Dangerous Dreams: A Novel (13 page)

When she finished the abstract, she decided to read the entire study. It looked like a good starting point because it focused on what she saw as the gaping flaw of clinical psychology, at least where stress-coping strategies were concerned: an
explosion
of interest met by a
paucity
of scientific data and results, which ultimately encouraged the egocentrism she harbored so much contempt for.

As she started reserving the paper on the computer, a lingering fragment of some random thought drew her back to the abstract. She glanced down the page, hoping to find the word that had incubated the thought, stopped on
historical
. That’s it . . . but why’d I do that? She stared at it for a moment.
Historical
. . .
historical
. Her mind floated for a moment before settling on last night’s dream. She felt a sudden chill as an image of the dead man wafted through her mind like a ghost slipping through a keyhole: bloody, crushed head, arrows, dead on the beach; she felt a twinge of nausea. Where, when . . . why me? She stared at the computer screen for several minutes, conscious of nothing, seeing nothing, mind spinning like the ceiling fan. Why those people, four times? Can’t dream things four times. She saw the young girl, the young man, the older man . . . talking, thinking, feeling . . . smell and taste; yes, she’d smelled the smoke, tasted that awful dried meat they ate— terrible stuff—felt the humidity . . . same story, same people, but like a new chapter each time. And the story keeps going when I’m awake, like a movie when you go out for popcorn. What’s happening to me?

She threw her notepad across the room like a Frisbee then stood and walked to the bookshelf. After scanning the titles, she removed a book, opened it to the table of contents, and ran her finger down the list of chapters. Nope. She put it back, withdrew another, same result, then another. “Yes!” She opened it to the chapter entitled “Dreams.” Haven’t looked at this one since freshman year. She walked to the desk, sat, opened the book, started reading in the middle of a paragraph.

First, we don’t usually ask for dreams to happen; they do so on their own during specific sleep periods. And when they occur, they include feelings,
emotions, landscapes, people, strange images, and more—some bizarre and some almost orderly. Though dreams have been with us since mankind’s beginning, relatively little is known for certain about why they happen and what they mean. Indeed, throughout history, dreams have never failed to stimulate great curiosity, conjecture as to their meaning and interpretation, and sometimes even dire reactions
.

She opened a new Word file, read and typed for a half hour, then sat back, closed her eyes—saw the dead man lying in the sand, bloodied, motionless, alone. Her eyes flicked open; she shook her head to exorcise the vision then quickly refocused on the notes.

My paraphrased comments

        
-
Dream during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep

        
-
Periods—10 minutes to 1 hour

        
-
Remember more if wake during REM

        
-
Alternate between Non-REM (NREM) sleep and REM sleep

        
-
Fall asleep—descend through 4 stages of NREM sleep

        
-
After an hour, back up through 4 NREM stages

        
-
1st REM sleep after 90 minutes, short dream period

        
-
Back down through NREM, stay awhile, back up to REM, dream and repeat cycle—each REM period longer

        
-
4 or 5 REMs per night, sleep 8 hours, dream 2 hours

        
-
Things that happen when dreaming—brain activity picks up, heartbeat and breathing become erratic, muscles tend to change tone, and genitals experience a surge in blood flow, which prompts enlargement
.

She thought about Erik for a second. Focus, Allie. Hmm, wonder how you remember stuff from an early REM when you can’t even remember the
last
REM very long? She snickered. But I remember
all
the REMs and for as long as anything I remember in real life. She snickered again. Now I can’t
forget
my dreams. Keep coming back—people sitting on the beach in the fog, yelling at each other, finding the dead men, building the fort,
houses, conversations, Indians, crabbing . . . crabbing . . . killing . . . feelings. The nausea hit her again like a shock from a cattle prod. His head, arrows . . . my God.

She looked back at the notes.

        
-
Dreams—connected to the unconscious

-
Normal & ordinary, also surreal & bizarre

Hmm . . . surreal and bizarre. She shook her head. Not mine.

        
-
Scary, exciting, mystical, depressing, adventurous, sexual

Scary, yes . . . more like terrifying . . . adventurous too, but not sexual, at least not yet.

        
-
Content beyond dreamer control, except for “lucid” dreaming, when dreamer aware of dream while dreaming

I’ve had those. Knew I was dreaming, told the dream what I wanted to see, and it happened. Keep moving, Allie.

        
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History - Freud—dreams represent unconscious desires, thoughts, and stimulations

        
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Thought repressed feelings and instincts manifested themselves in dreams

No way. No repression here. I’ve never even thought about the stuff in
these
dreams. But they started right after the fight with Erik. Maybe I want him more than I know, and I’ve repressed it, and it somehow shows itself in the dreams. She pondered the possibility for a moment. Nah! Too big a stretch. I’m dreaming some kind of random history, nothing to do with Erik . . . hate history . . . boring . . . but the
dreams
aren’t boring. Maybe the fight was a trigger, started the whole thing off. Think about that. Am I suppressing history because it bores me? If so, why
this
history? And how the hell can I suppress something I’ve never seen or heard of before?

Allie typed
dreams
into the search box of the library website, scanned the list—too many to count. She printed it out, headed for the library.

A half hour later, Allie pulled
Dreamlife
by Rufus Goodwin from the shelf and read that in the 19
^th
and 20
^th
centuries, Freud had not had the means to scientifically verify his theories as could be done today. Thus, though some still subscribed to his theories, they remained
only
theories and had been largely superseded by more modern concepts. One such modern theorist was a prominent scientist named Allan Hobson, a Harvard professor of psychiatry and director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Nice credentials, she thought. She found Hobson’s book,
The Dreaming Brain
, on her list, marked it for a full read. Oughta be good. She then read Goodwin’s summary of Hobson’s views on her laptop and logged her interpretation of them in her notes.

- Hobson

        
o
Lots of stimuli when awake—make “brain-mind” outwardly focused

        
o
Scant stimuli when dreaming—“brain-mind” inwardly focused, but with similar level of activity

Wow! Didn’t know that.

        
o
Dreams not from mysterious sources—but from auto-actuation of brain in REM sleep

So the mind, or the
brain-mind
as he calls it, is just as active when you’re dreaming as it is when you’re awake, but it looks outward when you’re awake and inward when you’re asleep. Interesting. And he says dreams don’t come from a bunch of external stimuli, but from somewhere
inside . . . inside the brain-mind, whatever
it
is. Of itself, this doesn’t seem to preclude Freud’s sexual repression theory, but I take Goodwin’s tone as suggesting that Freud isn’t very credible anymore. Lots more to learn here.

        
-
Goodwin says,“. . . summation of two hundred years of advances in physiology, neurophysiology, and psychology”

Physiology and neurophysiology. Now there’s
my
science. Physiology of the body and the nervous system. And it’s in the same breath as psychology. Love it!

-
Goodwin says we measure dream activity with:

                
o
Polygraphs—breathing rate, pulse, blood pressure, perspiration

                
o
Electroencephalograms—brain activity

                
o
Electrocardiograms—heart activity

                
o
Electromyograms—muscle electrical stimulation

                
o
Electroretinograms—electrical activity in nerve cells at the back of the retina—gateway to the brain

                
o
Electrooculograms—potential that exists between the cornea and Bruch’s membrane at the back of the eye

“That about covers it. Neat stuff . . . exactly what I want to do. With all that hardware you’d think they could nail it all down. But they’d have to correlate the readings with the dream events, and that’s the fresh cow pie you just stepped in, Allie: people can’t remember the details of their dreams very well, and what they
do
remember is fleeting. So they can’t do a very good job of correlating dream events with the data.” Allie felt like she was being watched, looked up, saw three people staring at her. She smiled abashedly at them as she realized she’d been talking out loud. “Sorry. Got a little excited.” She resumed reading and summarizing.

-
Freud—“experiences” are the roots of our dreams

But how could
my
dreams come from experiences? They have nothing to do with me
or
my experiences. Maybe someone else’s? Hmm. She added
whose experiences?
to her notes then read on.

        
-
Bulkeley (other author referenced by Goodwin)—just because contemporary science can’t conceive of something doesn’t mean dreams can’t do so

Now that’s a powerful statement. Don’t limit your thinking just because the science isn’t here yet. Right on.

-
“Other-dimension” dreams are a good example—dreams of unimaginable:

                
o
“Worlds”

                
o
“Strange and beautiful” things

        
Wow. That’s me. Weird stuff out of nowhere.

        
-
Hard to refute due to “other dimension” dreams by credible people throughout history

                
o
St. Jerome

                
o
Aldous Huxley

                
o
Socrates

No kidding! At least I’m in good company. Better check Bulkeley out. She retrieved and opened
An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming
by Kelly Bulkeley; skimmed the first two chapters, the second of which was on Freud; then opened to
chapter three
, entitled “ C.G. Jung Descends into the Collective Unconscious,” and read that Bulkeley considered Freud and Jung the predominant dream theorists of the twentieth century. But, Allie noted,
predominant
doesn’t mean
right
. She also noted that Freud and Jung had been friends but eventually suffered a theoretical split. She interpreted Bulkeley’s description of their theoretical divergence to be that Jung believed dreams were an open presentation of the dreamer’s inner self, while Freud believed dreams had hidden meanings to the extent that dreams differ from the material that stimulates them. However, Allie observed, they
agreed that a dreamer’s past has a lot to do with what he dreams.
Experiences
again, she thought, but that’s definitely not me. She further paraphrased that:

        
-
Jung believed that while dreams reveal stimuli from the dreamer’s unconscious, they also present material that exceeds the bounds of the dreamer’s own experiences
.

Wow! Here we go!

        
-
There’s more than an individual’s personal history (which is contained in their “personal unconscious”)
.

        
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There’s also a “collective unconscious” that ties us all to the entire development of humankind from the beginning of its existence
.

        
-
“Memories and experiences” are the instruments of connection to the personal and collective unconscious
.

Now that’s cool! She reread the second entry:
ties us all to the entire development of humankind from the beginning of its existence
. History again . . .
personal and collective unconscious
. . .
memories and experiences
. . . says we can connect to the history of our ancestors. What does that mean? She wrote,
Jung—learn more, understand, important
.