Psychology

What do dreams mean?

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who believed dreams reveal the unconscious, and that dream analysis can unlock this repository of repressed feelings.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams Throughout history, people have believed that dreams foretell the future and contain potent symbols. Most dreams, when the dreamer is wakened and questioned, are about quite dull and everyday events. Occasionally there are the bizarre and erotic elements that have provoked philosophers, religions and modem psychoanalysis to view dreams as containing a range of clues or answers to questions about ourselves.

Not everyone remembers their dreams, but those who do have no difficulty understanding why people have always been fascinated by dreams and dreaming. Our dreams may shock, disgust or delight us, or they may be so vivid that the emotions they provoke can affect our mood for the entire day. So although some scientists may have no time for the layman's fascination with dream interpretation, we cannot dismiss our dreams entirely.

There can be few cultures that have not attached significance to the meaning of dreams. In the Bible, stories of dreams and their interpretation abound. One of the most famous examples, in the book of Genesis, is the Pharaoh's dream of the seven lean kine (cattle) devouring the seven fat kine, which Joseph interpreted as seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who died in 322 BC, had a theory about why we dream. He rejected the idea then in vogue that dreams were sent by the gods, and suggested instead that dreams resulted from images which people had seen or thought about earlier being retained in the mind. Some cultures make little distinction between dream events and reality. For example, a Paraguayan Indian dreamt that a missionary shot him, and then tried to kill the missionary. In other cultures, people are, or were, expected to carry out their dreams. Among some natives of Kamchatka, in Russia,a man bad only to dream of sexual intercourse with a woman for her to be obliged to allow him this favour. There is an example from the 18th century of an Iroquois Indian who dreamt that ten friends dived into a hole in the ice on a lake, and emerged through another. Told of the dream, the friends obliged - but only nine came up through the second hole.

The answers may lie in dreams Some have believed that we can learn while we're asleep (above, sleeping US airmen being fed information in tests). Others believe we can learn from dreams. The German chemist Friedrich Kekulé worked for years to discover the molecular structure of benzene. One night, dozing in front of a fire, he saw an image of many snake-like structures. Then one of the snakes took its tall In its mouth - and Kekulé realised in a flash that the structure of benzene was a ring of carbon atoms (left).

In some countries, dreams play an important role in marking life events. For example, in Jamaica it is said some women do not believe they are pregnant until they have dreamt of a ripe fruit bursting to show its seeds.

The grandfather of all dream interpretation in recent times must be the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who died in 1939. He believed dreams were the expression of unacceptable and therefore repressed sexual desires. He decided, for example, that dreams that involved walking up stairs, playing piano or any rhythmic activity were really about sexual intercourse.

Carl Jung, another psychoanalyst, disagreed. He hypothesised that dreams gave people information from a sort of store of ancestral experience -the collective unconscious.
More recently, speculations about why we dream have gained from scientific investigation into sleep. We now know that most dreaming takes place during REM sleep. Human adults spend about 1.5 hours a night in REM sleep and thus approximately the same amount of time dreaming. This may come as a surprise to those who believe that they rarely, if ever,dream. People are much more likely to recall their dreams if they wake up during or shortly after REM sleep. So those who tend not to remember their dreams, and would like to do so, might have more success if they set their alarm clocks for an hour or two earlier than usual.

Our memory for dreams quickly fades, unlike our memory for the events of real life. Dream enthusiasts recommend writing them down immediately on awakening if you want to remember them. Apart from the written record, this activity also transfers the content of the dream to your conscious mind, making recall easier.

It is a popular myth that dreams take place in seconds even though they may feel as though they have taken many minutes. The origin of this idea may lie with the French doctor Alfred Maury, who lived in the last century. He had a lengthy dream that he was brought before a revolutionary court, questioned, sentenced to death, led to the scaffold and beheaded. When he woke in a panic, he found that part of his bed had fallen on his neck - and decided that the whole dream must have happened very quickly, stimulated by the physical pressure on his neck. But recent studies, in which people were woken after they started dreaming and asked how long they had been dreaming, have shown that our own assessments of the length of our dreams are fairly accurate.

Colin Shapiro, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, adds that new-born babies have about eight hours of REM sleep a day. "This strikes me as one of the most impressive facts that we have about dreaming. Perhaps dreaming is something to do with brain growth and forming new connections between brain cells. If so, then dreaming is a pretty useful thing for babies to be doing."

Dreaming may indeed be something to do with consolidating new information: one recent study found the amount of dreaming done by people made to carry out new and difficult tasks increased greatly. Others have suggested exactly the opposite: that dreams make it possible for us to "wipe the slate clean" and eliminate unwanted information from the brain.

There is some evidence that our dreams can help us stay in touch with our health. Professor Shapiro says in the British Medical Journal that dreams may reflect the presence of disease, and may even cause or precipitate disease. One study found that people with severe heart disease (the extent of which had not been clarified at that stage) had significantly more dreams dealing with separation and death. In another study, elderly people who dreamt of "lost resources" were more likely to show loss of brain tissue on a brain scan, though they had no overt signs of brain deterioration.

Why do some people remember their dreams more often and more clearly than others? People's personalities may also influence recall of dreams. Professor Shapiro says: "Some people who are very in touch with their emotions recall their dreams very well. Others, with "alexithymic" personalities (people for whom the emotional side of their lives is not very significant) do not recall their dreams." Professor Shapiro is currently researching whether the dream recall of "alexithymic" people is improved if they are woken up during REM sleep.

Professor Allan Hobson, of Harvard Medical School, says it's easy to answer the question of why people dream. "It's because the brain is activated during sleep," he says. "The real question we should be asking is:'Why is the brain activated during sleep?"'
Sharon Kingman

Nightmares: something to be frightened about? The word nightmare has less to do with wild horses than many artistic interpretations would have us believe. The term is in fact derived from "night" plus the Old English meaning evil spirit. Nightmares most commonly affect children, but about half of all adults have occasional nightmares and about one in a hundred adults suffers from nightmares once a week. Nightmares are really just bad dreams. Like ordinary dreams, they occur during REM sleep, late in the period of sleep, during which the body muscles are paralysed. On waking up, the sufferer is immediately aware of his or her surroundings and can often recall the nightmare in detail. Night terrors are rather different. They affect fewer than one in thirty children, most commonly those aged two to six, and fewer than one in a hundred adults. They usually occur within the first two hours of going to sleep. Sufferers normally scream and appear to be terror-stricken. They may thrash about in bed or sit bolt upright, and they do not respond to touch or speech during the night terror. After a night terror, sufferers will normally have little recall of the event, except possibly for a feeling of falling or choking, for example. Parental concern for a child who suffers from night terrors may cause the child more anxiety than the night terrors themselves. Doctors recommend seeking medical advice if they persist for longer than about three months. Sleepwalking is closely related to night terrors in that it occurs during the deepest stage of non-REM sleep when the muscles are not paralysed. A sleepwalker gets up and walks about, eyes open, and may utter meaningless phrases. Sleepwalkers are hard to waken - the best strategy is to guide them gently back to bed without waking them up. People who go straight from stage four sleep to wakefulness have a propensity to sleepwalk. Sleepwalking should not be dismissed lightly. Sleepwalkers have been known to injure themselves severely. Anyone who sleepwalks, or whose children sleepwalk, should take measures to reduce the risk of accidents by, for example, fitting bars on upstairs windows, stair gates and locks on doors. Crimes have been committed by some people who sleepwalk or suffer from night terrors. In one famous case in 1985, a 33-year-old salesman was acquitted of murdering his wife, whom he claimed he had strangled during his sleep. He said he had been having a dream that he was being attacked by two Japanese soldiers. The jury chose to believe psychiatrists who gave evidence on the defendant's behalf that he had been suffering from a vivid night terror at the time, and acquitted him.

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Nov93 p60