It is a hot summer day near Wrigley Field. Cappy Silver is in a helicopter hovering above the back yard of her home, where her daughter and the neighborhood children are splashing in an oversized, above-ground kiddiepool.
Ironically, the pool is the same kind of tacky suburban artifact that used to make Cappy snicker every time she flew into O`Hare and saw the vast blue geometric pattern they form from the air. But now she has joined the ranks of kiddiepool owners herself. As she watches her daughter at play and hears the children squeal, she feels a sudden urge to climb into the water with them. But the helicopter is unable to descend.
Even when she takes stock and realizes that she is not in an actual helicopter, that her body has acquired some of the capabilities of a helicopter and she is flying under her own power, she is still not able to come down. She is lamenting this fact when an unwelcome voice suddenly intrudes.
”Cappy? Can you hear me, Cappy?”
Silence.
”Cappy?”
”Yeah,” Silver replies groggily into the intercom above her pillow. In a computer room two doors away, Ellen Wood, assistant researcher in Dr. Rosalind Cartwright`s sleep clinic at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center, is poised to take down the details of Cappy Silver`s first dream of the night.
Silver is one of a handful of subjects in a pioneering experiment Cartwright is conducting to see if she can cure mental depression by teaching people to control the outcome of their own dreams. As in granting them script approval. Cartwright wants to know if the Daytime You would feel better if the Nighttime You got the bear before the bear got you.
A few years ago, Cartwright would have been here this evening to run the show herself, but after nearly two decades of conducting all-night dream collections, she can no longer take the hours. She is home but very likely wide awake, doing some ironing or pounding out notes for the book she is writing. All those years of sleep deprivation have left her with bouts of insomnia. ”I paid my time,” Cartwright says with a sigh. ”It ruins your sleep cycle.”
Back at the lab, Silver is rubbing cobwebs out of her eyes-it is 1:20 in the morning, for the love of Mike-and beginning to recount the dream and her own interpretation of it. Sigmund Freud believed that the meaning of dreams was heavily encrypted and hard to translate. But Silver`s dream seems very straightforward.
”I really did just buy my kid a pool,” she tells Wood. ”I had a lot of trouble deciding which one to get her because they were bigger and more expensive than I wanted them to be. The one I put in the backyard in the dream was the one I wanted to buy but couldn`t.
”Anyway, I was frustrated because I couldn`t be with my daughter and her friends,” laments Silver, who is locked in a custody battle with her soon-to- be ex-husband. ”I`m sure it was another one of my not-being-able-to-be-with-my-kid dreams.”
After a few pro forma questions, Wood allows the yawning Silver to go back to sleep. There will be more time for interpretation in a few days when Silver meets with Cartwright. Soon Silver is stacking Z`s again. Styluses in the computer room are scratchily plotting her brain waves, eye movements and chin-muscle tone on a continuous sheet of graph paper. A tape recorder has immortalized the helicopter dream and stands ready to be switched on again. Before the night is over, Silver will relate the content of four more dreams, and the whole voluminous data pile will be turned over to Cartwright for study.
Dreaming has fascinated Rosalind Cartwright ever since she was a little girl and her mother used to regale the family at the dinner table with the hallucinatory epics she experienced the previous night. ”My mother was a great dreamer,” Cartwright recalls with professional admiration. ”She had this tremendous love affair with the night.”
Raised on a diet of dreams, Cartwright has fashioned an entire career around trying to understand them. Today she is one of an elite handful of sleep researchers worldwide who are making headway in answering one of mankind`s most ancient puzzles: Why do we dream?
”I think I`m getting there,” she says, with a mix of determination and gentle humor. ”I think I may make it before I die.”
Solving the riddle of dreams has not come easy, but then scientists have had no better luck figuring out why we sleep. Despite years of tireless research, investigators have still not convincingly demonstrated even one function for sleep.
But Cartwright is a little like Edward Jenner, who discovered smallpox vaccine a hundred years before anyone learned what causes the disease. If Cartwright`s intuition is right, dreams may provide us with a direct cure for certain mental problems long before anyone determines exactly what sleeping and dreaming are for.
What Cartwright has found is that you may be able to change your self-image through your dreams. It is a form of auto-suggestion that builds upon Cartwright`s belief, shared by such notable psychologists as Erik Erikson, that the purpose of dreaming is to maintain the dreamer`s sense of identity. Have you ever wondered what keeps you you? Why your sense of ”me-ness” does not deviate from day to day? Why do we never wake up one morning feeling, however subtly, like somebody else? Concealed within each of us, apparently, is a gyroscope that keeps our personalities on a steady course despite the buffeting winds of daily life, and this gyroscope may operate through our dreams, comparing the direction of the winds with the flight plan and making whatever course adjustments are necessary.
This built-in continuity is fine if you have been blessed with a resilient, well-balanced psyche. It is not so good, however, if you`re fragile and insecure, because the same gyroscopic mechanism ensures that you may be stuck with this self, possibly for life.
Yet intervention now appears to be possible, Cartwright believes, particularly in people given to depression. ”People who are depressed have a dependent stance,” she notes. ”They are not strong copers in terms of personality, even when they are feeling well. They always need someone to hold their hand.
”What I`m trying to do,” she says, ”is change that underlying sense of incompetence by attacking it through their dreams.”
Cartwright`s plan grows out of a study of dreaming and depression that she has been conducting for more than a decade. Reasoning that people going through the throes of divorce are more prone to depression, she has focused on volunteers who are breaking up with their spouses. The study is only half over, but already some fascinating things have emerged.
The first is the sheer prevalence of depression among the volunteers.
”We are shocked by how many of our test subjects meet the clinical criteria for major depression and don`t realize it,” Cartwright says. ”Some 47 percent of the men and 51 percent of the women are walking around with a severe affective disorder and are receiving no treatment or medication.”
Cartwright is impressed by the statistic because it suggests that the incidence of depression in the general population is far greater than most authorities suspect. ”Think of how many people get divorced in this country and consider that half of them are clinically depressed, just from one form of life crisis alone. It`s overwhelming,” she says.
The dreaming pattern of depressed individuals shows some striking characteristics, beyond the well-known psychiatric fact that depression tends to wreak havoc on sleep. A full 80 percent of depressed people start dreaming much earlier in the night than normal subjects-as early as 45 minutes after falling asleep, rather than the usual 90 minutes. ”It`s like the brain can`t wait to start dreaming,” Cartwright says.
The dreams themselves are ”terrible,” she says. They are overlong, tortured and masochistic. They are nearly always set in the past rather than the future, and the dreamer experiences a sense of impotence in solving problems-doors won`t open, feet won`t move, fingers won`t grip. Treasured objects keep slipping away. So awful are the dreams of the depressed, and so miserable do they feel upon waking up, that for a long time it was assumed that the best thing one can do for such people is to prevent them from dreaming. In fact, that is how antidepressant medication works: among other things, it inhibits the dream cycle.
Yet Cartwright`s key finding has come from testing the same people a year later. Those with the tendency to start dreaming early and horribly recover completely from their depression, while those who lack the tendency do not.
”Those who have the early-dream marker have long, interesting, productive dreams, and they get better without psychiatric treatment or drugs. They have their own internal therapist,” Cartwright says. ”Those who don`t have the marker seem to get stuck. They don`t get better. When you take them off antidepressants, they relapse; many need hospitalization.
”What that tells me,” she says, ”is that there is something about that crazy, mixed-up early dreaming that is therapeutic. The dream system seems to be responsive to emotional upsets and gives access to a kind of working-through of troubling material in a way that is productive in revising your mood, as well as your sense of self, of who you are and how you cope in the world.”
Cartwright has seen enough to convince her that ”we`re on the threshold of making a major advance on depression.” One avenue, already being tried, involves administering drugs that will induce early dreaming. But the route that Cartwright prefers is something she calls ”dream reshaping.”
Cartwright got the idea that if dreams act as a sort of self-righting system, then perhaps the mechanism can be juiced up. She is taking 10 of her most depressed volunteers and enlisting them in a pilot program to test whether she can dramatically revamp their sense of self by influencing their dreams.
The idea makes use of a recently discovered phenomenon called ”lucid”
dreaming. In lucid dreaming, the dreamer is aware that what is taking place is just a dream and not reality. It turns out that the facility to dream lucidly can be taught. And once you know that you are dreaming, it appears that you may be able to restructure your sense of identity by editing the events of your dreams.
”I think we can literally reprogram people through their dreams,”
Cartwright says.
Silver, 34, is one of her reclamation projects. A local television actress and popular singer, Silver found herself last fall in an increasingly unhappy marriage. Around New Year`s, she decided to bring her 10-year union to an end.
Silver joined Cartwright`s dream study about the same time, after seeing an advertisement in the Chicago Reader asking for volunteers. She says she signed up not because she was depressed but because she found the idea of participating in a dream experiment appealing. ”Dreams have always been an influential part of my life,” she says. ”I tend to dream vivid, action-packed, `Indiana Jones` stuff, and I remember it better than most people do. The chance to have my dreams interpreted by one of the world`s great dream experts was irresistible.”
Although Silver does not remember being depressed, she admits to being
”very foggy and out of it.” However, her score on Cartwright`s objective psychological evaluations put her well within the depressed range. Moreover, her dreaming seemed out of control. She was dreaming an abnormally high 37 percent of the night (”the highest I have ever seen,” Cartwright says), which was causing her to awaken physically exhausted. And her first dream was coming only 53 minutes after falling asleep.
Just a few months later, Silver is ”no longer what I would call depressed,” Cartwright says. Part of this, she adds, must be attributed to the passage of time and the healing action inherent in the dreaming process itself. But part of it appears to be due to the eight weeks of training Silver received from Cartwright in the new and unproven discipline of dream reshaping.
Silver`s dreams still reveal her as less than fully confident and secure, and emotions surrounding her divorce still seem evident. The same night as the helicopter dream, in which she could not get to her daughter, she experienced the following episodes:
2:26 a.m.: ”God was speaking to me over a loudspeaker; He said I should eat my vegetables. Then He told me I am supposed to feed vegetables to this guy to keep him healthy. I was supposed to give him kale, then move on to yellow squash and the next day steamed carrots. Everything was oversized-the vegetables, the cookpot. And the guy I was supposed to be feeding was a bigger, older man with dark hair going gray and broad shoulders. . . . God, it was so domestic.”
4:40 a.m.: ”I was walking down the alley with my daughter. There had been a Cubs game, and the neighborhood was incredibly crowded. We were having trouble trying to navigate through the alley, and I was trying to explain to my daughter where all of these people had come from. I was also telling her how good hand-me-downs were, and she wasn`t buying it. The streets were very slippery. It had just rained, and there was a street vendor selling hot dogs and his grill had overheated and either the rain had put it out or he did, and there was a lot of smoke and it was very smelly, and we both yelled at him for stinking up our neighborhood. He was very far away.”
6 a.m.: ”It was the Fourth of July, and I was going to see the fireworks with some guy named Mitch. And we had to climb this strange, triangular mountain. It had very narrow steps, and everybody had to climb to the top to watch the fireworks. I tried, but I couldn`t even fit on the steps let alone climb them. I got about a third of the way up and felt myself falling, so I quit. I decided to come down real quick, and this guy was very nice about it. ”So then everybody was having a picnic, my whole family, and I was still embarrassed because I couldn`t negotiate this mountain. I told this guy, who was being very sweet, that I just couldn`t do it and I was sorry. He was very gracious, very warm and loving about it, and I told him I loved him and was lucky to have someone so nonjudgmental because I couldn`t do this, and I felt the thing was not to be too down on myself because I was a failure, and I felt real good about that.
”I was extremely fond of this young man. At the picnic there was a lot of good homemade food, and I was cutting him something and putting sauce on it and spilled it all over his leg and his pants, but he was again very kind about it.”
6:40 a.m.: ”My mom was going by on a flatbed truck with seats on it. She was hanging out with a hairdresser and some other loose gay guys she knew and kind of enjoying herself. In the beginning, they all came into this restaurant where I was, a coffee shop full of colorful characters. I remember being envious of my mother`s freedom. It was also unpleasant, my mother cavorting with these people you wouldn`t normally find in her social circle.”
If she has not overcome what she admits is a lack of well-being and confidence, Silver nevertheless attests that she has made progress. ”Dr. Cartwright is fabulous,” she says. ”She`s told me to foster a sense of power in my waking life by taking charge of the direction of my dreams. I`m just now realizing some small measurable success in that direction. It takes practice, like anything else. But I can assert myself now in dreams in ways I have trouble with when awake, such as expressing hostility. And this newfound assertiveness rubs off in my waking life. It`s empowering.”
The way Cartwright operates is to tell people such as Cappy not to let their dreams control them but to seize control themselves. ”I tell them that if they are having a bad dream, to wake up, cut it off,” Cartwright says.
”It`s yours. You control it. Then go back to sleep and give it a good ending. This has a fantastic effect on their daytime mood. They wake up feeling they can be active in their own behalf, which is what the depressed need.”
The idea is merely a scientific attempt to harness a well- known phenomenon: Awaken with a bad dream, feel bad all day. Awaken with a good dream, feel good all day.
A demonstration of how it can work came in a recent dream of Cappy`s. She dreamed of a friend she had known for 20 years who had been snubbing her during her divorce. The woman had avoided her on the street a few days earlier, which caused Silver a great deal of pain. In the dream, she was telling the friend that she felt abandoned by her . . . and then all of a sudden, she realized she shouldn`t leave it at that in the dream, and she began screaming at the woman-uncharacteristically, because she seldom curses-”You f – – – – – – bitch; after all the times I`ve helped you through trouble, the least you could do is help me!”
Silver woke up feeling she had resolved the issue. She felt she no longer needed the friend, and that the failure of the friendship was not her fault but stemmed from the inability of the friend to return warmth she had received from Cappy in the past. ”I felt purged of the concern, and I`ve just moved on,” Silver says.
