What Dreams Are Made Of
Technologies that reveal the inner workings of the brain are beginning to tell the sleeping mind's secrets
I've sat straight up in bed many times, reliving it, reseeing it, rehearing it. And it's in the most absurd ways that only a dream could depict...the one that comes to mind most, dreaming of a green pool in front of me. That was part of the radarscope. It was a pool of gel, and i reached into the radarscope to stop that flight. but in the dream, I didn't harm the plane. I just held it in my hand, and somehow that stopped everything.
Danielle O'Brien, air traffic controller for American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 (in an interview with ABC News)
Many clinicians working with traumatized patients have found that their nightmares follow a common trajectory. First, the dreams re-create the horrors; later, as the person begins to recover, the stories involve better outcomes. One way to help victims of trauma move on is to encourage them to wake themselves up in the midst of a horrifying dream and consciously take control of the narrative, to take action, much as O'Brien appears to have done in her dream. This can break the cycle of nightmares by offering a sense of mastery. "If you can change the dream content," says Harvard's Barrett, author of Trauma and Dreams, "you see a reduction in all the other post-traumatic symptoms."
Cartwright recalls helping a rape victim who came in suffering from nightmares in which she felt an utter lack of control; together, they worked to edit the young woman's dreams of being in situations where she was powerless--of lying on the floor of an elevator without walls as it rose higher and higher over Lake Michigan, for example. "I told her, 'Remember, this is your construction. You made it up, and you can stop it,'" says Cartwright, who coached the woman to recognize the point at which the dream was becoming frightening and try to seize control. At the next session, the woman reported that, as the elevator rose, she decided to stand in her dream and figure out what was happening. The walls rose around her until she felt safe.
A window? A royal road? A way for the brain to integrate today with yesterday? While definitive answers remain elusive, the experience of dreaming is clearly as universal as a heartbeat and as individual as a fingerprint--and rich with possibilities for both scientist and poet.
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