What Dreams Are Made Of
Technologies that reveal the inner workings of the brain are beginning to tell the sleeping mind's secrets
Madeline, third grade
What to make of young Madeline's dream? To Freud, had he met her, Madeline's rhinoceros horn would almost certainly have symbolized a penis, and the animal's violence would have been an expression of normal but threatening sexual feelings toward her brother--or perhaps of a fear of men in general. Freud saw dreams as deeply buried wishes disguised by symbols, a way to gratify desires unacceptable to the conscious mind. His ideas endured for years, until scientists started systematically studying dream content and decided that actually, something less exotic is going on.
"Dreams do enact--they dramatize. They are like plays of how we view the world and oneself in it," says William Domhoff, who teaches psychology and sociology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. "But they do not provide grandiose meanings." Domhoff bases his view on a study of themes and images that recur in a databank of some 16,000 dreams--including Madeline's--that have been collected as oral narratives and are held at Santa Cruz. (The narratives can be read at www.dreambank.net.)
Post-Freudians might argue that the monsters lurking in children's dreams signal a growing awareness of the world around them and its dangers. Young children describe very simple and concrete images, while the dreams of 9- and 10-year-olds get decidedly more complex. A monster that goes so far as to chase or attack might represent a person who is frightening to the child during waking hours. "Dreaming serves a vital function in the maturation of the brain and in processing the experiences of the day," says Alan Siegel, professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley and author of Dream Wisdom.
Nonsense. Physiology purists, who would say that Madeline's brain is simply flashing random images, got their start in 1953 with the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep. Using primitive electroencephalograms, researchers watched as every 90 minutes, sleepers' eyes darted back and forth and brain waves surged. Then, in 1977, Harvard psychiatrists Hobson and Robert McCarley reported that during sleep, electrical activity picked up dramatically in the most primitive area of the brain--the pons--which, by simply stimulating other parts of the brain, produced weird and disconnected narratives. Much like people looking for meaning in an inkblot, they concluded, dreams are the brain's vain attempt to impose coherence where there is none.
Or maybe that's not the whole story, either, said a young neuropsychologist at the Royal London School of Medicine 20 years later, when his findings hinted that dreaming is both a mental and a physical process. Mark Solms showed that dreams can't be explained as simple physical reactions to flashes from the primitive pons, since some of the most active dreamers in his study had suffered brain damage in that area. On the other hand, in those with damage to regions of the brain associated with higher-order motivation, passionate emotions, and abstract thinking, the nightly movies had stopped. That seemed a sign that dreams might indeed express the mind's ideas and motivations. "It is a mistake to think that we can study the brain using the same concepts we use for the liver," says Solms.
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