Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (8 page)

That is not to say that Domhoff thinks there are great meanings or evolutionary advantages lurking in dreams that have yet to be discovered. Dreams are just “an accidental by-product of our ability to think and have an autobiographical memory,” he said matter-of-factly. We dream about negative things, in Domhoff’s opinion, simply because we spend a lot of time worrying. The easiest way to see this in your own life is to start a new job. For the first week or so, there is a good chance that your new commute, new coworkers, or new responsibilities will take center stage in your dreams. In many of these dreams, you will probably disappoint yourself or others in some way. Students during the first week of school often dream about getting lost on their way to class, for instance, while waiters dream about dropping food or spilling wine down a customer’s shirt. “Dreams are worst-case scenarios that reflect what we think about every day,” Domhoff said. “We take all these little could-be’s and we blow them up.” In real life, that is what our minds do with many of our problems, anyway. Dreams could be the manifestations of the brain taking our anxieties and running with them because there is nothing else competing for its attention in the middle of the night.

Ernest Hartmann, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, agrees with Domhoff that the content of dreams matters, but with a slight twist. Hartmann sees dreams as a form of built-in nocturnal therapy. In dreams, he says, the mind takes what is new or bothersome and blends it into what the brain already knows, making the new information seem less novel or threatening. In what I have unscientifically come to think of as the Well-Adjusted Caveman Theory, Hartmann argues that the life of early man was filled with the kind of traumas—watching friends gored by animals with sharp tusks or fall through holes in the ice and drown, just to give you two possibilities—that few people experience today. Those who were able to regain their emotional balance after living through a traumatic event were more likely to survive over the long run than those who dwelled on the negative.

As evidence of this theory, Hartmann points to the fact that the mind has a tendency to replay scary or harrowing experiences in dreams almost exactly as they happened in real life for several nights after the event. It is not exactly impartial to judge the validity of a theory by your own experience, but this point resonates with me. The summer after college, I was on a rural one-lane dirt road in the woods of Northern California, riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s Mustang, when a white Bronco sped around a blind turn right in front of us. The Bronco swerved to the left to avoid a head-on collision, but it wasn’t quick enough. It rumbled over the hood of our car like a monster truck, missing my seat by inches. We were lucky. I wasn’t hurt, and my friend walked away with only a broken arm. The car, however, was practically totaled. For the next week or so, I woke up sweating from nightmares of still being stuck in that passenger seat, watching as the Bronco’s tires grew menacingly larger amid the sound of crumpling metal.

I don’t remember exactly how long it took to have a dream that wasn’t about the accident, but the nightmares eventually went away and never amounted to anything more than a couple nights of poor sleep. For some people, however, the brain gets stuck replaying traumas, like a band that knows only one song. When the brain fails to set aside the event in its long-term memory—a move that researchers see as a sign that the emotional system has come to accept what happened and can now put it into perspective—a person may experience recurring nightmares, which is one of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some grow to fear sleep.

Since at least the Vietnam War, when more than one in five combat veterans returned home with chronic nightmares, drugs have been the main line of defense against a brain stuck in a cycle of bad dreams. But there may be a better way. Doctors currently think it is possible to train the brain to dream about other subjects and characters, in a sense rewriting the stories that we tell ourselves each night. One promising technique is called imagery rehearsal therapy, a two-step process in which patients first describe the traumatic event or person that continues to reappear in their nightmares. Then, they choose a situation or image to replace it. Before going to sleep, patients spend at least ten minutes thinking about the dream they want to have, positioning themselves as the director of the show rather than an audience member. Over time, this appears to work. In one study of combat veterans, imagery rehearsal therapy was as effective at reducing nightmares as medication.

Domhoff calls this form of therapy a clear advance in the science of dreaming because it does not imply that the mind is masking its concerns in symbols or storylines. Nightmares themselves don’t seem to serve any function other than to frighten us, he argues, and we may have more of them than we realize—we simply forget about them shortly after we wake up. What Domhoff calls the clearest example yet that Freud’s dream interpretation theory is misguided is the lack of evidence that people who remember their bad dreams are more in touch with their emotions than those who don’t. Dream theory in the twenty-first century is pointed toward uncovering anxieties, not symbolism. Psychologists now look to what dreams can do for us—our understanding of ourselves, or how a soldier copes after returning from fighting in Afghanistan—instead of whether dreams have an intrinsic meaning or represent a suppressed urge.

That concept closely resembles what I experienced at the dream group that cold day in Manhattan. Alice wasn’t concerned about her possible repressed feelings when she was searching for meaning in the dream in which her dead father criticized her. In fact, she sounded a lot more like Ed, the man who spent two decades dreaming about missing his wife. Just like Ed couldn’t let his love for Mary go, Alice couldn’t come to peace with her father’s memory.

A few months later, I returned to the dream clinic, curious to see whether Alice would still be there and what she was dreaming about. I walked up the stairs to the counseling center and made my way down the hallway. I was the first one to arrive. Over the next twenty minutes, seven people filled in the seats around me. But still no Alice.

I had a report ready this time. In the dream, I received a call at work from my college’s registrar’s office. The office had recently audited the files of past students, and found that I was six units short of the requirements to complete my degree. I was told that I would need to take two classes that summer on campus or else I would have to make up the full four years again. The fact that I was living in New York at the time, and not Southern California, made this impossible. In the last part of the dream, I was frantically calling the dean’s office to explain my situation. Domhoff, if I had asked him about it, would most likely tell me that this is nothing more than an example of my mind going through a worst-case scenario and that I should ignore it.

Alice walked in with a few minutes to spare. The session started and we went around the circle, introducing ourselves. Alice was the second person to share a dream. I leaned in, wondering what was going to come next. Was she going to tell us about her father again?

“So I had a very strange dream that I wanted to share with the group,” she began. In her dream, she told us, she was babysitting her grandson when he suddenly disappeared from her couch. She searched the house and couldn’t find him. Her cell phone began to ring, and just when she was about to answer it, she was woken up by the sound of her phone ringing in real life.

“How did the dream make you feel?” the session leader asked.

“Like a bad grandmother. I swear, all my dreams end up this way.”

6

Sleep on It

I
n the early 1960s, Jack Nicklaus was in the midst of a remarkable run. At age ten, he had picked up a set of golf clubs for the first time and promptly won the juvenile tournament at the Scioto Country Club, a prestigious club in Columbus, Ohio. Competing as an amateur at age twenty, he had placed second at the U.S. Open, finishing only two strokes behind Arnold Palmer, then the world’s best golfer. Nicklaus had won the U.S. Open the year that he began golfing full-time as a pro, and won the Masters and the P.G.A. Championship the next year. In two years, his ability to sink a ball into a hole had earned him what in 2011 would now be worth $1.2 million.

Nicklaus entered the 1964 U.S. Open as the favorite. He had just finished second in the Masters behind Palmer and was looking to even the score in their building rivalry. As he walked onto the course on a hot and humid day at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, Nicklaus was counting on the choreographed power of his swing—which artfully combined brute force with graceful accuracy to smash a ball far onto a fairway—to put him ahead of the pack on one of the longest courses in the tournament’s history.

On the first hole, he plunked the ball directly into a sand trap. It was the first sign that something was off. Fourteen times over the course of the day, he used his driver—normally his best club—to aim for the fairway from the tee. His ball landed on the fairway of only six holes. The rest of the time was spent hacking his way out of the rough, out of sand traps, and out from behind trees. After the first round, Nicklaus was tied with thirteen other golfers at a score of 72, four strokes behind Palmer. The next day was even worse, with Nicklaus ending with a 73, and the day after that was worse still, with Nicklaus scoring a 77. By the end of the final round, Nicklaus had finished the tournament he was supposed to win tied for twenty-third place. He walked home with a measly $475.

Swinging a golf club is one of the hardest skills to learn in any sport. There are just so many ways to mess it up. Turn your hands in too much, and you will watch the ball sail off anywhere but the place you were aiming for. Bring your arms around at the wrong time, and the powerful stroke you were envisioning will do nothing more than plop the ball five feet in front of you. Connect the face of the club either too high or too low on the ball, and you could be left with a stinging vibration in your arms and a ball that is buried in the grass. Professional golfers are so much better at the game than everyone else because they have trained their bodies to rotate at the right speed while keeping their arms at the right angle, again and again, without variation.

Somewhere on the course in Bethesda, Nicklaus lost that fine sense of timing that was his livelihood, and he didn’t have long to get it back. In three weeks, he was scheduled to play in the British Open at St. Andrews, one of the most challenging courses in the sport, and the tournament where he had lost by a single stroke the year before. Bookies in London, expecting him to regain his form, listed him as the favorite to win. But what they didn’t know was that as he went through the dynamics of his swing, Nicklaus couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong. Every golfer has a bad day, or even a bad week. But Nicklaus’s troubles were showing no signs up letting up. The poor performance at Bethesda lingered past the event, and if it continued, it could put his career in jeopardy. It was as if the extra amount of talent that had separated him from the rest of the pack had vanished without warning. After years of routinely shooting under 70 strokes per round, Nicklaus found himself in the unfamiliar position of readjusting his expectations downward.

A few nights before he planned to leave for Scotland, Nicklaus went to bed still puzzling over what had happened to his swing. That night, he dreamed that he was once again pounding the ball onto the fairway, regaining his form as the Golden Bear pictured in so many sports sections. When he woke up, he suddenly realized that he had held the club slightly differently in his dream, an adjustment that allowed him to keep his right arm steady throughout the swing. It was a tweak that would be barely perceptible to anyone else, but Nicklaus instantly recognized that this was the cause of his recent troubles. He got out of bed and went directly to the course. There, he gripped the club like he had in his dream. He shot a 68, and the next day he shot a 65. His old stroke was back. “Believe me, it’s a lot more fun this way,” he told a newspaper reporter. “All I had to do was change my grip a little.” He went on to finish second at the British Open after scoring one of the lowest rounds in the long history of the tournament.

In his sleep, Nicklaus had figured out a problem that was costing him ten strokes a round, which, in the high-stakes world of professional golf, was the difference between walking home with a $100,000 check and barely making enough money to cover the airfare. His dreaming brain was able to do something that it couldn’t when Nicklaus was awake and studying his poor performances. Clearly, something happened that night that led Nicklaus to wake up with a solution to his swing problem. But what?

For as long as we have been dreaming, the stories our minds create while we are asleep have been credited as a source of insight. As Nicklaus’s dream about his golf swing shows, the breakthroughs aren’t always emotional. When a person lies down to sleep at night, the brain undergoes a process that is crucial to learning, memory, and creativity in ways that scientists are only now beginning to understand. What dreaming does for our brains is most evident in stories like Nicklaus’s, in which the mind solves a problem or develops a new thought without any conscious effort.

Scientists and others who investigate how the mind works have long attributed insights like these to flittering strokes of genius, a mysterious dance of cells and neurons which adds up to a thought that changes the game. Viewing creativity and problem solving as onetime events echoes the thinking of the Ancient Greeks, who believed that ideas came from the Muses and that you needed to work to win their favor. Even hardened scientists with no inclination to believe in mythology have been amazed at how the mind, while in a dream, sometimes suddenly reaches the perfect solution to a problem. In 1865, August Kekulé, a German chemist, was working on a model of the structure of benzene, an important industrial solvent whose chemical makeup had been confounding engineers and scientists at the time. Kekulé woke up from a dream with a vision of a snake eating its own tail. As he lay in bed, he realized that benzene’s chemical bonds would fit into the same hexagonal shape. The discovery was so important to German industry that Kekulé was awarded a title of nobility. Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian scientist who won a Noble Prize in 1937 for isolating vitamin C, credited his dreams for regularly revealing solutions to stumbling blocks. “My work is not finished when I leave my workbench in the afternoon,” he wrote. “I go on thinking about my problems all the time, and my brain must continue to think about them when I sleep because I wake up, sometimes in the middle of the night, with answers to questions that have been puzzling me.”

Naturally, dreaming and its role in creative thought are more celebrated the farther you move away from the hard sciences. In perhaps the most famous instance of dreams leading to art, Samuel Taylor Coleridge awoke from an opium-induced dream in 1816 with three hundred lines of poetry in his head. He was in the middle of writing them down when he was interrupted by a visitor, who stayed for nearly an hour. When Coleridge returned to the poem, he could remember only fragments of what had appeared so vividly to him in his dream, which accounts for why the last stanzas of his masterpiece “Kubla Khan” seem disjointed. About 150 years later, Paul McCartney woke up in his girlfriend’s bedroom thinking of a melody. He went straight to a nearby piano and began playing the tune for the future hit “Yesterday.” “It was just all there,” McCartney later told a biographer. “A complete thing. I couldn’t believe it.” In the summer of 2003, Stephenie Meyer was a stay-at-home mother living in the Arizona suburbs. On the day she was supposed to take her children to their first swimming lessons, she woke up from a dream in which a girl was talking in a meadow with a beautiful vampire, who was trying to restrain himself from killing her and drinking her blood. She immediately wrote down the conversation from the dream as accurately as she could remember it. That dream became the basis for the
Twilight
series of books and movies, which have since earned Meyer more than $100 million.

On the surface, it seems like these ideas came out of nowhere. But a tiny bit of excavation shows that each dream had clear connections to what was happening in that person’s daily life. Complex, creative thoughts that appear fully formed were little more than solutions to life’s problems. Kekulé had been searching for the structure of benzene for months. McCartney was part of one of the most productive songwriting duos in history and in the midst of creating a historic succession of hit records, but he was facing the fact that the next Beatles album needed another song to be complete. Meyer had been starting and stopping ideas for novels for years, trying to find characters that were real enough to hook readers.

Dreaming looked to be the time when the mind continued to work in its laboratory, testing approaches and solutions to situations that were a part of its waking life. But how? And could the process of creativity really be tested and observed in a research lab?

In the 1960s, leading psychologists turned their attention to how we develop innovative solutions to problems. To begin with, these researchers had to define what they meant by creativity. The working definition they came up with was “the forming of associative elements in new combinations which either meet specified requirements or are in some way useful,” a definition wide enough to include both the chemical structure of benzene and the tales of lovesick vampires. The next step after defining creativity was to see whether there was any replicable method for how the mind comes up with new ideas. Psychologists crafted a four-step model to chart how we typically react when faced with a new problem that has no easy or obvious solution. In the first step, we engage in an intense but unsuccessful session in which our minds grapple with the basic elements of the problem or issue. Then we tend to put it aside and focus on other things that require immediate attention. That leads to a dormant period in which the problem doesn’t take up any conscious thought or attention. Finally, the solution comes to us in a sudden flash of insight at a time when either we are not thinking about it or we are dreaming.

The most important part of the puzzle is what happens in the brain between when we put a problem aside and when a solution flashes in front of us. Is it simply the passage of time that allows the brain to come up with the new idea, or is there something more at work? In the early 1980s, Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison theorized that dreaming was a crucial element of learning and creativity, two closely related skills that can lead to advantages for survival, ranging from finding scarce food to creating a new product for a business. That sleep—especially REM sleep—could be a time when the mind solves a problem makes intuitive sense. REM sleep is when our most vivid dreams occur and a period in which the mind is as active as it is while awake. If we spend little time in REM sleep one night, our brain will compensate by prolonging that stage of sleep the next night. It doesn’t take a huge leap to assume that the brain considers this time important.

According to Crick and Mitchison’s theory, the brain picks up countless bits of information throughout the day, from the structure of the face of a waiter at lunch to the color and pattern of a coworker’s tie. When we learn something new—whether it is declarative, such as the facts of what happened at work last Wednesday, or procedural, like how to drive a car—the information flows through a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Storing all of this information into long-term memory not only is impractical but also could slow our brains down from finding something important when we need it. The brain picks and chooses what it keeps and what it tosses, so that information that isn’t essential is forgotten to make way for what is coming the next day. The process of cleaning up and organizing the mind’s filing cabinet could take place during REM sleep, which would account for the randomness of dreams. Touches of creative genius are simply exaggerated versions of what happens when our brains remove the clutter every night. With only important information left, the mind may then be free to make associations that it couldn’t see before.

While this theory was intriguing, Crick and Mitchison didn’t do much to prove it. In the first part of the 2000s, a team of researchers at the University of Lübeck in northern Germany decided to put it to a test in a laboratory setting. The question they hoped to solve was whether sleep was the catalyst for a new idea, or whether the time the brain spent working through a problem accounted for insights. They assembled a group of volunteers and asked them to solve a number puzzle. Researchers explained to the subjects that, to reach the six-digit answer to the problem in front of them, they should follow two rules that required no math skills beyond basic subtraction. The first step was to look at the relationships between six pairs of numbers in a string of digits. If a subject saw something like two 4’s in a row, he or she was told to respond with the repeated number. But if the two numbers were different, then the correct response would be the difference between them.