
When you fall asleep, you enter an alternative state of consciousness—a time when true inspiration can strike
By Deirdre Barrett
As a young mathematician in the 1950s, Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was . . . trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled.
One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution. Nash explained how to solve it. Newman awoke realizing he had the answer! He spent the next several weeks turning the insight into a formal paper, which was then published in a mathematics journal.
Newman is hardly alone in making a practical breakthrough during a night of sleep. While dreaming, Friedrich August Kekulé came up with the structure of benzene, Dmitry Mendeleyev conjured up his final form of the periodic table of the elements and Otto Loewi thought of the neuroscience experiment that won him a Nobel Prize in medicine. Modern engineers Paul Horowitz and Alan Huang dreamed designs for laser-telescope controls and laser computing, respectively. Innumerable artists and film- makers have depicted images that came to them in their sleep. Mary Shelley dreamed the two main scenes that be- came Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson did the same with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul McCartney and Billy Joel all awoke to discover new tunes ringing in their minds. Mahatma Gandhi’s call for a nonviolent protest of British rule of India was inspired by a dream.
Yet dreams so often seem incoherent, bizarre or even trivial. We search in- tensely for our brother in an endless maze of corridors because we must give him a yellow package. But when we find him, we have forgotten the package— which we are certainly not holding any longer—and anyway he is now a neighbor, not a brother. Other dreams are ephemeral—we wake up thinking about a yellow box, but that is all we recall. For decades scientists have puzzled over how dreams could display such diverse characteristics. Research is beginning to suggest that dreams are simply thought in a different biochemical state. The physiological demands of sleep alter the way the brain functions. Dreams may seem bizarre or nonsensical because the chemistry of the sleeping brain affects how we perceive our own thoughts, but we nonetheless continue focusing on all the same issues that concern us while we are awake. This unusual state of consciousness is often a blessing for problem solving—it helps us find solutions outside our normal patterns of thought. By following a few simple steps, we can even harness this power, encouraging our sleeping brain to ruminate on particular concerns.
Anatomy of a Dream
One often hears the question, “What is dreaming for?” You would never pose such a simplistic query about waking thought. It is for everything.
Nevertheless, theorists have long offered one-function explanations for dreaming. Sigmund Freud believed that dreams primarily express repressed wishes, namely, infantile sexual and aggressive impulses. Other psychoanalysts thought they had more to do with narcissistic strivings or compensation for feelings of inferiority. More recently, psychologists have posited that dreams simulate threats or help to consolidate memories. All these theories characterize some dreams, but none of them can account for every type. Just as waking thought can drift between reminiscing, planning, rumination, and so on, dream cognition seems to encompass many modes of thought.
Most early theorists assumed that the dreams we remembered constituted all dreams. Several hypotheses supposed that people experienced dreams when some specific situation triggered a set of distinctive feelings—the desire for sex, say, or a bruised ego. In the 1950s, how- ever, a series of groundbreaking studies by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Klietman, both then at the University of Chicago, revealed that people have many more dreams than they are likely to remember. The two sleep researchers discovered that human slumber consists of approximately 90-minute cycles, each one containing a period of rapid eye movement (REM) and heightened brain activity—about as much activity as when we are awake. When the scientists awakened people near the end of each REM period, the sleepers recounted an average of almost five dreams per night. The discrepancy between the subjects’ reports when awakened right after the REM period, as opposed to later, led the scientists to conclude that dreams almost always accompany this stage of sleep even if none are recalled by morning.
Within the past two decades positron-emission tomography (PET) scans have allowed us to see which brain areas are involved in dreaming. Parts of the cortex associated with visual imagery and the perception of movement become activated even more dramatically than when we are awake, as do some deep brain areas associated with emotion. In contrast, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less engaged during dreaming; this area is associated with volitional action and the evaluation of what is logical and socially appropriate. These PET results fit the characteristics of dreams well; dream reports almost always contain visual imagery and often involve movement. The prefrontal findings fit neatly with the fact that dreams have long been associated with less “censorship”—not only in the Freudian sense of uninhibited sex and aggression but also in terms of filtering out scenarios that are illogical or abnormal. We will return to this point when discussing problem solving. Sometimes tackling a puzzle the “wrong” way can lead to surprising insights.
Evolutionary psychologists were quick to point out that this PET portrait of the dreaming brain makes sense because such activity would have supported human survival—certain areas of the brain are safer to turn on and off during sleep than others. Donald Symons, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued in his 1993 paper “The Stuff That Dreams Aren’t Made Of” that sleepers must monitor the environment with specific senses—to smell smoke, hear intruders, sense temperature changes and feel pain. Hallucinating vividly in those sensory modes might lead us to wake up frequently in an unnecessary panic, or, even worse, over a long period we might evolve a threshold of tolerance that would cause us to block our real warnings. Our eyes can be closed, however, as we do not need to monitor our visual environment during sleep. And our bodies can be paralyzed, as is normal during REM sleep, because we do not need to move—in fact, we should not move until we awaken.
Evolution, then, may help elucidate why certain brain areas are more or less active when we sleep. The pattern of activity explains why dreams have the characteristics they do—visually rich and logically loose. At first, these exciting physiological findings gave rise to a proliferation of theories that dreams were just an epiphenomenon, or side effect, of the brain patterns during slumber. Sleep researchers often referred to REM activity as “random,” although no evidence suggested it was any more random than waking brain activity. Many theorists leaped to pronounce dreams “explained.”
I reiterate: we would never dismiss waking thought so quickly. Knowing that our prefrontal cortex is active when we encounter a social prohibition does not explain away the subjective debate we experience when deciding how to respond. Likewise, describing a dream’s content or its associated brain activity does not answer the question of its purpose. Brain researchers finally grasped this fact after a two-decade lull and in the past few years have begun studying dreams seriously again.
Sleep on It
By the 1990s a growing body of research suggested that slumber is impor- tant for consolidating new learning: even very early studies had shown that sleep- ing for a while after learning something new results in much better recall than after spending the same amount of time awake. More recent findings hint at a special role for REM sleep in memory consolidation. Studies of rats learning to navigate mazes have found that during REM sleep, brain activity mimics that of the awake rodent training in the maze, which suggests that circuits may be rein- forced during REM sleep. In humans, too, research supports the role of REM sleep in memory. The more REM sleep subjects get after learning, the better they recall emotionally charged material [see “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work,” by Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen; Scientific American Mind, August/September 2008].
In 2009 psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, examined whether REM facilitated more than just memory when learning. They gave their subjects a test that required creative problem solving and then dropped hints about the answers. The subjects then spent some time either awake, in non-REM sleep only or in REM sleep before taking the test again. The REM sleep group showed the most improvement on their creative solutions to the previously presented problems.
The same year in Robert Stickgold’s lab at Harvard University, a team led by postdoctoral researcher Ina Djonlagic had subjects learn a complicated system of weather prediction. The students were shown a combination of images, each representing a probability of sun or rain. The students did not know the meaning of the images, but they attempted to figure them out through trial and error by predicting an overall chance of sun or rain and getting feedback on their answers. The researchers found that subjects who nodded off before doing the task again were more likely to discover the general rule behind the images’ meaning through an “aha!” type of i sight than those who stayed awake. In addition, their heightened performance, as well as their ability to explicitly articulate that they had grasped the general rule, was correlated with the amount of REM sleep they had gotten.
Further research confirms that REM sleep aids in problem solving. In a series of ongoing studies in the same Harvard lab, postdoctoral researcher Erin Wamsley asks subjects to navigate a virtual maze. After some practice, they get either a waking break, REM sleep or a non-REM sleep period. As Wamsley reported at the 2011 SLEEP conference, only REM sleep
sharpens participants’ performance. In addition, when she wakes or interrupts them to ask what they are thinking or dreaming, the theme is often the maze— but only when this thinking occurs in REM sleep do subjects fare better the next time they tackle the real maze.
Because REM sleep is the stage during which dreams occur, these sleep studies imply that dreaming might have something to do with creative problem solving. Mounting experimental evidence, as well as countless anecdotes of solutions that popped up during dreams, supports this idea.
The first study on dreams and objective problem solving was conducted more than a century ago. In 1892 Charles M. Child of Wesleyan University asked 186 college students whether they had ever addressed a problem in a dream. One third said they had. The students re- ported playing a chess game, solving an algebra problem, detecting a bookkeeping error and translating a passage from Virgil while slumbering.
The next major breakthrough came when researchers decided to try seeding people’s dreams with a specific problem. In 1972 sleep researcher William Dement of Stanford University asked 500 of his students to spend 15 minutes a night trying to solve brainteasers, making sure that they fell asleep with an unsolved problem on their mind. Students reported having 87 dreams, seven of which solved a brainteaser.
Such puzzles are a useful tool for testing creative problem solving because people are likely to get stuck before having an “aha!” moment of insight. Yet these brainteasers may be beyond the ability of some subjects, and they are also not of great personal import. In Dement’s study, which lasted three nights, all the correct answers came during the first night. He surmised that students lost motivation quickly on problems of little relevance to their lives. Therefore, in my own research in 1996, I took a different approach. I asked students to select their own objec- tive problem. They recorded their dreams for a week and noted the ones they thought addressed the issue or contained a satisfactory solution. Two research assistants also judged whether the dreams focused on or solved the problems.
Most of my subjects chose problems that appeared simpler than Dement’s brainteasers. Half of them had dreams they felt touched on their concern, and one third dreamed a solution to it. Judges rated only slightly fewer dreams as tackling or solving problems. Although a number of the problems had to do with homework or mundane tasks such as rearranging furniture, some of the most interesting solutions came up in dreams about major life decisions. For instance, this dilemma was rated as solved by both the dreamer and the judges:
Problem: I have applied to two programs in clinical psychology and two in industrial psychology because I can’t decide which field I want to go into.
Dream: There’s a map of the U.S., and 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’re right over, but he says that all of Massachusetts is very dangerous. The lights seemed to be farther west.
Solution: I woke up and realized that my two clinical schools are both in Massachusetts, where I have spent my entire life and where my parents live. Both industrial programs are far away, in 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 is a lot wrong with staying at home, and funny as it sounds, getting away is probably more important than which kind of program I go into.
A Portal to Creativity
The all-time most famous dream example— Kekulé realizing that the structure of benzene was a closed ring after dreaming of a snake made of atoms taking its tail in its mouth—illustrates the two distinctive features of problem solving in dreams. Recall that the brain areas that usually restrict our thinking to the logical and familiar are much less active during REM sleep. Many studies of creativity suggest that such disinhibition is a crucial component of creative thought [see “The Unleashed Mind,” by Shelley Carson; Scientific American Mind, May/June 2011]. Similarly, the high activity in the visual areas of the sleeping brain allows it to visualize solutions more readily than in waking thought. Kekulé had been stumped because all known molecules were straight lines with side chains, and he had assumed, wrongly, that benzene would follow suit.
My research confirms that dreamed solutions tend to have unusual visual characteristics. Through the late 1990s I scoured the existing literature on dreams, professional biographies and history books for examples of problem-solving dreams, and I queried working professionals as to whether they had ever had dreams that were useful in their jobs. Certain patterns emerged. Well over half of the visual artists said they had used dreams in their work. About half of fiction writers had. The numbers dropped off rapidly as the professions became more abstract. Within the sciences, inventors, engineers and others who benefit from visualizing problems in three dimensions were likelier to report helpful dreams. Some dreamers even had multiple examples of having awakened with a solution and had developed an explicit bedtime incubation routine.
In my present study, for which I reported preliminary results in June at the International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference, I investigated how dream-based problem solving might benefit working men and women more broadly. Professionals aged 21 to 69 at- tempted to solve real work-related problems in their sleep. These subjects seemed to dream about their problems with the same frequency as the college students I had observed in 1996; however, they reported less than half the number of solutions as compared with the students. The work-related problems may simply be more difficult than the college students’ dilemmas, and because this group is older, the subjects may not recall as many dreams. A significant number of them, however, report having a useful dream after only one week of incubation practice.
Your Dreams
Shortly after my book The Committee of Sleep was published in 2001, I heard Newman recount his story on a PBS show about John Nash and the film A Beautiful Mind. A year later I was unexpectedly seated next to Nash at a dinner party. I asked him about the incident, which he remembered well. “Don actually included a footnote thanking me in the paper,” Nash chuckled, “and he kept acting grateful, like I’d actually helped him when it was his dream.” I came across that remark often in my survey. Solutions frequently came from a dream character—one computer programmer got repeated nocturnal lessons from Albert Einstein—and people had trouble taking full credit for what their dreaming mind had done. This tendency fits brain findings for REM sleep in which the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with perceptions of volition, is less active.
But we need not wait passively for inspiration to strike. We spend almost a third of our lives asleep—and almost a third of that time dreaming. My research suggests that in a short amount of time, people can learn to focus their dreams on minor problems and often solve them [see "How to Train Your Dreams" below]. As for the bigger concerns, surveys find that all kinds of mysteries can be revealed in dreams—two Nobel Prizes resulted from dreams, after all. But even if you choose to leave your sleeping brain alone, pay attention: after nodding off, your brain in its altered state of consciousness is very likely already hard at work.
(The Author)
DEIRDRE BARRETT is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and author of the book The Committee of Sleep (Oneiroi, 2010).
___________________________________________________________________________
Further Reading:
◆ The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving—and How You Can Too. Deirdre Barrett. Crown (Random House), 2001.
◆ REM, Not Incubation, Improves Creativity by Priming Associative Networks.
D. J. Cai, S. A. Mednick, E. M. Harrison, J. C. Kanady and S. C. Mednick in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 106, No. 25, pages 10130– 10134; June 23, 2009.
◆ Sleep Enhances Category Learning. Ina Djonlagic et al. in Learning and Memory, Vol. 16, No. 12, pages 751–755; December 2009.
◆ Dreaming and Offline Memory Processing. Erin J. Wamsley and Robert Stickgold in Current Biology, Vol. 20, No. 23, pages R1010–R1013; December 7, 2010.
◆ The International Association for the Study of Dreams Web site: www.asdreams.org
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How to Train Your Dreams
Intentionally trying to dream about a particular problem, called dream incubation, increases the chance that you will come up with a solution. The term “incubation” was borrowed from ancient Greek practices at the temples of Asclepius. There the ill tried to have dreams that would tell them how to cure their malady. In Western psychology, here is how we harness our dreams:
6. At bedtime, picture yourself dreaming about the problem, awakening and writing on your bedside notepad.
7. Arrange objects connected to the problem on your night table or on the wall across from your bed. —D.B.
By Deirdre Barrett
As a young mathematician in the 1950s, Don Newman taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology alongside rising star and Nobel-laureate-to-be John Nash. Newman had been struggling to solve a particular math problem: “I was . . . trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t,” he recalled.
One night Newman dreamed that he was reflecting on the problem when Nash appeared. The sleeping Newman related the details of the conundrum to Nash and asked if he knew the solution. Nash explained how to solve it. Newman awoke realizing he had the answer! He spent the next several weeks turning the insight into a formal paper, which was then published in a mathematics journal.
Newman is hardly alone in making a practical breakthrough during a night of sleep. While dreaming, Friedrich August Kekulé came up with the structure of benzene, Dmitry Mendeleyev conjured up his final form of the periodic table of the elements and Otto Loewi thought of the neuroscience experiment that won him a Nobel Prize in medicine. Modern engineers Paul Horowitz and Alan Huang dreamed designs for laser-telescope controls and laser computing, respectively. Innumerable artists and film- makers have depicted images that came to them in their sleep. Mary Shelley dreamed the two main scenes that be- came Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson did the same with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ludwig van Beethoven, Paul McCartney and Billy Joel all awoke to discover new tunes ringing in their minds. Mahatma Gandhi’s call for a nonviolent protest of British rule of India was inspired by a dream.
Yet dreams so often seem incoherent, bizarre or even trivial. We search in- tensely for our brother in an endless maze of corridors because we must give him a yellow package. But when we find him, we have forgotten the package— which we are certainly not holding any longer—and anyway he is now a neighbor, not a brother. Other dreams are ephemeral—we wake up thinking about a yellow box, but that is all we recall. For decades scientists have puzzled over how dreams could display such diverse characteristics. Research is beginning to suggest that dreams are simply thought in a different biochemical state. The physiological demands of sleep alter the way the brain functions. Dreams may seem bizarre or nonsensical because the chemistry of the sleeping brain affects how we perceive our own thoughts, but we nonetheless continue focusing on all the same issues that concern us while we are awake. This unusual state of consciousness is often a blessing for problem solving—it helps us find solutions outside our normal patterns of thought. By following a few simple steps, we can even harness this power, encouraging our sleeping brain to ruminate on particular concerns.
Anatomy of a Dream
One often hears the question, “What is dreaming for?” You would never pose such a simplistic query about waking thought. It is for everything.
Nevertheless, theorists have long offered one-function explanations for dreaming. Sigmund Freud believed that dreams primarily express repressed wishes, namely, infantile sexual and aggressive impulses. Other psychoanalysts thought they had more to do with narcissistic strivings or compensation for feelings of inferiority. More recently, psychologists have posited that dreams simulate threats or help to consolidate memories. All these theories characterize some dreams, but none of them can account for every type. Just as waking thought can drift between reminiscing, planning, rumination, and so on, dream cognition seems to encompass many modes of thought.
Most early theorists assumed that the dreams we remembered constituted all dreams. Several hypotheses supposed that people experienced dreams when some specific situation triggered a set of distinctive feelings—the desire for sex, say, or a bruised ego. In the 1950s, how- ever, a series of groundbreaking studies by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Klietman, both then at the University of Chicago, revealed that people have many more dreams than they are likely to remember. The two sleep researchers discovered that human slumber consists of approximately 90-minute cycles, each one containing a period of rapid eye movement (REM) and heightened brain activity—about as much activity as when we are awake. When the scientists awakened people near the end of each REM period, the sleepers recounted an average of almost five dreams per night. The discrepancy between the subjects’ reports when awakened right after the REM period, as opposed to later, led the scientists to conclude that dreams almost always accompany this stage of sleep even if none are recalled by morning.
Within the past two decades positron-emission tomography (PET) scans have allowed us to see which brain areas are involved in dreaming. Parts of the cortex associated with visual imagery and the perception of movement become activated even more dramatically than when we are awake, as do some deep brain areas associated with emotion. In contrast, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is less engaged during dreaming; this area is associated with volitional action and the evaluation of what is logical and socially appropriate. These PET results fit the characteristics of dreams well; dream reports almost always contain visual imagery and often involve movement. The prefrontal findings fit neatly with the fact that dreams have long been associated with less “censorship”—not only in the Freudian sense of uninhibited sex and aggression but also in terms of filtering out scenarios that are illogical or abnormal. We will return to this point when discussing problem solving. Sometimes tackling a puzzle the “wrong” way can lead to surprising insights.
Evolutionary psychologists were quick to point out that this PET portrait of the dreaming brain makes sense because such activity would have supported human survival—certain areas of the brain are safer to turn on and off during sleep than others. Donald Symons, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued in his 1993 paper “The Stuff That Dreams Aren’t Made Of” that sleepers must monitor the environment with specific senses—to smell smoke, hear intruders, sense temperature changes and feel pain. Hallucinating vividly in those sensory modes might lead us to wake up frequently in an unnecessary panic, or, even worse, over a long period we might evolve a threshold of tolerance that would cause us to block our real warnings. Our eyes can be closed, however, as we do not need to monitor our visual environment during sleep. And our bodies can be paralyzed, as is normal during REM sleep, because we do not need to move—in fact, we should not move until we awaken.
Evolution, then, may help elucidate why certain brain areas are more or less active when we sleep. The pattern of activity explains why dreams have the characteristics they do—visually rich and logically loose. At first, these exciting physiological findings gave rise to a proliferation of theories that dreams were just an epiphenomenon, or side effect, of the brain patterns during slumber. Sleep researchers often referred to REM activity as “random,” although no evidence suggested it was any more random than waking brain activity. Many theorists leaped to pronounce dreams “explained.”
I reiterate: we would never dismiss waking thought so quickly. Knowing that our prefrontal cortex is active when we encounter a social prohibition does not explain away the subjective debate we experience when deciding how to respond. Likewise, describing a dream’s content or its associated brain activity does not answer the question of its purpose. Brain researchers finally grasped this fact after a two-decade lull and in the past few years have begun studying dreams seriously again.
Sleep on It
By the 1990s a growing body of research suggested that slumber is impor- tant for consolidating new learning: even very early studies had shown that sleep- ing for a while after learning something new results in much better recall than after spending the same amount of time awake. More recent findings hint at a special role for REM sleep in memory consolidation. Studies of rats learning to navigate mazes have found that during REM sleep, brain activity mimics that of the awake rodent training in the maze, which suggests that circuits may be rein- forced during REM sleep. In humans, too, research supports the role of REM sleep in memory. The more REM sleep subjects get after learning, the better they recall emotionally charged material [see “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work,” by Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen; Scientific American Mind, August/September 2008].
In 2009 psychologists at the University of California, San Diego, examined whether REM facilitated more than just memory when learning. They gave their subjects a test that required creative problem solving and then dropped hints about the answers. The subjects then spent some time either awake, in non-REM sleep only or in REM sleep before taking the test again. The REM sleep group showed the most improvement on their creative solutions to the previously presented problems.
The same year in Robert Stickgold’s lab at Harvard University, a team led by postdoctoral researcher Ina Djonlagic had subjects learn a complicated system of weather prediction. The students were shown a combination of images, each representing a probability of sun or rain. The students did not know the meaning of the images, but they attempted to figure them out through trial and error by predicting an overall chance of sun or rain and getting feedback on their answers. The researchers found that subjects who nodded off before doing the task again were more likely to discover the general rule behind the images’ meaning through an “aha!” type of i sight than those who stayed awake. In addition, their heightened performance, as well as their ability to explicitly articulate that they had grasped the general rule, was correlated with the amount of REM sleep they had gotten.
Further research confirms that REM sleep aids in problem solving. In a series of ongoing studies in the same Harvard lab, postdoctoral researcher Erin Wamsley asks subjects to navigate a virtual maze. After some practice, they get either a waking break, REM sleep or a non-REM sleep period. As Wamsley reported at the 2011 SLEEP conference, only REM sleep
sharpens participants’ performance. In addition, when she wakes or interrupts them to ask what they are thinking or dreaming, the theme is often the maze— but only when this thinking occurs in REM sleep do subjects fare better the next time they tackle the real maze.
Because REM sleep is the stage during which dreams occur, these sleep studies imply that dreaming might have something to do with creative problem solving. Mounting experimental evidence, as well as countless anecdotes of solutions that popped up during dreams, supports this idea.
The first study on dreams and objective problem solving was conducted more than a century ago. In 1892 Charles M. Child of Wesleyan University asked 186 college students whether they had ever addressed a problem in a dream. One third said they had. The students re- ported playing a chess game, solving an algebra problem, detecting a bookkeeping error and translating a passage from Virgil while slumbering.
The next major breakthrough came when researchers decided to try seeding people’s dreams with a specific problem. In 1972 sleep researcher William Dement of Stanford University asked 500 of his students to spend 15 minutes a night trying to solve brainteasers, making sure that they fell asleep with an unsolved problem on their mind. Students reported having 87 dreams, seven of which solved a brainteaser.
Such puzzles are a useful tool for testing creative problem solving because people are likely to get stuck before having an “aha!” moment of insight. Yet these brainteasers may be beyond the ability of some subjects, and they are also not of great personal import. In Dement’s study, which lasted three nights, all the correct answers came during the first night. He surmised that students lost motivation quickly on problems of little relevance to their lives. Therefore, in my own research in 1996, I took a different approach. I asked students to select their own objec- tive problem. They recorded their dreams for a week and noted the ones they thought addressed the issue or contained a satisfactory solution. Two research assistants also judged whether the dreams focused on or solved the problems.
Most of my subjects chose problems that appeared simpler than Dement’s brainteasers. Half of them had dreams they felt touched on their concern, and one third dreamed a solution to it. Judges rated only slightly fewer dreams as tackling or solving problems. Although a number of the problems had to do with homework or mundane tasks such as rearranging furniture, some of the most interesting solutions came up in dreams about major life decisions. For instance, this dilemma was rated as solved by both the dreamer and the judges:
Problem: I have applied to two programs in clinical psychology and two in industrial psychology because I can’t decide which field I want to go into.
Dream: There’s a map of the U.S., and 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’re right over, but he says that all of Massachusetts is very dangerous. The lights seemed to be farther west.
Solution: I woke up and realized that my two clinical schools are both in Massachusetts, where I have spent my entire life and where my parents live. Both industrial programs are far away, in 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 is a lot wrong with staying at home, and funny as it sounds, getting away is probably more important than which kind of program I go into.
A Portal to Creativity
The all-time most famous dream example— Kekulé realizing that the structure of benzene was a closed ring after dreaming of a snake made of atoms taking its tail in its mouth—illustrates the two distinctive features of problem solving in dreams. Recall that the brain areas that usually restrict our thinking to the logical and familiar are much less active during REM sleep. Many studies of creativity suggest that such disinhibition is a crucial component of creative thought [see “The Unleashed Mind,” by Shelley Carson; Scientific American Mind, May/June 2011]. Similarly, the high activity in the visual areas of the sleeping brain allows it to visualize solutions more readily than in waking thought. Kekulé had been stumped because all known molecules were straight lines with side chains, and he had assumed, wrongly, that benzene would follow suit.
My research confirms that dreamed solutions tend to have unusual visual characteristics. Through the late 1990s I scoured the existing literature on dreams, professional biographies and history books for examples of problem-solving dreams, and I queried working professionals as to whether they had ever had dreams that were useful in their jobs. Certain patterns emerged. Well over half of the visual artists said they had used dreams in their work. About half of fiction writers had. The numbers dropped off rapidly as the professions became more abstract. Within the sciences, inventors, engineers and others who benefit from visualizing problems in three dimensions were likelier to report helpful dreams. Some dreamers even had multiple examples of having awakened with a solution and had developed an explicit bedtime incubation routine.
In my present study, for which I reported preliminary results in June at the International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference, I investigated how dream-based problem solving might benefit working men and women more broadly. Professionals aged 21 to 69 at- tempted to solve real work-related problems in their sleep. These subjects seemed to dream about their problems with the same frequency as the college students I had observed in 1996; however, they reported less than half the number of solutions as compared with the students. The work-related problems may simply be more difficult than the college students’ dilemmas, and because this group is older, the subjects may not recall as many dreams. A significant number of them, however, report having a useful dream after only one week of incubation practice.
Your Dreams
Shortly after my book The Committee of Sleep was published in 2001, I heard Newman recount his story on a PBS show about John Nash and the film A Beautiful Mind. A year later I was unexpectedly seated next to Nash at a dinner party. I asked him about the incident, which he remembered well. “Don actually included a footnote thanking me in the paper,” Nash chuckled, “and he kept acting grateful, like I’d actually helped him when it was his dream.” I came across that remark often in my survey. Solutions frequently came from a dream character—one computer programmer got repeated nocturnal lessons from Albert Einstein—and people had trouble taking full credit for what their dreaming mind had done. This tendency fits brain findings for REM sleep in which the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with perceptions of volition, is less active.
But we need not wait passively for inspiration to strike. We spend almost a third of our lives asleep—and almost a third of that time dreaming. My research suggests that in a short amount of time, people can learn to focus their dreams on minor problems and often solve them [see "How to Train Your Dreams" below]. As for the bigger concerns, surveys find that all kinds of mysteries can be revealed in dreams—two Nobel Prizes resulted from dreams, after all. But even if you choose to leave your sleeping brain alone, pay attention: after nodding off, your brain in its altered state of consciousness is very likely already hard at work.
(The Author)
DEIRDRE BARRETT is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and author of the book The Committee of Sleep (Oneiroi, 2010).
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Further Reading:
◆ The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving—and How You Can Too. Deirdre Barrett. Crown (Random House), 2001.
◆ REM, Not Incubation, Improves Creativity by Priming Associative Networks.
D. J. Cai, S. A. Mednick, E. M. Harrison, J. C. Kanady and S. C. Mednick in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 106, No. 25, pages 10130– 10134; June 23, 2009.
◆ Sleep Enhances Category Learning. Ina Djonlagic et al. in Learning and Memory, Vol. 16, No. 12, pages 751–755; December 2009.
◆ Dreaming and Offline Memory Processing. Erin J. Wamsley and Robert Stickgold in Current Biology, Vol. 20, No. 23, pages R1010–R1013; December 7, 2010.
◆ The International Association for the Study of Dreams Web site: www.asdreams.org
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How to Train Your Dreams
Intentionally trying to dream about a particular problem, called dream incubation, increases the chance that you will come up with a solution. The term “incubation” was borrowed from ancient Greek practices at the temples of Asclepius. There the ill tried to have dreams that would tell them how to cure their malady. In Western psychology, here is how we harness our dreams:
- Write down your problem as a brief phrase or sentence and place this note next to your bed. Also keep a pen and paper— and perhaps a flashlight—alongside it.
- Review the problem for a few minutes before going to bed.
- Once in bed, visualize the problem as a concrete image,
if possible.
- Tell yourself you want to dream about the problem as you drift
off to sleep.
- On awakening, lie quietly before getting out of bed. Note whether you recall any trace of a dream and try to invite more of the dream to return. Write it down.
6. At bedtime, picture yourself dreaming about the problem, awakening and writing on your bedside notepad.
7. Arrange objects connected to the problem on your night table or on the wall across from your bed. —D.B.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND TM
Lucid Dreams Unlock Clues about Consciousness
Becoming aware of your sleeping self could relieve anxiety or tap the creative unconscious
By Ursula Voss
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In Brief
- Approximately eight out of 10 people have had a lucid dream, in which they were conscious of their dreaming, at least once.
- Parts of the brain tend to work together more intensely during lucid dreaming than in other dream phases.
- Lucid dreaming is useful for treating chronic nightmares and perhaps even anxiety.
I moved my eyes, and I realized that I was asleep in bed. When I saw the beautiful landscape start to blur, I thought to myself, “This is my dream; I want it to stay!” And the scene reappeared. Then I thought to myself how nice it would be to gallop through this landscape. I got myself a horse ... I could feel myself riding the horse and lying in bed at the same time.
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So recounted a test subject in the sleep laboratory at the University of Bonn in Germany. This particular sleeper was having a lucid dream, in which the dreamer recognizes that he or she is dreaming and can sometimes influence the course of the dream. By measuring the brain waves of lucid dreamers, my colleagues and I are gaining a better understanding of the neural processes underlying this state of consciousness that exists between sleep and waking. In addition to providing clues about the nature of consciousness, research on lucid dreams is also beginning to suggest new ways to treat anxiety and learn complex movements while asleep.
Waking Frequencies during Sleep
Most people report having a lucid dream at least once in their life, and a small fraction of us have them as often as once or twice a week. Some individuals even develop routines to increase their chances of having a lucid dream [see box on opposite page]. But researchers who wanted to study lucid dreams were long confounded by the need to rely on subjects’ self-reports. The process of recall is notoriously prone to distortion; for example, some people may confuse lucid dreams with the transient hallucinations that occur while falling asleep or waking up.
In 1975 sleep researcher Stephen LaBerge of Stanford University and his colleagues figured out a way to prevent such misinterpretation. Unlike the rest of the body, the eye and its movements are not inhibited during sleep. The researchers instructed subjects to move their eyes a certain way as soon as the sleepers recognized they were dreaming, for example, by rolling their eyes twice from left to right.
These signals are easily distinguished from the rapid eye movement (REM) that occurs randomly during regular dreams. We still use this method today.
After a sleeper has signaled with eye movements that a lucid dream has started, researchers can investigate the corresponding brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). In an EEG recording, electrodes attached to the skin of the head pick up the oscillating electrical sig- nals that indicate that thousands or millions of neurons are firing in synchrony. Recent studies indicate that the brain’s activity during lucid dreaming resembles that of waking consciousness.
In 2009 my team and I decided to take a closer look at the brain activity of lucid dreamers. In the sleep laboratory, we found what we believe to be an electrical signature of lucid dreaming—increased activity in the 40-hertz range (the “gamma band”), primarily in the frontal lobe, located behind the forehead. We tend to generate these high-frequency waves when we concentrate on a particular object. In addition to the frontal lobe, other regions of the cerebral cortex—the rippled mantle on the surface of the brain—play a major role in lucid dreaming. The frontal lobe seems to work in lucid dreams much as it does in the waking state, whereas areas in the parietal and temporal lobes exhibit patterns more typical of REM sleep.
Another striking feature in our study involved coherence—a rough measure of how coordinated the activity is in various areas of the brain. Coherence is generally slightly decreased in REM sleep, but not during lucid dreams. Think of the brain’s activity during REM sleep as equivalent to a party with all the guests talking simultaneously. In lucid dreams, however, the party guests tend to converse with one another, and the overall background noise decreases.
Beyond Fantasies
Until recently, most experts thought of lucid dreaming as a curiosity—a fun way to act out wishful thinking about flying or meeting celebrities. But recent research has uncovered practical uses for lucid dreams. Chronic nightmare sufferers often find their only source of relief is learning how to take control of their dreams. A study in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in October 2006 found that those who learned how to increase their frequency of lucid dreams reported fewer awful dreams afterward, although the exact mechanism underlying the relief is unclear. Perhaps becoming aware during a bad dream allows sufferers to distance themselves emotionally from the dream’s content. Some people may
even become so adept at lucid dreaming that they are able to keep themselves from imagining frightening disaster scenarios while they are asleep.
In theory, lucid dreams could help alleviate generalized anxiety or the reaction to specific fear stimuli in everyday life (for instance, spiders) by allowing people to confront worries and frights in the safe environment afforded by knowing “it’s just a dream.” More research is needed to test this application.
Beyond therapeutic applications, lucid dreaming may also facilitate the learning of complicated movement sequences. In dreams, we are all capable of unusual actions. We can fly, walk through walls or make objects disappear. According to sports psychologist Daniel Erlacher of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, athletes can internalize complex motor sequences, such as those needed in the high jump, more quickly after targeted lucid-dream training.
Regular dreams have been shown to be involved in problem solving, so some researchers have asked if lucid dreams could be useful in focusing the dreamer’s mind. A small study last year at Liverpool John Moores University in England suggests that lucid dreams are good for creative endeavors such as inventing metaphors but not for more rational exercises such as solving brainteasers. The lucid dreamers in the study were instructed to summon a “guru” figure, a wise character to serve as a kind of guide. Indeed, some of the subjects found their dream characters to be surprisingly helpful.
We still have much to learn about lucid dreaming. For example, we do not know under what circumstances these dreams appear most frequently or how to induce them more reliably. Once we do, we may finally harness these unique dreams’ healing power and gain insight into the nature of consciousness. Lucid dreaming’s potential for therapy, problem solving or pure entertainment could be limitless.
(Further Reading)
◆ Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life. Stephen LaBerge. Sounds True, Inc., 2009.
◆ Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-lucid Dreaming. Ursula Voss, Romain Holzmann, Inka Tuin and J. Allan Hobson in Sleep, Vol. 32, No. 9, pages 1191– 1200; September 2009.
◆ An Exploratory Study of Creative Problem Solving in Lucid Dreams: Preliminary Findings and Methodological Considerations. Tadas Stumbrys and Michael Daniels in International Journal of Dream Research, Vol. 3, No. 2,
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Am I Dreaming?
Lucid dreams cannot be willfully induced, but you can increase the likelihood that you will have one. People who practice these techniques regularly are able to have one or two lucid dreams per week.
- Throughout each day, ask yourself repeatedly if you are awake. When this habit becomes ingrained, you may find yourself asking the question in a dream—at which point your chances of realizing you are dreaming skyrocket.
- Make a point to look in a mirror or reread a bit of text every so often as a “reality check.” In dreams, our appearance is often altered and the written word is notoriously hard to pin down. You may carry the habit of checking for these dream signs into sleep, where they could alert you to the fact that you are dreaming.
- Keep a dream journal by the bed and jot down the dreams you remember immediately on waking. Studies show that this practice makes you more aware of your dreams in general, and people who are more aware of their dreams are more likely to have a lucid dream.
- Before falling asleep,focus intently on the fantasy you hope to experience in as much detail as possible. Research shows that “incubating” an idea just before bed dramatically increases the likelihood that you will dream about it. And if you suddenly notice that you are dancing with the movie star you hoped to meet, you might just realize you are having a dream and be able to take control of what happens next.
www.ScientificAmerican.com/Mind
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