Time Loops
Page 27
But while dreams contain tantalizing bits of our recent daily life—Freud’s “day residues”—they seldom if ever replay experiences of the previous day in any literal fashion, and their surreal quality (or “bizarreness”) has always frustrated scientists’ attempt to link the content of dreams to the formation of new memories. But in 2013, a psychologist named Sue Llewellyn hit on a colorful and inspiring answer. She did so by venturing out of the science stacks into the alien world of the humanities and ancient history, unifying the available neurobiology of sleep and memory with insights drawn from the study of the ancient “art of memory” used by orators in pre-Gutenberg and preliterate times. 18 To link to-be-remembered new information to older contents of their memory, practitioners of this art playfully used puns, analogies, and substitution to create bizarre and memorable mnemonic images. Llewellyn suggested that dreams are essentially the ancient art of memory operating automatically while we sleep. 19
Memory seems to work on multiple levels in the brain. The circuit level (multiple interlinked neurons and circuits, involvement of distinct brain areas like the hippocampus, amygdala, and so on) is best understood because it unfolds at a scale that puts it within the granularity of existing research tools. On this level, we can see how “memories” are encoded in the brain physically as the readiness of dispersed groups of neurons to fire together again having fired together in the past (i.e., Hebbian learning—“neurons that fire together, wire together”). Again, long-term potentiation (and its opposite, long-term depression) reflects the constant forging of new connections between neurons and the updating of the weights of existing connections—the readiness of synapses to transmit signals, based on their (prior) history of signal transmission.
According to the mnemonic theory, dreams are the experience of this nightly re-updating of neural connectivity via the triggering of associations around recent experiences in waking life—Hebbian learning at work. Specifically, Llewellyn argues that a dream scene represents a junction retained in the hippocampus, drawing together disparate associations to encode an autobiographical (episodic) memory. Instead of a “junction,” a dream could also be thought of as an associative halo around a salient experience from your day. The experience itself generally will not be represented because the brain does not need to replay that. What it needs to do is connect that experience to other experiences and themes so that it is accessible later via multiple associative pathways, and thus better integrated into long-term memory.
It makes beautiful sense of the weird characteristic of dreams that has long beguiled dreamers: that they seem so closely related to profound concerns and experiences in our waking lives, yet leave those concerns and experiences precisely unrepresented, like a blank at their heart. It is what naturally led the suspicious Freud to think that dreams were specifically hiding something, like spies smuggling letters past checkpoint guards, cloaking their “true meaning” in symbolism. He was probably incorrect in this assumption, but at the same time, the mnemonic theory explains why Freud’s innovative method of free association—saying the first thing or two that a given dream element reminds the dreamer of—is helpful when interpreting a dream. Free associating on a dream’s elements, as Freud showed with his Irma example, quickly produces a wealth of coherent references to recent experiences and concerns in the dreamer’s life, and often the disparate elements in a single dream “point” to the same window or timeframe in waking life, as though the dream is indeed an “art of memory”-style bundle of associations to that narrow window of time. 20 Waking experiences that feed into a dream are seldom more than one degree removed from the bizarre narrative a dreamer will remember on waking. But unless it occurs to the dreamer to free associate on each dream element—unpacking the various puns and other substitutions—that “latent content” will remain mostly or wholly obscure, and the dream will just seem like some baffling and inscrutable message from God-knows-where.
The correspondence between the mnemonic hypothesis and Freud’s theory is close in other ways too. The techniques used by ancient orators to remember speeches and books—puns, absurd juxtapositions and substitutions, vivid and dramatic narratives, and so on—happen to precisely match the tropes that Freud described under his rubrics of “condensation,” “displacement,” and “dramatization.” If dreams are art-of-memory-style associative halos around waking events, it makes sense of why these should be so prevalent in dreams. It also makes sense of why dreams so often contain sexual imagery. One of the trade secrets of medieval and modern mnemonists was making memory images as dirty as possible, because sexy images are easily remembered. 21
Dreaming could thus really be described as the nightly metabolism of waking experience by the brain, analogous to the metabolism of food by the digestive system. What Freud thought were symbolic disguises hiding some deep dark secret were really the associative connective tissue of long-term memory, the way recent events are made more accessible and findable by connecting both logically and illogically to things they remind us of. Without knowing it, Freud was really a pioneer in memory research, mapping out the illogical, poetic tropes our brain uses to file and retrieve information. 22 The idea that dreams often represent some satisfying situation or wish is not incompatible with such a view, although even Freud came to admit this was not a universal rule. The mnemonic view, however, omits any need for a “censor” to “repress” unwanted thoughts.
Llewellyn’s mnemonic hypothesis is the most satisfying functional account of dreaming yet offered by a mainstream scientist. It restores color and meaning to dreaming without losing sight of the neurobiological mechanisms. One dream researcher, commenting in Psychology Today , remarked on the irony that it took an outsider to the field of sleep and dream research (Llewellyn teaches at the University of Manchester’s Business School) to weave together those disparate threads from C. P. Snow’s sundered worlds into such a compelling account of dreaming. 23 But the sour jingle of those invisible keys was also to be heard. The eminent Hobson, in one of numerous professional responses published with her article, praised the elegance and originality of her hypothesis but challenged her to design an experiment that could actually be used to test it, adding that he himself could not imagine one. He specifically forbade any form of “anecdotal self-analysis”—providing examples of one’s own dreams and demonstrating how they support the theory (the standard move in psychoanalytic writing)—and declared that “we must not tolerate neo-Freudianism, no matter how brilliant.” 24
As long as one-sided authorities like Hobson control the playing field, the study of dreams will remain at an impasse. If meaning’s sinews are as idiosyncratic and private as Freudian psychoanalysis presumes (and as working experience with mnemonic techniques also affirms), it would indeed be virtually impossible to design a rigorous experiment to adequately test Llewellyn’s hypothesis. So, unless and until psychological scientists can bring themselves to trust individuals’ meaning-claims, they may be doomed to forever circle that streetlight when it comes to dreams, which are among the most personal and private experiences in our lives. If precognition centers on meaningful personal experiences, it faces the same challenge. We cannot make progress without trusting—however cautiously and critically—those dreaded anecdotes.
Symbolism Versus Obliquity
All of which leads to the obvious—and at this point, obviously rhetorical—question: If dreams do represent a process of recent experiences being accessioned by the brain, could they be doing the same thing with future experiences? If we trust even some of the evidence for precognitive dreaming provided by Dunne and many other writers, the answer seems to be yes. It looks very much like neuronal networks might be being reinforced and conditioned not only by their past history of signaling but also, to some as-yet-undetermined degree, by their future history. Viewing this as a normal function of the brain—the brain’s nightly metabolism of future as well as past time—suggests why precognitive dreaming may potentially be much more common than even D
unne thought. If the function of a dream is to update our memory-search system by triggering associations to “new” material, it could be that, as often as not, it is future experiences that are the “absent center” of a dream. 25
This is where the analogy to the digestive system breaks down, of course. As far as we know, the stomach at night is not digesting tomorrow’s breakfast, let alone a breakfast I might eat several years from now. The brain may be far, far weirder (or wyrd-er) than the stomach.
Although Dunne did not see any conflict between precognition and wish-fulfillment in dreams, he largely ignored the Freudian idea that a dream’s surface content consists mainly of symbols and substitutions and compromises among warring desires—an idea that is readily carried over into the mnemonic theory. Nor did Dunne bother to scratch below the surface of his dreams in search of thoughts or feelings in relation to future events that may have been represented obliquely in them. He was content to look for obvious resemblances of dream motifs to waking experiences, and he imagined, like many laypeople, that free association is a difficult or esoteric exercise. Consequently, he noted that people are unlikely to recognize most precognitive content (or any kind of meaningful content for that matter) because of dreams’ associative logic:
The difficulty of remembering is easily overcome; but the difficulty of associating proves in some cases insurmountable. It is always hard to discover in the average dream any incident which is clearly related to a chronologically definite past waking event, and some people’s dreams are far too complex to allow such connections to be traced. It is obvious that persons thus handicapped would find it equally impossible to discover in their dreams any clear suggestion of precognition. 26
More recent investigators of precognitive dreaming have also typically not gone beyond the level of manifest content (as Freud termed the dream’s surface-level narrative and images), focusing instead on immediately obvious relations of dream elements to things seen or encountered later in waking life. In their experiments with precognitive dreaming, Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman, and Charles Honorton had independent judges assess the similarity of their psychic subject’s dream descriptions to target scenarios (based on randomly selected paintings) without delving into the dreamer’s private and personal associations or attending to possible symbols or Freudian tropes. 27 Dale E. Graff, who directed the U.S. military’s Star Gate remote viewing program, went on to write two very interesting memoirs about his experiences as well as his personal experiments in precognitive dreaming; in his experiments, he routinely obtained many close matches between dream scenes and newspaper photographs or cartoons—although, since he focuses mainly on visual forms (per standard remote-viewing methods), he has not ventured too deeply into dream symbolism. 28 In an effort to scientifically analyze a huge database of 11,850 of his own dream scenes, many of which he identified as precognitive, film and video game CG artist Andrew Paquette claimed to find a relative in frequency of unambiguous symbols in his dreams, especially those that had veridical precognitive content. 29 On the other hand, a recent writer named Bruce Siegel, replicating Dunne’s experiment in his own life and finding that just over a quarter of his 241-dream sample appeared to be precognitive, noted that his dreams very often used the same tropes—metaphor, substitution, wordplay, etc.—that would be familiar to a psychoanalyst (and that can be glossed, for convenience, as symbolism). 30
Psychoanalytically informed parapsychologists have demonstrated that apparent precognitive dreams not only may be subject to the same kinds of contortions and distortions Freud described but may express the same types of divided feeling and emotional complexity. 31 In his 1982 book Paranormal Foreknowledge , Jule Eisenbud provides many examples of what could be called typical Dunne dreams, appearing to match something the patient was about to read in the newspaper or encounter the next day, along with the kind of richly layered (sometimes uncomfortably detailed) commentary that is typical of Freudian case studies. Eisenbud regarded precognitive elements in such dreams as serving the dream’s purpose: fulfilling a repressed wish. But it is easy to reframe the cases he presents in terms of the newer mnemonic hypothesis. What seems like a dream “collecting precognitive bricks” to fulfill a wish can generally be redescribed as a dream about the complex thoughts and emotions that will be triggered by a later, unsettling learning experience in the dreamer’s life. There is not too big a gap between the two theories: If precognition focuses on a person’s future conscious thoughts in response to some experience, those future thoughts may still often be “wishful.”
For example, a female patient with a distinctly “Oedipal” pattern of self-inhibition and frustrating relationships with older men had a dream involving her roommate, who had just become engaged to a man the patient herself had previously dated.
Shortly after the engagement was announced, the roommate, who had been visiting her parents’ home in the east, took a plane to join her fiancé in the Midwest. On the eve of her flight the patient dreamed that the plane crashed and that her roommate was killed. The roommate’s plane did not crash, but a later one out of the same city the next day did, and many lives were lost. The crash occurred several hours after my patient reported her dream to me. 32
Following standard Freudian theory, this dream appears to Eisenbud as the use of psi-acquired information (an imminent fatal plane crash out of the same city her roommate was in) to help represent an unconscious wish about the death of the roommate, who was a rival for a man’s affections. In light of the mnemonic theory, we might flip this and say that the dream was pre -presenting a “what if” that would naturally have occurred to the dreamer upon learning of a fatal plane crash out of that city. Note that whereas Eisenbud would assume the death wish to be a thought that already existed (but was repressed) in the patient’s unconscious, and that seized on a convenient future brick to represent itself in the dream, I am proposing that the dreamer simply precognized a thought or mental image she would consciously, albeit perhaps fleetingly, have the next day on hearing of the disaster.
Another of Eisenbud’s patients reported a dream of being smothered in a landslide, “a vast roaring avalanche of mud and rock,” 33 from which he awoke in terror, quickly realizing to his relief that the dream had been triggered by his wife flushing the toilet. First thing the next morning, though, he read in the paper about a man and boy tragically being buried alive under 20 tons of coal in a coal hopper accident. Eisenbud suggests that the patient was using this bit of psi-acquired data to represent his “anal” anxieties, his wife’s flushing of the toilet acting as a kind of nucleus “attracting” information appearing in the next day’s news to help express those anxieties. But it could just as easily be supposed that the toilet flush “preminded” him of the disturbing reading experience the next morning about people being buried in black muck—a kind of prime in reverse (like in the temporally inverted priming experiments of Daryl Bem). The real source and subject of the dream might have been relief that this muck-burial happened to someone else and not him. As we will see in the next chapter, the main message “sent back” from future learning experiences about disasters and deaths seems to be the rewarding thought “but I survived.” Another possibility for the previous dream about the plane crash, too, is that it was not really about a death wish for the roommate so much as thoughts of personal survival provoked by news of a disaster befalling or “nearly” befalling someone close to the dreamer.
I propose that Dunne, in his comment about dreams collecting future bricks to build a wish-fulfilling edifice, was nearly right, but that we should reverse his formulation: A precognitive dream uses past and present bricks to pre-present (or, per the mnemonic hypothesis, simply associate to or perhaps “encode”) a future thought . That is to say, a dream should be interpreted from the temporal vantage point not of the dream itself but from the future point at which the dreamer will have those thoughts consciously, in waking life (as well as, in rare cases, realize that those thoughts/experiences supply
the meaning of that remembered dream). Often there isn’t too much time delay—a matter of hours or minutes, or even seconds in some cases 34 —but there are plenty of examples in which years or decades pass before the experience that “makes sense” of an old dream. Vladimir Nabokov’s dream of “Harry and Kuvyrkin” comes to mind, and we will see further examples. Once again, what Freud naturally took as evidence of an off-stage or submerged unconscious agency, harboring secret thoughts that must take nightly symbolic form to escape a censor, may really just be future conscious thoughts associatively pre-presented at some earlier point in time.
Let’s apply this idea to some well-documented dreams that we have already encountered in this book, to see how it adds to our understanding.
Less Guilty by a Factor of 10
First, we can revisit Dunne’s most well-known disaster dream, about the eruption of Mont Pelée. Commentators naturally tend to focus on the eruption (which, we should note, does not actually happen in the dream) and his death toll closely matching the headline but not the reality. They seldom comment on the “bureaucratic nightmare” sequence, in which Dunne’s dream-self tried to save all those lives but could get no one to believe his warnings. This part of the dream may have related to thoughts the soldier would naturally have had in response to the strange experience of reading about the eruption in the newspaper, having just dreamed of it.