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Dreams and Your Sleep

Was Freud right? Are all our dreams about sex? Or was Carl Jung right, and dreams are a chance to integrate our personality? What has modern science contributed to this debate? The answer is simple, says a noted sleep scientist: if you believe your dreams are meaningful, then they are. There are even ways to better recall your dreams and even “wake up” inside a dream—a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming.

Dreams and Dreaming: Why We Dream and How to Do it Better

Can anything be more typically human than the fact that we dream? Actually, it’s not our dreams that make us different— cats and dogs and other mammals dream too. What makes us human is that we insist on interpreting our dreams.

In this article, we’ll look at the history of dream interpretation, and at what sleep scientists make of it today. Then we’ll pass on some hints for remembering and working with your dreams, whether to enhance creativity, gain insight into personal issues, or just have fun- including waking up inside your own dream!

Dream history, from Greeks to Geeks

Like other ancient peoples, the Greeks considered dreams as sources of healing and prophecy; many people today still believe so too (“I dreamed Aunt Sally would miss her flight, and she did!”). More recently, Freud did his best to make us feel guilty about our dreams by insisting they had only one subject: sex. Hats, umbrellas, bridges, landscapes, heavy machinery, you name it— everything was a symbol for one set of genitalia or another. Another famous psychologist, Carl Jung, also believed dreams were full of symbols, but to him they represented different parts of our personalities that needed integration.

In the 1950s, sleep scientists discovered that dreams occurred during a stage of sleep known as Rapid Eye Movement, or REM. Quite literally, we move our eyes back and forth during our dreams because we’re watching whatever it is we’re dreaming about.

Scientists such as Allan Hobson of Harvard have speculated that dreams are merely the brain’s way of making sense of random bursts of electrical activity from the brainstem— which would suggest that dreams are essentially meaningless. More recently, however, other scientists have shown that although such bursts of electrical activity do occur, more complex areas of the brain quickly get involved. The manner in which this plays out in our dreams is driven by current events in our lives, and our preoccupations- past and present. Research has also shown that dreaming helps us retain things we’ve recently learned. But beyond that, science hasn’t gotten all that much further than the ancient Greeks.

How, then, should we think about our dreams? Perhaps we should take the advice of another prominent sleep researcher, William C. Dement of Stanford University. Dement has great respect for dreams— it was a nightmare about being diagnosed with lung cancer that convinced him to quit smoking back in 1964. He puts it this way: if we believe a dream has meaning for us, then it does.

Improving Dream Recall

Working with your dreams requires remembering them. Fortunately, dream recall quickly improves with practice. Some tips:

• Get plenty of good sleep, because the most vivid and enjoyable dreams occur in the morning when you’re well-rested. For this reason, be sure to practice good sleep hygiene.
• Keep a dream journal by your bed for writing down your dreams. To build recall, write down everything, even the smallest scraps or feelings.
• Remind yourself when falling asleep that you want to remember your dreams. When you wake up, ask yourself, “Was I dreaming?”
• If you do find you have woken from a dream, don’t move! Changing body position may actually drive the dream from your memory.
• Dream recall usually works in reverse: you remember the last scene, then the scene before that, then the scene before that, and so on till the beginning of the dream. It’s like gently pulling on a thread. When you’ve remembered all you can, write it down.

Working With Your Dreams

What can you do with dreams, once you begin remembering them more often? You can just enjoy them. Or you can see if they remind you of people or situations in real life and if they might shed some insight. Or you can even share them with others at web sites such as Dream Journal.

You can also consult books, of course. Avoid books about dreams as such— they’re liable to be poor attempts at dream “dictionaries.” Instead, look for books about dreaming, which are more likely to give you a process that you can use to explore your own dreams. One of the best of these is Patricia Garfield’s “Creative Dreaming,” which is still selling briskly in an updated version more than 30 years after it first came out. Garfield will lead you through a variety of exercises to develop a personal dream vocabulary, end nightmares, and enhance creativity, among other benefits.

Lucid dreaming for fun and more

Garfield even has a section on the most challenging dream adventure of all: how to literally wake up inside your dreams. This phenomenon is known as “lucid dreaming.” Although it may seem incredible, sporadic instances have been documented for centuries. More recently, sleep researcher Steven LaBerge (F) of Stanford University, has developed a system for reliably inducing lucid dreams for all kinds of purposes, including rehearsing real-world situations ahead of time, solving difficult problems, and enhancing healing.

To learn more, visit LaBerge’s Lucidity Institute. In the meantime, here are a couple of tidbits to whet your appetite:

• Lucidity can be weak or strong. With weak lucidity, you have only a hazy idea you’re dreaming. With strong lucidity, you’re fully as aware as when awake— meaning you can play around as much as you like, knowing it’s impossible for you to get hurt.
• Lucid dreaming is hard to learn, but gets easier with practice. One strange means of practicing is to “test reality” while you’re awake. For example, you can try jumping up, to see if you suddenly start floating as you would in a dream. By testing the laws of physics when you’re awake, you’re more likely to do so in a dream— which can trigger lucid dreaming when you actually do find yourself floating upward.

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