THE MIND AT NIGHT THE MIND AT NIGHT The New Science of How and Why We Dream Andrea Rock A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York Copyright © 2004 by Andrea Rock Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For informa- tion, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-5298, (800) 255-1514 or e-mail [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rock, Andrea. The mind at night: the new science of how and why we dream / Andrea Rock.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7382-0755-1 1. Dreams—Physiologicalaspects—Popular works. I. Title. QP426.R63 004 154.6'3—dc 2003022389 Text design by Reginald R. Thompson Set in 11-point CG Elante by Perseus Books Group First Edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10-06 05 04 Contents Preface vii Rockettes, EEGs, and Banana Cream Pie 1 The Anti-Freud 17 Experiments of Nature 41 The Lesson of the Spiny Anteater 61 Rerunning the Maze 77 Nocturnal Therapy 101 The Ultimate Spin Doctor 121 Creative Chaos 135 Altered States 149 Consciousness and Beyond 173 Epilogue 187 Acknowledgments 201 Notes 203 Bibliography 213 Index 219 v Preface I'VE ALWAYS WONDERED WHY my brain doesn't simply rest at night, as my body does, but instead sets to work creating an artificial world that seems as real as waking life. I don't recall my dreams with any greater frequency than most people I know, but I'm intrigued by the ones I do remember and curious about what—if anything—they mean. Often I awaken with no memory of dreaming at all, but some- times, my experiences in that part of my life are so vivid that my mood for the day is colored by them. My dreams of flying come only two or three times a year but they are exhilarating. Making more fre- quent appearances in my night life, though, are the classic anxiety dreams in which I show up to take an exam for a course I've never at- tended or I arrive at a party and belatedly realize I'm missing vital pieces of clothing. Then there are the out-of-control dreams, in which I'm driving a car that loses its brakes or its steering just as I start down a steep, winding hill, or the pursuit dreams, where I'm be- ing chased by some dangerous person or creature. The common thread is that all of the dreams feel utterly real, from the visual details down to the emotions they trigger. In discussing dreams with friends, I have found that the themes in mine seem to be quite common, as is my curiosity about them. I was particularly intrigued when I came across an essay by the late physicist Richard Feynman in which he posed many of the same questions about dreaming that I had. Like Feynman, I was intensely curious about why images in dreams looked so real, but I also won- dered how they could feel so much like waking life. My terror when I periodically dream of my children falling from a cliff or out a window vii viii Preface is so physiologically real that I wake with my heart racing. Mulling over the mystery of what happens to our stream of consciousness when sleep descends, Feynman zeroed in on other fascinating ques- tions: "What happens to your ideas? You're running along very well, you're thinking clearly and what happens? Do they suddenly stop, or do they go more and more slowly and stop, or exactly how do you turn off thought?" As I discovered in the course of research for this book, you don't turn off thought. It just takes a different form. Feynman lamented the fact that he was unable to find answers to his questions about dreaming because there had been so little scientific investigation of the subject. But thanks to the dream research that has unfolded in the past two decades, many of those answers are now becoming avail- able. I discovered surprising explanations about why dreams look and feel so real—fascinatingin themselves but deeply revealing about how the mind works in waking consciousness. In fact, understanding more about what makes us tick during those other sixteen hours has been one of the most exciting aspects of my journey through the world of neuroscientific research. When I began my reporting for this book, I quickly discovered that it's impossible for scientists to agree on something as seemingly sim- ple as the definition of dreaming. Some define it narrowly as the cre- ation of hallucinatory narratives complete with characters and a discernable plotline that occurs primarily during that period of rest known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—when, as the name sug- gests, you see a sleeper's eyes darting back and forth beneath closed lids. At the other end of the spectrum are researchers who classify any mental activity that occurs during any stage of sleep as dreaming, and some even argue that dreamlike mental processes during waking states, such as meditation, should also be included in the definition. After months spent interviewing scientists, serving in labs as a test subject myself, and digesting stacks of studies, dream reports, and other related material, it was clear to me that a definition of dreaming that edges toward the broader end of the spectrum best reflects the scope of knowledge that's emerged from dream research. For the purpose of discussion in the chapters ahead, I define a dream as a mental experience during sleep that can be described dur- Preface ix ing waking consciousness. Some dreams are relatively mundane, while others are hallucinatory masterpieces. Of course, we're likely to be able to provide a description only if we're awakened in the midst of a dream or immediately after it ends. But even though we don't recall the majority of our dreams, they're still being produced each night. And research demonstrates that they can affect the quality of our waking hours whether we remember them or not. The mind at night is surprisingly active, I learned, and not just when it is churning out a scenario in which we're suddenly able to fly without an airplane. Using the same neural circuitry that permits us to navigate the world during the day, the brain on its night shift per- forms an impressive array of important cognitive tasks. For instance, when we're just drifting off to sleep, we experience dreamy but plot- less imagery that is associated with one of the vital functions the brain performs at night: rerunning experience to extract what's im- portant enough to be incorporated into long-term memory, thereby updating the internal model of the world that helps guide our day- time behavior. In the pages ahead, then, you'll discover how the mind concocts the vivid cinematic mental productions that we typically think of when the word dream comes to mind. But you'll also learn about the related and equally important, high-level mental activity that goes on each night entirely outside conscious awareness. Though you would not be able to describe that portion of what hap- pens in your mind during sleep, it nevertheless has an enormous im- pact on who you are and how you make your way in the world. FROM THEBEGINNING of recorded history, dreaming has captured the human imagination, as Robert Van de Castle amply demonstrates in his comprehensive history of dreaming, Our Dreaming Mind. The earliest records of dreams come from Mesopotamia, where clay tablets recounting the adventures of the legendary hero Gilgamesh included accounts of dreams and how to interpret their symbolic and metaphorical imagery. The tablets were found in the library of a king who ruled in the seventh century B.C., but oral versions of the dream- rich stories are believed to have circulated hundreds of years earlier. In both India and China by about 1000 B.C., texts had been written on how to decipher the meaning of dreams. These early conceptions x Preface of dreams revolved around the notion that they were messages from the gods that could foretell the future, and in many cultures, dreams still are believed to have that power. The roots of modern scientific thought about dreams can also be found in ancient times. Aristotle proclaimed that, far from being a product of divine origin, "dreaming is thinking while asleep." The Up- anishads, philosophical treatises written in India between 900 and 500 B.C., proposed that it is the dreamer himself who creates horses, chariots, and other objects appearing in the dream world and that dream objects were expressions of the dreamer's inner desires. This notion was, of course, at the heart of Sigmund Freud's dream theory, which dominated both scientific and popular thought about dreams throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century. Freud described dream interpretation as "the royal road to under- standing the unconscious activities of the mind." In his view, the un- conscious consisted of both innate information that had never entered consciousness as well as experiences or thoughts that had been shunted off to the unconscious and remain repressed because they were memories, wishes, or fears that were unacceptable. The re- pressed desire to sleep with one's mother and kill one's father became perhaps the iconic example of Freudian theory. Published in 1900, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams argued that dreams spring from subconscious wishes (primarily sexual and aggressive desires, which Freud called libidinal drive) that the censor- ing ego normally suppressed in waking hours. To protect sleep from being disrupted, the mind then imagined these wishes being fulfilled by creating dreams—symbolic,disjointed tales that were filled with visual metaphors designed to disguise the desires and fears actually being expressed. These wishes sometimes arose from "day residue," meaning consciously remembered wishes that were aroused during the preceding day but were unfulfilled, or desires bubbling up from the unconscious once sleep relaxed the controlling grip of the mind's censor. In Freud's view, dream symbols had to be translated—with the aid of a psychoanalyst—to uncover meaning. Analysts were taught to use Freud's technique of "free association"—instructing dreamers to say whatever comes into their minds about each element of the dream Preface xi without censoring their thoughts. Using free association to decode a dream's seemingly bizarre, "manifest" content and reveal the uncom- fortable hidden truth of its "latent" content was at the heart of Freudian psychoanalysis. A Freudian lexicon developed to explain what various symbols represented. The majority of symbols had sex- ual connotations, and these have permeated popular culture. It's dif- ficult to divorce the image of a train entering a tunnel from its Freudian interpretation, a fact that Alfred Hitchcock used to his full advantage in the film North by Northwest, in which a seduction scene between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in a train's sleeper car cuts abruptly to a shot of the train plunging into a tunnel. In summarizing his view, Freud stated clearly that "the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes." He contended that "impressions from the earliest year of our life can appear in our dreams, which do not seem to be at the disposal of our memory when we are awake." In one of his best- known cases, for instance, Freud concluded that a patient's dream of seeing wolves sitting in a tree symbolized a traumatic early childhood memory of observing his parents having sex, as well as an underlying fear of castration. Freud's insistence that most dream content reflected repressed sexual wishes was one of the major factors leading to the split that oc- curred between Freud and his one-time protege, Carl Jung, whose dream theories also influenced popular thought on the subject throughout much of the past century. Unlike Freud, Jung did not be- lieve dreams had to be decoded to decipher buried meaning. "The 'manifest' dream picture is the dream itself and contains the whole meaning of the dream," he wrote. Jung believed images in dreams could carry messages from the instinctive, emotional parts of the mind to its rational other half, but they weren't all disguised symbols representing repressed sexual urges. Often, in fact, dreams express positive desires for growth and development. He proposed analyzing dreams via a process called amplification, in which the personal meanings attached to the dream images are explored by the dreamer himself. If a central image in a dream were a ship, for instance, Jung would ask the dreamer to describe all of the characteristics of the ship as she would if she were speaking to someone who had never seen