The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
Date Published:
Publisher: Daily News
Figuring out what those nighttime images mean.
You step from the jet door and land on a cloud of lime cotton candy. A sombrero-capped Albert Einstein, seated upon a throne of orange peels, debates you about Pacific vs. Atlantic oysters, and then you climb through a porthole, alighting upon the red shag carpet of your childhood bedroom.
Crazy dream, you think, rubbing your eyes. What the heck was that all about?
For answers, you can turn to books, surf the Internet, or call Lauri Loewenberg, a dream interpreter and syndicated columnist.
"People need to know what that strange dream last night is all about," says Loewenberg, who lives in Nashville, Tenn. "That donkey in the kitchen may be giving them advice …about their deadbeat husband."
Waking life is full of struggles, but in dream life we may be fleeing goblins or strolling through the mall naked or suddenly remembering that test you were supposed to take.
Mystery surrounds the links between waking life and dreams.
In today's pop culture, Web sites offer instant dream interpretation, participants at conferences dress up as characters in their dreams, and books examine how, for example, God communicates with people through dreams.
In academia, scholars examine different aspects of dreaming, such as nightmares, sex and even politics.
Something called "lucid dreaming" draws both camps, although it's weighted more heavily on the pop-culture side. In lucid dreaming, people are aware of their dreaming while they're doing the backstroke inside of whale's belly or flirting with Marilyn Monroe.
The two sides spar, but they both agree upon the value of a dream journal.
"Just start paying more attention to your dreams," says Deirdre Barrett, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School who researches dreams while you remember them."
The woman who dreams repeatedly of exploding golf carts might figure out that she has a problem with her spouse's preoccupation with golf.
The man who experiences nightly dreams of a pin-striped figure with a pig's head might again insight into his true feelings about his boss.
Journals help the eggheads figure out what dreams are all about. Because dreams don't have anything physical to measure - REM sleep is not longer the sole province of dreaming, says noted sleep physician James Pagel in Pueblo, Colo. - many scholars depend in part on the reports of dreamers.
Are dreams irrational? Are they connected to our waking lives? Do they have a purpose?
Scholars have probed these questions for centuries, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to scientists toiling in labs today.
And then there are the artists. Painters, actors, film directors, sculptors, writers - every creative field supports an inordinate number of people who dream wildly, and leverage these visions in their work.
Whether everybody dreams may be a subject for debate - Pagel says some of his patients have no memories of ever experiencing a dream. But one thing is sure: some people pay a lot of attention to what's happening in our heads after we curl up under the covers.
Nightmares
Women suffer more nightmares than men, and nobody gets haunted by more wicked dreams than teenage girls, says Pagel, a sleep researcher who runs several sleep laboratories and is a professor at the University of Colorado Medical School.
In fact, Pagel says, about 40 percent of teenage girls have nightmares at least twice a week. Among adults, about 5 percent say they are "having problems" with nightmares.
The classic nightmare, he says, places the dreamer in a situation "where there is no way out but awake."
Pagel, whose wife works in the film industry, has researched the nightmares of film directors, actors and others.
"They have a huge number of nightmares," he says.
"We found that people who make their living with creativity, they have a very active dream life. These people use their dreams in almost everything they do."
People without creative outlets. Pagel says, "Had little dream recall and rarely used their dreams."
"It appears dreaming (including nightmares) may have a major function in the creative process."
While adult actors may embrace their nightmares, children wish they would go away. They get chased by monsters in their dreams and wake up shrieking and crying.
Pagel helps train children to face their dream monsters. He has kids draw the monsters in their dreams and then decorate the pictures - "make them more pleasant, put flowers on them," he says. The children hang the pictures beside their beds and study them before gong to sleep.
When the monsters appear in dreams, the memory of the silly creature inserts itself, and the nightmare is defused.
"It works better than Prozac," Pagel says.
Lucid Dreaming
What's an oneironaut?
It's you, if you are aware that you are dreaming while you sleep.
People who consciously engage in what is also known as lucid dreaming say they can control their dreams. Want to fly? If you're in lucid dreaming, you can just set your mind to it and soar.
"I'll go looking for my father and have an experience with him. I need to hug him or tell him that I miss him," says Beverly Kadzierski Heart D'Urso, a Stanford University computer science Ph.D. who is one of the best-known lucid dreamers in the country.
D'Urso gave several talks about lucid dreaming at the recent dream convention in California. One of the more intriguing topics: The ethics of dream sex.
"You're in a dream, you're married, you find a friend of yours who also is married, and this person tries to seduce you. You know you wouldn't go along with it in your waking state, says D'Urso.
Would you go along with them in your dream?
D'Urso says she's "done all sorts of things because I knew it was a dream, having sex with groups of people, all kinds of variety."
She champions - for herself - lucid-dream sex, but others maintain that their dream and waking lives are inseparable, form a moral standpoint. If they won't have sex with others in their waking lives, they say, they won't do it in their lucid dreams.
But there's more to lucid dreaming than flying and sex.
Barrett at Harvard has studied dreaming in artists and scientists, and she has found they sometimes use their dreams to solve creative or scientific puzzles. For them and others, she says, lucid dreaming is a powerful tool.
One artist, she said, "would become lucid and then decide he would go to a gallery show of his own work."
Two kinds of problems in particular are susceptible to resolution through lucid dreaming, she says.
One category is "anything that is solvable visually, "she says, "Not just art but also engineers, people who are designing computer ships or optics for telescopes. Architects talk about walking through houses that were finished, where in waking life they are still trying to work out the details and design."
Also, for people who remain stuck on a very unusual problem, lucid dreaming can help.
Most problems, she says, don't need dreaming's sometimes hallucinatory effects. But some problems require outside-the-box approaches, she says.
"People get very locked into the idea that there are just a few good conventional possibilities," she says. "and dreams are good at throwing out other ways of dealing."
Some people experience lucid dreams routinely - D'Urso estimated she's had about 20,000 of them - but for most people, these alert-while-dreaming episodes are rare.
It's possible, however, to "incubate" lucid dreams, says Barrett.
"As people are falling asleep, if they tell themselves they want to dream of a particular problem even simple verbal phrase" can help spark lucid dreaming at night, she says.
"Right as you are falling asleep is a time when you are especially suggestive," she says. "It's a great time to give yourself semi-hypnotic suggestions."
Much is written about lucid dreaming in the pop-culture slice of dream world, with the inevitable theme of using Lucid dreaming to lose weight, boost energy, enhance sex and so on. But relatively few scientists dedicate much time to lucid dreaming.
Scientific attention or not, D'Urso says lucid dreaming has taught her all about "lucid living."
"If you have recurring scenes in your real life, they aren't that different from recurring dreams in your sleep." She says. "Maybe in your waking life you need to change your reactions. You need to have less fear."
Dreaming in Blue and Red
Even in dreams, there's a red state-blue state divide, says Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
He has studied how self-described liberals and conservatives dream for about 13 years.
"There is a liberal personality type, or a conservative personality type, that plays out in dreaming as well as waking," says Bulkeley, who recently presented a paper on his findings at the International Association for the Study of Dreams annual conference in California.
Conservatives sleep more soundly than liberals, and they have fewer dreams. In addition, the dreams of liberals are more "bizarre."
The "blue state" interpretation, Bulkeley, is that liberals "have a more" open-minded and imaginative approach to the world. Conservatives are less imaginative and open-minded, and their dreams are narrower, less varied and less intense."
The Red-State take?
"Conservatives are more anchored, more realistic in their approach to the world," says Bulkeley. "Liberals could be seen as fanciful, their heads in the clouds, unrealistic, out of touch."
Bulkeley also found that before 2000 - during the Clinton administration - conservatives suffered from significantly more nightmares than liberals. Once George W. Bush became president, however, the rate of nightmares among liberals has risen, while among conservatives the rate has dropped.
Liberal women in general, he says, remember more of their dreams, have the poorest-quality sleeps - and report dreams about homosexuality at a higher rate than anybody else.
On the other end of the spectrum are conservative men: they have the toughest time remembering anything about their dreams, they enjoy the soundest sleeps - and dreams about homosexuality just don't happen, they report.
All of this matters, Bulkeley says, because it helps buttress the idea that "dreaming reflects our engagement with the communal world."
"A lot of researchers and people in the public think that's still an open question," he says. "Dreams are random, they are nonsense, they have no connection to anything. I don't think so, and I think we have good evidence to support the contrary."