Whatever its purpose, dreaming has been around a while. Birds do it, and virtually all mammals, too, but reptiles don`t, suggesting that dreaming evolved about 130 million years ago, after we all split off from our reptilian ancestors.
Throughout history, dreams have figured strongly in human myth, no doubt because, being involuntary, phantasmagoric and illogical, they seem to originate from somewhere outside ourselves, thrust upon us without our consent. Not surprisingly, for eons they have been taken as omens, divine communiques and the like.
Freud demystified dreams by certifying them as wholly internal events but gave them an occult spin of his own. He said they represent efforts by our primitive selves to fulfill forbidden urges, urges so unacceptable to our conscious minds that even in sleep they must be disguised by use of symbols. Later, theoreticians such as Adler and Jung took differing views, but all such opinions were based on very little data since there was no way to study dreams scientifically in the laboratory. It was not even possible to know when a person was dreaming. As a result, misconceptions about dreams arose. It was commonly believed that dreams lasted for a second or two, that they seldom occurred more than once a night and that they took place just prior to awakening.
The watershed event in dream research came in 1953, when researchers at the University of Chicago linked dreaming to a new sleep phase they had discovered called rapid eye movement, or REM. REM is marked by periodic darting eye movements; a change in brain-wave pattern from the slow waves of deep sleep to an active pattern similar to waking; signs of intense excitement, such as irregular heartbeat and breathing and arousal of the genitals; and a striking paralysis of the limbs. If you wake people during REM, 85 percent of the time they will be dreaming.
Here was the answer to a dream researcher`s prayers. Suddenly, one could detect the onset of a dream, allowing this baffling mental activity to be placed under the microscope at last. Almost immediately, sleep psychologists began tucking volunteers by the thousands into bed and waking them up each time they went into REM.
Soon, many assumptions about dreams had to be discarded. It became clear that we spend much of the night dreaming, some 20 to 25 percent of it. REM periods occur with monotonous regularity, about every 90 minutes, meaning that we average four to five dreams a night. These dreams grow progressively longer and more complex as the night wears on; toward dawn our dreams may last as long as an hour. The time orientation also changes: We tend to go further into the past with each succeeding dream, so that by the end of the night we are often resurrecting our childhoods. And we do it with a recall that is astonishing, summoning up high school biology teachers or camp counselors we haven`t thought of in years. The vividness and creativity of dreams amaze psychologists; even the most prosaic mind can put together a surrealistic masterpiece worthy of James Joyce`s ”Finnegans Wake” or Federico Fellini`s
”Satyricon.”
Another characteristic of dreaming: It apparently is a biological need on the order of eating and breathing. Whenever dreams are purposely aborted by waking subjects the instant they enter REM, the subjects make evermore insistent attempts to initiate the state upon drifting off. When, after several nights, the researchers stop depriving them of REM, the volunteers proceeded to go on dream binges, like winos deprived of booze.
But why should we need this bizarre, sometimes disturbing function? Many explanations have been advanced.
Two views, however, have come to dominate modern dream theory. One is that of Harvard Medical School researchers J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley. Rooted in biochemistry, their theory is that dreams originate in the brain stem, the primitive part of the brain that controls reflexes such as breathing and heartbeat. During REM, they say, a segment of the brain stem called the pons sends random bursts of electrical activity to the cortex, the seat of reasoning and perception. These bursts, which flow along the neuron pathway mediated by the chemical neurotransmitter acetylcholine, stimulate nerve cells controlling optical function, triggering random images and eye movements-just as a monkey might aimlessly pound typewriter keys. The cortex then responds as it is programed to do, by trying to make sense of these haphazard images fed to it, weaving them into a ”story.” Because all the cortex knows is what the sensory apparatus tells it, it believes everything that is going on, accounting for why we completely lose the ability to test reality during a dream.
But Hobson`s theory, which he calls the ”activation-synthesis hypothesis,” leaves open the question of why we dream. Why should all those neurons be firing willy-nilly in the first place? Hobson is less helpful on this, beyond an anatomical explanation: Certain neurotransmitters in the pons seem to shut down coincidentally with REM, opening the floodgates to acetylcholine, which would otherwise be held in check. These other brain chemicals, responsible for conscious attention and long-term memory, may need to be conserved and their neurons rested overnight, says Hobson. Conversely, cortical neurons affected by acetylcholine may need to be maintained and recharged frequently, the way a car should be started once a day. Thus dreaming may be more of a byproduct of neurochemical regulation than an end in itself.
If all that existed were Hobson`s choice, we would be left with a reductionist theory that seems ultimately unsatisfying. But then there is the other major theory of dreaming-the theory of Rosalind Cartwright.
Cartwright accepts Hobson and McCarley`s idea that the pons stimulates REM. Where she splits off from them is in their notion of randomness. To Cartwright, there is nothing random about dreams. They flow together across the night, she asserts, in a coherent pattern of related themes.
”What makes Hobson`s work attractive is it is based on good neurophysiology,” Cartwright says, sitting in her smallish office in the old section of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s. ”But what puts holes in it is that he doesn`t wake people up, and I do. I have examined thousands of dream records, and what I see is that the images aren`t random at all. They are well chosen to express the emotions we feel from the previous day. The images are far too specific and too interrelated from dream to dream to happen purely by chance.”
Nor are they cryptic, as Freud believed. ”The reason our dreams used to seem cryptic,” she says, ”is because our memory for dreams is so poor. We forget them the minute we begin to move around on waking. Before we had sleep laboratories, all people could recall was the tag end of their last dream. But the lab makes the mind look sensible again.”
Cartwright believes that human beings maintain a memory bank for emotions, just as they do for information, and that a filing system exists for both. Emotional material, she says, is stored in networks of related associations and feelings that can be teased out like long strings of sausages. The pons may be the instigator of dreams, Cartwright says, but it acts by lighting up specific memory networks that are already on the front burner due to current psychological concerns.
”As you start the night,” she says, ”you tap into a particular network of feelings, and that network stays at the ready all night, more vulnerable to be excited each time the brain goes into REM. I think we can map these networks. They are a huge number of images tied to a particular feeling, and the feeling is what connects all of them. Some are old, some are new, and they are layered and scotch-plaided in such a way that you are continually getting new combinations of dreams.”
And the importance of this? Cartwright`s eyes bulge at the question. ”Do you know how hard an analyst has to work to get into those networks of feeling? To learn why we have specific fears and anxieties? What wouldn`t an analyst give to be able to get into those old memory networks easily, to tug on a present concern and have the original fear flop out like a fish. I think they are all there in our dreams and accessible, all our unconscious fears and motivations.”
To Cartwright, the function of dreaming is not arcane but clear. ”It is to test out the programmed image we all carry around of ourselves, to keep a stable sense of identity. We take the new experiences of each day and match them against the program of ourselves at night. Say you get fired. You will get stuck in a series of dreams dealing with failure. There will be associated themes challenging the image of the highly successful person you think you are. Often you have to reach back into deep memory. Did I ever have such an experience before? Well, yes, I have. I flunked 8th grade. Eventually you reach an accommodation. I had a rotten boss, you might decide.”
It is this silent sentinel lurking in all of us that Cartwright thinks we can reach, making subtle but important adjustments. ”I want the unconscious to talk to the unconscious directly and say, `You`re okay, you can manage.` ”
Rosalind Cartwright knows something about depression and divorce. Years ago, she was a young Ph.D. psychologist who had made a name for herself, first with a pioneering study of empathy-how one person learns to understand another-and later by investigating which traits make some psychotherapists succeed and others fail. She was also a wife and the mother of two daughters. Then one day she learned her husband was having an affair with her married secretary. Full of empathy and understanding, she followed him from Chicago to Boulder, Colo., after he left town fearing retribution from the secretary`s husband. Whereupon he repaid Cartwright`s loyalty by leaving her.
”There I was with no job, two kids, stuck in a strange town nursing a big depression,” she recalls. ”For 18 months, I did nothing but cry.” When she returned to Chicago in 1964, taking a job as chief psychologist at the University of Illinois Medical School, she became absorbed in a study of the effect of hallucinogens on student volunteers. After listening to the students express what struck her as waking dreams, she resolved to build a sleep laboratory at the university to compare hallucinations with actual dreams. ”I thought maybe we had a way of reading the unconscious while people were awake,” she says.
The experiment with the hallucinogen turned sour. ”The drug was bad news,” she says with a shudder. ”But I was hooked on studying dreaming and sleep from that point on.”
It was not a big jump to make. Cartwright had been nurtured on dreams as a child by her mother, a poet. Her father was a fey vagabond who immersed himself successively in Shakespearean acting, the study of law, marine biology, the teaching of English literature, New York state politics, building contracting, real estate development and the popularization of theater and cinema, dragging his family all over the United States and Canada as he followed his whims. Cartwright`s mother dutifully put up with it all, getting everyone to bed before sitting down at midnight to write poetry. ”She drew on her dreams for her imagery,” says Cartwright, who grew up thinking of dreams ”as another natural language, an aspect of life that was understandable and accessible.”
After setting up her sleep lab in the mid-1960s, Cartwright threw herself into the study of dreams, trying to make sense out of this odd state that consumes 50,000 hours of our lives. For a while she investigated whether stimuli applied just before sleep would be incorporated in the night`s dreams. This made her a controversial figure when she began showing volunteers stag movies to see if it would provoke sexual dreams. ”There were no porno movies as such back then,” she says. ”I had to borrow ridiculous old stag reels from the Kinsey Institute. We had one called `The Wedding Night` in which the groom never even took off his shoes and socks.” For a short time, she even studied whether our powers of ESP are heightened during dreams. The answer:
Yes, they seem to be.
With the passing years, during which time she transferred her sleep clinic to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s in 1977, she has become a major figure in the small fraternity of dream researchers, internationally acclaimed for her contributions to a science that is often seriously hampered by the elusiveness and subjectivity of its subject matter.
All the while she has never lost her fascination with dreams, especially her own. When her 28-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident in 1983, she had months of terrible dreams. ”I grew her up all over again,”
Cartwright says. ”She was a toddler in a snowsuit. She would be crying and I`d rescue her, night after night. And every night she would get older. The last dream broke my heart. I was in a crowded elevator, and she came up beside me as an adult. I said, `Chrissy, it`s so great to see you, I thought you were dead.` And she said, `I am, but I came to be with you till you got used to the idea.` And we rode the elevator together. It was like `Topper.` I was talking to her, and nobody else could see her. I thought it would be the last dream, and it was, because I was ready to let her go.”
A dark-haired, energetic woman of 66, Cartwright spends much of her time performing psychotherapy and running her busy sleep clinic, where she treats such nocturnal disorders as a potentially lethal snoring condition called sleep apnea, insomnia, narcolepsy, sleepwalking and children`s night terrors. She also has studied a newly recognized phenomenon called REM behavior disorder, in which people lose the normal protective mechanism of muscle paralysis during REM. It is this paralysis that keeps us from acting out our dreams. But some people, particularly elderly men, lose this safety feature and begin jumping out windows, putting their hands around their mates` throats and the like.
Cartwright has testified on behalf of several defendants who actually committed murder while allegedly dreaming, including a Toronto man who stabbed his mother-in-law to death. He was acquitted last June in what appears to be the first successful sleep defense.
But Cartwright`s main love is studying the dynamics of dreaming-and, for the moment, her experiment in dream reshaping. So far, she has tried remolding the egos of four people through their dreams-admittedly a small sample, ”but the improvement has been dramatic.”
In weeks to come, Cartwright expects to try the new treatment on at least six more depressed people from her divorce study, including at least one person in the more difficult-to-treat group that lacks the early-dream marker. The money to support the research is essentially coming out of her own pocket, but her ultimate goal is to convince the federal agencies that administer research grants that she has discovered what she calls ”a short-cut treatment for depression.”
”This is wild-blue-yonder stuff, and I don`t know if it will work in everybody,” she says, ”but so far it`s produced results in every case in just a matter of eight weeks.”
So where does it leave Freud? she is asked. ”Asleep,” she says, laughing gaily.
The research will, at least in part, be the subject of her new book, when it is complete. She allows as how she has already given it a working title.
”I think I am going to call it `The Dream Doctor.` Only the word
”doctor” does not refer to me. It refers to the reader. You and your dream are the doctor.”
