Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep

by David K. Randall

  The discovery that dreams are often negative perked the interest of neurologists. Why would we have dreams if most of them tended to be unhappy? Are our brains depressed novelists? The answer, some said, comes from imagining the purpose of dreaming in the context of evolution. In a 2009 paper, a Finnish cognitive scientist named Antti Revonsuo argued that negative, anxiety-filled dreams were simply an ancient defense mechanism, letting us experience bad things in order to train our brains to react in case something similar happened while we are awake. Dreams, in this view, are the brain’s dress rehearsals. For evidence, Revonsuo pointed to data collected by Hall in which the dreamer is running away from something or being attacked. “Because adaptations presumably require hundreds of generations to change, currently living individuals still carry those adaptations that were designed to work in the ancestral environment, regardless of whether the adaptations serve their original functions in the radically different modern setting,” Revonsuo wrote. In other words, our ancient ancestors likely had negative dreams before a planned hunt or battle. Today, dreaming of getting attacked is how the brain prepares for the anxiety of a big sales presentation at work, and there is nothing we can do about it.

  A problem with this theory is that not all unpleasant dreams are of the I-am-being-chased variety. Take, for instance, the dreams of a man named Ed, who kept a journal of his dreams about his wife, Mary, for twenty-two years after her death. Ed and Mary met on a boardwalk in 1947, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-two. She died of ovarian cancer three decades later. When Ed dreamed about Mary after she was gone, the plot often followed the same theme: Ed and Mary started off happily engaged in an activity before something happened that split them apart. Sometimes the stories were full of cinematic images. In one dream, for instance, Ed sees Mary sitting in a car across the road, but he can’t find a way to reach her. At other times, Ed’s dreams introduced absurd elements into vignettes of everyday life, such as the time when Ed and Mary bump into Jerry Seinfeld and ask him for directions. Before Ed knows it, Seinfeld has walked away with Mary, and Ed has been left alone. Ed goes behind a building to brood, where the ground beneath him turns into quicksand. Individually, all of the elements of the dream are recognizable from daily life. But add them together, and there isn’t a clear and present danger the brain is preparing for.

  I am able to tell you the details of Ed’s dreams because of G. William Domhoff, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who collected dream journals alongside Calvin Hall and made their vast collection available to other researchers in the early 1990s. As he read countless accounts of dreams, Domhoff began to see that most people had dreams like Ed, featuring the same situations and characters for years on end. With enough reports from any one person, Domhoff argued, the stories in the dreams can give an accurate reading of the dreamer’s concerns, all without having to resort to Freud’s idea of interpreting symbols. Just look at Ed, he said. He had recurring dreams in which he was separated from the love of his life for two decades after her death. It doesn’t take an analyst’s couch to realize that he missed her.

  I spent a sunny afternoon with Domhoff in Santa Cruz, sitting in a Yogurt Delite on the Pacific Coast Highway and talking about dreams. “None of Freud’s claims are true by any of our standards today,” Domhoff said, dipping his spoon into his yogurt. “If you look at dreams—if you really look at them like we have—then you see that it’s all there, out in the open. You don’t need any of these symbols.” He went on. “Freudians got all caught up in the idea that there were hidden meanings to our dreams. But their interpretations only worked because we share a system of figurative language and metaphor.”

  As an example, he had me imagine that I had a fairly straightforward dream. “Let’s say you have this dream that you are on a bridge to an island and then the bridge starts to shake and then you run back. Now what would you say if I asked, ‘Now, what do you suppose that bridge is a symbol of?’ ”

  “I don’t know,” I said, with my mouth full of yogurt.

  “But you do,” Domhoff replied. “You have a metaphor system. You’ll ‘cross that bridge when you come to it.’ It’s a transition. So I say that you’re in the midst of a transition. But we’re all in the midst of some sort of transition in our lives. Then I can say that the dream means that you are afraid to take the next step. You want to stay with solid land instead of going onto the island. It all makes sense because I’ve assumed that the dream is metaphoric and I’m giving you a metaphoric interpretation. If I stay very general all of this works. Now that I know a little bit more about you, I can guess and get more specific. I can say that the island means that you’re writing a book and going out on your own. I’ve got a plausible interpretation. But really I’m just a fortune-teller going from a lot of clues.”

  Looking at a history of a single person’s dreams reveals that the brain doesn’t construct such clear metaphors, he said. Instead, dreams are filled with images and settings that are familiar. If a woman dreams about walking over a bridge, it is more likely that she literally crosses a bridge during her daily commute, or that she can see one from her window at home, than that her brain has decided to broadcast her emotions using figurative images.

  Freud, on the other hand, thought that a stranger dream signified a deeper meaning. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he argued that “dreams are often their most profound when they seem the most crazy” because they were more densely packed with symbols to unlock. I asked Domhoff how, even if they don’t happen as often, seemingly surreal dreams, such as of flying or getting trapped in a strange room, could possibly serve as a mirror to our daily lives and concerns.

  He decided to answer my question with a story. One woman who sent him her dreams gave herself the code name Melora. Hall and Domhoff had asked the subjects to obscure their name before contributing to the dream bank. Melora, for those who don’t know, is the name of a character from a well-known episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a television show that ran in the mid-1990s. Domhoff’s subject chose the code name because she was a big-time Trekkie who loved reading science fiction. On a less pleasant note, she was also a mother going through a divorce. In most of her dreams, she is concerned about her child or she is spending time with her ex-husband, doing such routine things as hiking together or spending a holiday at his parents’ house. But every once in while, she is charging through the cosmos. “Sure, sometimes she has a fantastic adventure, but she lives in that world because of her enormous amount of reading and love of science fiction,” Domhoff said. Just like work or family, Star Trek was another part of her life that showed up in her dreams. Trying to parse the meaning of why one of Melora’s dreams took place aboard a spacecraft and another took place in her office couldn’t tell you anything, Domhoff said. But, taken in context of hundreds of other dreams, the small number of intergalactic dreams reflected the fact that science fiction was important to her. The things that you care about are the things that you dream about.

  That is not to say that Domhoff thinks there are great meanings or evolutionary advantages lurking in dreams that have yet to be discovered. Dreams are just “an accidental by-product of our ability to think and have an autobiographical memory,” he said matter-of-factly. We dream about negative things, in Domhoff’s opinion, simply because we spend a lot of time worrying. The easiest way to see this in your own life is to start a new job. For the first week or so, there is a good chance that your new commute, new coworkers, or new responsibilities will take center stage in your dreams. In many of these dreams, you will probably disappoint yourself or others in some way. Students during the first week of school often dream about getting lost on their way to class, for instance, while waiters dream about dropping food or spilling wine down a customer’s shirt. “Dreams are worst-case scenarios that reflect what we think about every day,” Domhoff said. “We take all these little could-be’s and we blow them up.” In real life, that is what our minds do with many of our problems, anyway.
Dreams could be the manifestations of the brain taking our anxieties and running with them because there is nothing else competing for its attention in the middle of the night.

  Ernest Hartmann, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, agrees with Domhoff that the content of dreams matters, but with a slight twist. Hartmann sees dreams as a form of built-in nocturnal therapy. In dreams, he says, the mind takes what is new or bothersome and blends it into what the brain already knows, making the new information seem less novel or threatening. In what I have unscientifically come to think of as the Well-Adjusted Caveman Theory, Hartmann argues that the life of early man was filled with the kind of traumas—watching friends gored by animals with sharp tusks or fall through holes in the ice and drown, just to give you two possibilities—that few people experience today. Those who were able to regain their emotional balance after living through a traumatic event were more likely to survive over the long run than those who dwelled on the negative.

  As evidence of this theory, Hartmann points to the fact that the mind has a tendency to replay scary or harrowing experiences in dreams almost exactly as they happened in real life for several nights after the event. It is not exactly impartial to judge the validity of a theory by your own experience, but this point resonates with me. The summer after college, I was on a rural one-lane dirt road in the woods of Northern California, riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s Mustang, when a white Bronco sped around a blind turn right in front of us. The Bronco swerved to the left to avoid a head-on collision, but it wasn’t quick enough. It rumbled over the hood of our car like a monster truck, missing my seat by inches. We were lucky. I wasn’t hurt, and my friend walked away with only a broken arm. The car, however, was practically totaled. For the next week or so, I woke up sweating from nightmares of still being stuck in that passenger seat, watching as the Bronco’s tires grew menacingly larger amid the sound of crumpling metal.

  I don’t remember exactly how long it took to have a dream that wasn’t about the accident, but the nightmares eventually went away and never amounted to anything more than a couple nights of poor sleep. For some people, however, the brain gets stuck replaying traumas, like a band that knows only one song. When the brain fails to set aside the event in its long-term memory—a move that researchers see as a sign that the emotional system has come to accept what happened and can now put it into perspective—a person may experience recurring nightmares, which is one of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some grow to fear sleep.

  Since at least the Vietnam War, when more than one in five combat veterans returned home with chronic nightmares, drugs have been the main line of defense against a brain stuck in a cycle of bad dreams. But there may be a better way. Doctors currently think it is possible to train the brain to dream about other subjects and characters, in a sense rewriting the stories that we tell ourselves each night. One promising technique is called imagery rehearsal therapy, a two-step process in which patients first describe the traumatic event or person that continues to reappear in their nightmares. Then, they choose a situation or image to replace it. Before going to sleep, patients spend at least ten minutes thinking about the dream they want to have, positioning themselves as the director of the show rather than an audience member. Over time, this appears to work. In one study of combat veterans, imagery rehearsal therapy was as effective at reducing nightmares as medication.

  Domhoff calls this form of therapy a clear advance in the science of dreaming because it does not imply that the mind is masking its concerns in symbols or storylines. Nightmares themselves don’t seem to serve any function other than to frighten us, he argues, and we may have more of them than we realize—we simply forget about them shortly after we wake up. What Domhoff calls the clearest example yet that Freud’s dream interpretation theory is misguided is the lack of evidence that people who remember their bad dreams are more in touch with their emotions than those who don’t. Dream theory in the twenty-first century is pointed toward uncovering anxieties, not symbolism. Psychologists now look to what dreams can do for us—our understanding of ourselves, or how a soldier copes after returning from fighting in Afghanistan—instead of whether dreams have an intrinsic meaning or represent a suppressed urge.

  That concept closely resembles what I experienced at the dream group that cold day in Manhattan. Alice wasn’t concerned about her possible repressed feelings when she was searching for meaning in the dream in which her dead father criticized her. In fact, she sounded a lot more like Ed, the man who spent two decades dreaming about missing his wife. Just like Ed couldn’t let his love for Mary go, Alice couldn’t come to peace with her father’s memory.

  A few months later, I returned to the dream clinic, curious to see whether Alice would still be there and what she was dreaming about. I walked up the stairs to the counseling center and made my way down the hallway. I was the first one to arrive. Over the next twenty minutes, seven people filled in the seats around me. But still no Alice.

  I had a report ready this time. In the dream, I received a call at work from my college’s registrar’s office. The office had recently audited the files of past students, and found that I was six units short of the requirements to complete my degree. I was told that I would need to take two classes that summer on campus or else I would have to make up the full four years again. The fact that I was living in New York at the time, and not Southern California, made this impossible. In the last part of the dream, I was frantically calling the dean’s office to explain my situation. Domhoff, if I had asked him about it, would most likely tell me that this is nothing more than an example of my mind going through a worst-case scenario and that I should ignore it.

  Alice walked in with a few minutes to spare. The session started and we went around the circle, introducing ourselves. Alice was the second person to share a dream. I leaned in, wondering what was going to come next. Was she going to tell us about her father again?

  “So I had a very strange dream that I wanted to share with the group,” she began. In her dream, she told us, she was babysitting her grandson when he suddenly disappeared from her couch. She searched the house and couldn’t find him. Her cell phone began to ring, and just when she was about to answer it, she was woken up by the sound of her phone ringing in real life.

  “How did the dream make you feel?” the session leader asked.

  “Like a bad grandmother. I swear, all my dreams end up this way.”

  6

  Sleep on It

  In the early 1960s, Jack Nicklaus was in the midst of a remarkable run. At age ten, he had picked up a set of golf clubs for the first time and promptly won the juvenile tournament at the Scioto Country Club, a prestigious club in Columbus, Ohio. Competing as an amateur at age twenty, he had placed second at the U.S. Open, finishing only two strokes behind Arnold Palmer, then the world’s best golfer. Nicklaus had won the U.S. Open the year that he began golfing full-time as a pro, and won the Masters and the P.G.A. Championship the next year. In two years, his ability to sink a ball into a hole had earned him what in 2011 would now be worth $1.2 million.

  Nicklaus entered the 1964 U.S. Open as the favorite. He had just finished second in the Masters behind Palmer and was looking to even the score in their building rivalry. As he walked onto the course on a hot and humid day at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, Nicklaus was counting on the choreographed power of his swing—which artfully combined brute force with graceful accuracy to smash a ball far onto a fairway—to put him ahead of the pack on one of the longest courses in the tournament’s history.

  On the first hole, he plunked the ball directly into a sand trap. It was the first sign that something was off. Fourteen times over the course of the day, he used his driver—normally his best club—to aim for the fairway from the tee. His ball landed on the fairway of only six holes. The rest of the time was spent hacking his way out of the rough, out of sand traps, and out from behind trees. After the first round, Ni
cklaus was tied with thirteen other golfers at a score of 72, four strokes behind Palmer. The next day was even worse, with Nicklaus ending with a 73, and the day after that was worse still, with Nicklaus scoring a 77. By the end of the final round, Nicklaus had finished the tournament he was supposed to win tied for twenty-third place. He walked home with a measly $475.

  Swinging a golf club is one of the hardest skills to learn in any sport. There are just so many ways to mess it up. Turn your hands in too much, and you will watch the ball sail off anywhere but the place you were aiming for. Bring your arms around at the wrong time, and the powerful stroke you were envisioning will do nothing more than plop the ball five feet in front of you. Connect the face of the club either too high or too low on the ball, and you could be left with a stinging vibration in your arms and a ball that is buried in the grass. Professional golfers are so much better at the game than everyone else because they have trained their bodies to rotate at the right speed while keeping their arms at the right angle, again and again, without variation.

  Somewhere on the course in Bethesda, Nicklaus lost that fine sense of timing that was his livelihood, and he didn’t have long to get it back. In three weeks, he was scheduled to play in the British Open at St. Andrews, one of the most challenging courses in the sport, and the tournament where he had lost by a single stroke the year before. Bookies in London, expecting him to regain his form, listed him as the favorite to win. But what they didn’t know was that as he went through the dynamics of his swing, Nicklaus couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong. Every golfer has a bad day, or even a bad week. But Nicklaus’s troubles were showing no signs up letting up. The poor performance at Bethesda lingered past the event, and if it continued, it could put his career in jeopardy. It was as if the extra amount of talent that had separated him from the rest of the pack had vanished without warning. After years of routinely shooting under 70 strokes per round, Nicklaus found himself in the unfamiliar position of readjusting his expectations downward.