What Dreams Are Made Of
Technologies that reveal the inner workings of the brain are beginning to tell the sleeping mind's secrets
Indeed, PET scans of people in a non-REM state show a decline in brain energy compared with REM sleep and increased activity in those dormant schoolmarmish lobes. Does this affect the content of dreams? Yes, say researchers from Harvard and the Boston University School of Medicine.
Since people should theoretically be more uninhibited when the controlling prefrontal cortex is quiet, the team tracked participants for two weeks to see if their REM dreams were more socially aggressive than the ones they reported during non-REM sleep. The REM dreams, in fact, were much more likely to involve social interactions and tended to be more aggressive.
I had a horrible dream. Howard was in a coffin. I yelled and screamed at his mom that it was all her fault. I kicked myself that I hadn't waited to become a widow rather than a divorcee in order to get the insurance. I woke up feeling miserable, the dream was so icky.
Barb (from Dreambank.net)
To many experts, Barb's bad dream would be a good sign, an indication that she would recover from the sorrow of her divorce. A vivid dream life, in which troubled or anxious people experience tough emotions while asleep, is thought to act, in the words of Cartwright, as "a kind of internal therapist."
The enduring and vexing question is: How much of value do dreams say? Despite all the efforts to quantify, to measure, no one has an answer yet. But dreams have played a role in psychotherapy for over a century, since Freud theorized that they signal deep and hidden motivations. "A dream is the one domain in which many of a patient's defenses are sufficiently relaxed that themes emerge that ordinarily would not appear in waking life," says Glen Gabbard, professor of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at Baylor College of Medicine.
Sometimes, dreams can be a helpful diagnostic tool, a way of taking the emotional temperature of a patient. The dreams of clinically depressed people are notable for their utter lack of activity, for example.
Might there be a physiological reason? Eric Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Research Program at the University of Pittsburgh medical school, has studied PET scans of depressed patients and has found that the difference between their waking and sleeping states is far less dramatic than normal. On the one hand, he says, "we were shocked, surprised, and amazed at how much activity" there was in the emotional brain of healthy people during sleep. In depressed patients, by contrast, the vigilant prefrontal cortex, which normally is not active during sleep, worked overtime. Never surrendering to the soothing power of dreams, the brain is physically constrained, and its dream life shows it.
Healing power. Is it possible that dreaming can actually heal? "We know that 60 to 70 percent of people who go through a depression will recover without treatment," says Cartwright, who recently tested her theory that maybe they are working through their troubles while asleep. In a study whose results were published this spring in the journal Psychiatry Research, she recruited 30 people going through a divorce and asked them to record their dreams over five months. Depressed patients whose dreams were rich with emotion--one woman reported seething while her ex-husband danced with his new girlfriend--eventually recovered without the need for drugs or extensive psychotherapy. But those whose dreams were bland and empty of feeling were not able to recover on their own.
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