Lucid Dreaming Part 13

All right, you might say, so that's why we have quiet sleep, but why did active sleep evolve, and with it, dreaming? Certainly there must have been very good reasons for it, since this state has many disadvantages. For one, your brain uses much more energy during dreaming than it does while awake or in quiet sleep. For another, the body is paralyzed during REM sleep, significantly increasing the sleeper's vulnerability. In fact, the amount of dreaming sleep for a given species is directly proportional to its degree of safety from predators; the more dangerous life is, the less a species can afford to dream.

Given these drawbacks, active sleep must have offered particularly useful advantages to the mammals of 130 million years ago. We can guess one advantage, if we remember that this was the point in evolutionary history when mammalian mothers gave up laying eggs in favor of bearing live young. What advantages might active sleep have offered our ancestral mothers? The answer can be seen, I think, if you recall that egg-hatched lizards and birds break out of their sh.e.l.ls sufficiently developed to survive on their own if necessary. Viviparous offspring-of which the human baby provides an unexcelled example-are less developed at birth and often completely helpless. Viviparous infants have to go through a great deal of learning and development, especially of the brain, in the first few weeks, months, and years of life.

In contrast to the hour and a half an adult spends in REM sleep each night, a newborn baby, who sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours a day, is likely to spend fifty percent of this time dreaming-as much as nine hours a day. The amount and proportion of REM sleep decreases throughout life, suggesting to several dream researchers11 that REM sleep may play an important role in the development of the infant brain, providing an internal source of intense stimulation that would facilitate the maturation of the nervous system as well as help prepare the child for the limitless world of stimulation it will soon have to face.

The foremost French sleep researcher, Michel Jouvet of the University of Lyon, has proposed a similar function for active sleep: dreaming permits the testing and practicing of genetically programmed (i.e., instinctual) behaviors without the consequences of overt motor responses-thanks to the paralysis of this sleep state. So the next time you see newborns smiling in their sleep, don't be surprised if they turn out to be practicing their perfect smiles to charm a heart they are yet to meet!

Well, then, we know why babies dream. But if that were all there is to it, why wouldn't REM sleep completely disappear by adulthood? It might, except that there does seem to be something more to it, providing adults with a good reason to continue to dream. The reason is this: active sleep has indeed been found to be intimately involved with learning and memory.

The evidence connecting the dream state with learning and memory is of two kinds. The most direct evidence is an extensive body of research indicating that learning tasks requiring significant concentration or the acquisition of unfamiliar skills is followed by increased REM sleep. The second type of evidence is less direct but still quite convincing: many studies have shown that memory for certain types of learning is impaired by subsequent REM deprivation. Psychologists distinguish two varieties of learning: prepared and unprepared. Prepared learning is easily and quickly acquired, while unprepared learning is difficult and only slowly mastered, with great effort. According to Boston psychiatrists Dr. Ramon Greenberg and Dr. Chester Pearlman, it is only unprepared learning that is REM-dependent. In one of their experiments, rats easily learned that cheese was located behind one of two doors-and an electric shock behind the other. This is called "simple position" learning, and most animals are well equipped for it. If, on the other hand, the positions of reward and punishment are reversed on successive trials, most animals find it difficult (or impossible) to learn where to expect what. In other words, for rats, "successive position reversal" is an instance of unprepared learning.

After Greenberg and Pearlman subjected the rats to these two varieties of task, they deprived them of REM sleep and re-tested them for learning. The results were that while simple position learning was unimpaired by REM deprivation, successive position reversal was "markedly" impaired. "This finding is noteworthy," Greenberg and Pearlman remarked, "because successive position reversal is a task which clearly distinguishes the learning capacities of species with REM sleep (mammals) from those without it (fish)." The implication is that REM sleep makes more complex learning possible.

Greenberg and Pearlman conclude that dreaming sleep "appears in species that show increasing abilities to a.s.similate unusual information into the nervous system." They suggest that the evolutionary development of the dream state "has made possible the increasingly flexible use of information in the mammalian family. That this process occurs during sleep seems to fit with current thinking about programming and reprogramming of information processing systems. Thus, several authors have pointed out the advantage of a separate mechanism for reprogramming the brain in order to avoid interference with ongoing functions."12

One of these authors is the late Christopher Evans, whose computer-a.n.a.logy theory of dreams is presented in his book Landscapes of the Night: How and Why We Dream. Dr. Evans, an English psychologist with an abiding interest in computers, proposed that dreaming is the brain-computer's "off-line" time-when the mind is a.s.similating the experiences of the day and at the same time updating its programs.

Not only is dreaming a.s.sociated with learning and memory, but it also appears to play a somewhat broader role in the processing of information in the nervous system, including coping with traumatic experiences13 and emotional adjustment. The dream state has been proposed as a restorative for mental functioning; according to Professor Ernest Hartmann, REM sleep helps us adapt to our environments by improving our mood, memory, and other cognitive functions through restoring certain neurochemicals that are depleted in the course of waking mental activity.

Dreaming sleep has also been shown to play a general role in reducing brain excitability. It can have a favorable effect on our moods-making us, for example, less irritable. Janet Dallet, in a dissertation, has reviewed a number of theories of dream function, concluding that "contemporary theories tend to focus on the function of environmental mastery, viewed from one of three perspectives: (a) problem solving, (b) information processing, or (c) ego consolidation."14

Finally, psychologist Ernest Rossi has attributed a developmental function to dreams:

In dreams we witness something more than mere wishes; we experience dramas reflecting our psychological state and the process of change taking place in it. Dreams are a laboratory for experimenting with changes in our psychic life. ... This constructive or synthetic approach to dreams can be clearly stated: Dreaming is an endogenous process of psychological growth, change and transformation.15

It might be said that the diverse theories of dream function are all partly right and all partly wrong: right insofar as they say what a function of dreaming is, and wrong when they say what the function of dreaming is. The situation is a.n.a.logous to the traditional tale of the blind men and the elephant. In this story, the blind men each seek to discover-by means of touch alone-the nature of an elephant. Each believes he knows, from the part he has grasped, the tine nature of the whole. For the blind man who grasped it by the tail, the elephant was like a rope; like a rug for the one who grasped its ear; like a pillar for the one who grasped its leg; and so on. In a similar manner, the proponents of various dream theories have each grasped not the whole, as they thought, but a part of the function of dreams. Freud, for example, in surveying the many opinions about dreams, judged almost all of the previous views to have missed the forest for the trees. He considered his own theory, which posited s.e.x as the basis of all dream content, a "view from the heights." But-as it is perhaps apparent today-Freud himself mistook a wood for the world. Or, as the irreverent have put it, he seems to have grasped the elephant by the b.a.l.l.s. Things could be worse, though, for others seem to have grasped the elephant by the feathers!

Puffing aside, for the moment, the question of the special functions of dreaming, let us ask what is the most basic or general function that dreaming is likely to serve. Since dreaming is an activity of the brain, we must first ask what function brain activity serves. And since the most general biological purpose of living organisms is survival, this must also be the most general purpose of brain activity. The brain fosters survival by regulating the organism's transactions with the world and with itself. The latter transactions might perhaps be best achieved in the dream state, when sensory information from the external world is at its minimum.

As organisms proceed up the evolutionary ladder, new forms of cognition and corresponding actions emerge. The four major varieties of action are reflexive, instinctive, habitual, and intentional, in ascending order. Behaviors lower on the evolutionary scale are relatively fixed and automatic, while behaviors higher on the scale are more flexible. Automatic behaviors are best if the situation they are designed for is relatively invariable. For example, since we must breathe every minute of our lives, this is very efficiently accomplished by a reflexive mechanism. Likewise, instinctive action is effective as long as the environment we are in is not too different from the one our ancestors lived in. Habit, too, is useful if the environment doesn't change too much. But intentional or deliberate action has evolved in order to handle environmental changes that our habitual behavior is inadequate to cope with. The highest level of cognition, which allows for intentional action, is usually referred to as reflective consciousness. It is the same cognitive function that we call lucidity when speaking in the context of dreaming.

Reflective consciousness offers the advantage of flexible and creative action in the dream state as well as in the waking state. More specifically, consciousness allows dreamers to detach themselves from the situation they are in, and reflect on possible alternative modes of action. Lucid dreamers are thus able to act reflectively, instead of merely reflexively. The important thing for lucid dreamers is their freedom from the compulsion of habit; they are capable of deliberate action in accordance with their ideals, and are able to respond creatively to the dream content. Seen in this light, lucid dreaming does not at all appear as a mere abnormality or meaningless curiosity; rather, it represents a highly adaptive function, the most advanced product of millions of years of biological evolution.

The Meaning of Dreaming

Since the evidence indicates that dreaming serves important biological functions, dreaming cannot be "meaningless biology." On the contrary, dreams are, at very least, meaningful biology. But does this mean that dreams must be meaningful psychology? I think the answer is "Not necessarily." If you ask, "What do dreams mean?" the answer will depend upon just exactly what you mean by "meaning." But perhaps we can agree that "meaning" refers to placing anything-in this case, a dream-in some explanatory context or other. Please note, however, that explanatory contexts vary widely from person to person. For some, interpretation or translation will seem most appropriate, under the a.s.sumption that dreams are messages to ourselves. Others will seek mechanistic explanations in a physiological or psychological context; still others will be inclined to treat the dream on its own terms, as it relates to itself. Which approach is right? Or, rather, which is right for which dream?

Freud a.s.sumed that the events occurring in dreams (lucid or otherwise) were by their very nature symbolic of unconscious motives. This a.s.sumption, although undoubtedly correct in certain circ.u.mstances, is equally misleading in others. Many dream interpreters would like to believe that every element of every dream is equally subject to symbolic interpretation, or that "All dreams are equal." This is an understandable belief, for dream interpreters could not expect to stay in business for very long if they were to say of a dream presented for a.n.a.lysis: "This dream is meaningless," or even, "not very interesting." Dreamers meeting with such responses would be inclined to take their dreams elsewhere, until they found someone more willing to tell them what their dreams "really" meant. Also, it is a sensible working hypothesis, when presented with a dream for interpretation, to a.s.sume that it does have meaning, or at least that part of it does.

In the case of psychotherapists and their clients, the relevant kind of meaning a.s.sumed and sought is psychological. However, the a.s.sumption that every dream contains significant psychological information has yet to be subjected to rigorous testing. To me, a.s.serting that every dream is equally informative-psychologically or otherwise-is like supposing that every sentence you say is equally interesting, coherent, or profound!

There is a contrary view of dreams, the "existential" view, which treats dreams as lived experiences composed of imagined interactions and elements that could be symbolic, literal, or somewhere in between. Flying, for instance, could be the symbolic expression of any number of unconscious desires, such as the wish to transcend all limitation, or-as Freud would suggest-the wish to engage in s.e.xual activity. In another case, flying might simply be the most convenient mode of travel available to the dreamer.

With these considerations in mind, we would probably be wiser to leave the degree of symbolic significance attributed to a dream event as an empirical rather than an axiomatic matter-as something to test rather than to a.s.sume. It seems safe to conclude that an interpretation is valid only if it impresses the dreamer as having sufficient explanatory power for his dream, or if it is otherwise supported by compelling evidence.

It is important to realize that just because a particular dream can sometimes be interpreted in symbolic terms doesn't mean it was intended as a communication in the first place. If dreams are important messages to ourselves-as suggested by the proverb "An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter"-then why do we throw most of them away? This is surely what we do when we forget our dreams, and we forget the great majority of them. The "letter-to-yourself" theory of dreams is in even worse trouble when we remember the mammalian origins of dreaming. Consider the family dog: of the tens of thousands of dreams Fido will dream in his lifetime, how many are likely to be interpreted? By Fido, none at all! By his owners, perhaps a few. But if humans are the only mammals equipped with the linguistic skills to use symbolic language, what purpose could dreaming serve for the thousands of species of non-human dreamers? And if dreaming served no purpose to our ancestors, how could it ever have evolved?

I think the answer is clear: dreaming must serve purposes other than talking-to-ourselves; moreover, these purposes must be achievable without requiring dreams to be remembered, to say nothing of interpreted. In fact, there is a good reason why remembering dreams might be maladaptive for all non-linguistic species, including our ancestors. To see why, consider how we are able to distinguish memories of dreamed events from those that actually occurred. It is something we have learned to do, thanks to language. Remember Piaget's account of the child's development of the concept dream. When, as children, we remembered our earliest dreams, we a.s.sumed that they had "actually" happened, just like everything else. After enough repet.i.tions of our parents' telling us that some of our experiences were "only dreams," we learned to distinguish memories of inner dream events from memories of external physical events. But how would we ever have been able to untangle the two realities without the help of other people telling us which was which?

Animals have no way to tell each other how to distinguish dreams from reality. Imagine your pet cat living on the other side of a tall fence that protects it from a vicious dog. Suppose your cat were to dream that the wicked dog was dead, and replaced by a family of mice. What would happen if the cat were to remember this dream when it awoke? Not knowing it was a dream, it would probably hungrily jump over the fence, expecting to find a meal. But instead, it would find itself a meal-for the dog!

Thus, dream recall would seem to be a bad thing for cats, dogs, and all the rest of the mammalian dreamers except humans. This could explain why dreams are difficult to recall. They may be so, according to this view, because of natural selection. We and our ancestors might have been protected from dangerous confusion by the evolution of mechanisms that made forgetting dreams the normal course of affairs. But if the theory I have proposed for why dreams are difficult to recall is correct, then-contrary to Crick and Mitchison-remembering dreams should do humans no harm, precisely because we can tell the difference between dreaming and waking experiences.

In conclusion, I would suggest that the dream is not so much a communication as a creation. In essence, dreaming is more like world-making than like letter-writing. And if, as we have seen, an uninterpreted dream isn't like an unopened letter, then what is it like? Having demolished a popular proverb, let us replace it with another that seems to come closer to doing the dream justice: "An uninterpreted dream is like an uninterpreted poem."

If I am right, dreams have much more in common with poems than they do with letters. The word poem is derived from a Greek verb meaning to create, and I have already argued that the essence of dreaming is closer to creation than to communication. Are all poems equally worth interpreting? Are poems equally coherent, effective, or beautiful? If you wrote a dozen poems a night every night of your life, what do you suppose you would find among your several hundred thousand poems? All masterpieces? Not likely. All trash? Not likely, either. What you would expect is that among great piles of doggerel, there would be a smaller pile of excellent poems, but no more than a handful of masterpieces. It is the same with your dreams, I believe. When you have to stage five or six shows every night, many of them are likely to lack inspiration. It is true that you can cultivate your dream life so that the time you spend there will grow more rewarding as the years pa.s.s. But why should you expect that every one of your dreams is worth taking the time to interpret? And yet, if a poem or a dream calls out to you to interpret it, by all means find out what it means to you.

It would be a very unusual poet who created poetry primarily for the amus.e.m.e.nt and instruction of critics or interpreters. Poets don't need a critic on hand in order to be affected, perhaps even transformed, by the poem's creation. When we read a poem, we don't need to interpret it to be deeply moved, edified, inspired, and perhaps even enlightened. Having said that neither poems nor dreams have any need of interpretation doesn't mean that it is never useful. On the contrary, intelligent criticism or interpretation can at times greatly increase the depth of our understanding of a poem, and in the best of circ.u.mstances, of ourselves as well. It is the same with the dream.

9.

Dreaming, Illusion, and Reality

"In the ages of the rude beginning of culture," wrote Nietzsche, "man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dreams, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dreams; likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body: whence all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in G.o.ds."1

I am inclined to agree with Nietzsche in placing the blame for belief in ghosts, G.o.ds, and life after death on the doorstep of the dream. Let us suppose that the idea of a soul-body derives from subjective experiences in the dream world. Whether or not the soul would be granted the status of objective reality would then depend on the reality status given to the dream.

If early humans believed they had discovered in the dream a second "real world," what might they have meant? Did they merely mean that the dream world had a subjectively verifiable existence? That dreams were only real while they lasted? Or that dreams existed actually and objectively in some subtle plane of existence every bit as real as the physical world?

Is there any evidence suggesting that dreams can be objectively real? Several enigmatic phenomena seem to raise the possibility that, in some circ.u.mstances, the dream world may be at least partially objective. One of these enigmas is the uncanny experience in which a person feels he or she has somehow temporarily left his or her body. Survey data indicate that a surprising number of people have had such out-of-body experiences (OBEs) at least once in their lives.2 Very frequently, those who have this experience become unshakably convinced that they, or at least some part of themselves, are capable of an existence independent of their bodies.

Another phenomenon whose existence is widely attested to is the mysterious mode of information transfer called extrasensory perception (ESP). A wealth of anecdotal evidence supports the idea that ESP occurs, working across both s.p.a.ce and time. If it is indeed possible to perceive, in some fashion, events that are happening at a distance, or even those that have not yet happened, s.p.a.ce and time must be other than what they seem, and the same thing goes for subjective and objective realities!

Accounts of "mutual dreaming" (dreams apparently shared by two or more people) raise the possibility that the dream world may be in some cases just as objectively real as the physical world. This is because the primary criterion for "objectivity" is that an experience is shared by more than one person-a fact supposedly true of mutual dreams. In that case, what would happen to the traditional dichotomy between dreams and reality?

These mysterious phenomena that threaten the simplicity of our commonsense view of life are all primarily "children of the night." Surveys indicate that more spontaneous psychic experiences are reported to occur during dreaming than waking.3 Most out-of-body experiences likewise tend to occur while the person is dreaming or at least in bed. Dean Shiels, an American anthropologist, studied OBEs in sixty-seven different cultures around the world and found that sleep was regarded as the most important source of OBEs in about eighty percent of those cultures.4

How does all this relate to lucid dreams? I propose that OBEs are actually variant interpretations of lucid dreams; that dream telepathy will provide the basis for an explanation of the occasional accuracy of paranormal OBE vision; and laboratory experiments with mutual lucid dreams will be suggested as a means of testing the objective reality of shared dream worlds.

Although telepathic experiences also apparently occur during the waking state, surveys do indicate that most instances occur in dreams. The following is a remarkable example of such a dream:

Many years ago when my son, who is now a man with a baby a year old, was a boy I had a dream early one morning. I thought the children and I had gone camping with some friends. We were camped in such a pretty little glade on the sh.o.r.es of the sound between two hills. It was wooded, and our tents were under the trees. I looked around and thought what a lovely spot it was.

I thought I had some washing to do for the baby, so I went to the creek where it broadened out a little. There was a nice clean gravel spot, so I put the baby and the clothes down. I noticed I had forgotten the soap so I started back to the tent. The baby stood near the creek throwing handfuls of pebbles into the water. I got my soap and came back, and my baby was lying face down in the water. I pulled him out but he was dead. I awakened then, sobbing and crying. What a wave of joy went over me when I realized that I was safe in bed and that he was alive. I thought about it and worried for a few days, but nothing happened and I forgot about it.

During that summer some friends asked the children and me to go camping with them. We cruised along the sound until we found a good place for a camp near fresh water. The lovely little glade between the hills had a small creek and big trees to pitch our tents under. While sitting on the beach with one of the other women, watching the children play, I happened to think I had some washing to do, so I took the baby and went to the tent for the clothes. When I got back to the creek I put down the baby and the clothes, and then I noticed that I had forgotten the soap. I started back for it, and as I did so, the baby picked up a handful of pebbles and threw them in the water. Instantly my dream flashed into my mind. It was like a moving picture. He stood just as he had in my dream-white dress, yellow curls, shining sun. For a moment I almost collapsed. Then I caught him up and went back to the beach and my friends. When I composed myself, I told them about it. They just laughed and said I imagined it. That is such a simple answer when one cannot give a good explanation.5

Anecdotes, though dramatic and numerous, do no more than convince one that precognitive dreams are a possibility. It takes scientific investigation to convert possibility to probability. Fortunately, there are perhaps half a dozen scientific demonstrations of dream telepathy.

The most famous of these were the experiments in dream telepathy carried out in the dream laboratory of the Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn by Dr. Montague Ullman and Dr. Stanley Krippner in the late 1960s. These dream researchers monitored sleeping subjects. During the periods when a subject was in REM sleep, a person in another room focused on an art reproduction and attempted telepathically to transmit an image of the painting to the sleeper, who was awakened for dream reports at the end of each REM period. Afterward, judges were able to match which picture went with which dream report, with an accuracy significantly above chance.

One night, the target picture was The Sacrament of the Last Supper by Salvador Dali. The painting shows Christ at the center of a table, surrounded by the twelve disciples, with a gla.s.s of wine and a loaf of bread on the table, and a fishing boat on the sea visible in the distance. Dr. William Erwin was the subject that night. His first dream was about an ocean, which, he commented, had a "strange beauty about it. ..." Remembering his second dream, he said, "Boats come to mind. Fishing boats. Small-size boats. ... There was a picture in the Sea Fare Restaurant that came to mind. ... It shows, oh, I'd say about a dozen or so men pulling a fishing boat ash.o.r.e right after having returned from a catch." Erwin's third dream seemed to relate to the Christian theme: he was looking though a "Christmas catalogue." His following three dreams were about doctors (Christ the healer and spiritual physician?). His last two dreams of the night dealt with food. In the morning, Dr. Erwin's reflections on his dreams put the pieces together in a way that is very suggestive: "The fisherman dream makes me think of the Mediterranean area, perhaps even some sort of Biblical time. Right now my a.s.sociations are of the fish and the loaf, or even the feeding of the mult.i.tudes. ... Once again I think of Christmas. ... Having to do with the oceanwater, something in this area. ..."6

The findings of the Maimonides research offer scientific support for the possibility of telepathic influence on dream content.7 Likewise, in 1962, L. E. Rhine concluded on the basis of a large body of anecdotal evidence that more spontaneous psychic experiences occurred during dreaming than during the waking state. That being so, we may accept dream telepathy as a working hypothesis.

But now let us return to the other enigma we were discussing-the out-of-body experience. The OBE takes on a confusingly wide variety of forms. A person having an OBE may, for example, find his sense of ident.i.ty a.s.sociated with a second, non-physical body: a "soul," "astral body," "spirit," or, to suggest a term having a certain charm, "out-of-body body" (OBB)! Equally, "out-of-body" one may dispense entirely with the inelegance of bodies of any sort, and experience oneself as a point of light or a freely mobile center of awareness. In some OBEs, one seems to see the sleeping physical body, while in other cases one finds an empty bed or someone else entirely.

Let us take the case of one "astral projector" who wrote that before he knew what his OBES were, he "was much afraid each time" he had one. He explained that his projections always began with him lying in bed, feeling a weight holding him down. The next thing he knew he would be out of his body. During one OBE, he walked around his bedroom and looked down the stairs into the kitchen. He decided to look at himself in the mirror, but could not see anything when he did so. On another occasion, when returning from "astral adventures," he thought, "I'll look at myself on the bed." But when he looked, he saw his mother, who "had been pa.s.sed over quite a long time." Yet, curiously, finding his dead mother in bed instead of his sleeping body didn't lead him to the conclusion that he was dreaming; he took this to mean that his mother's spirit would always be with him whenever he was "projected."8