Dreaming, like sleep itself, is a highly subjective phenomenon that has been interpreted in contradictory ways during different historical periods, in different societies, and by different individuals. Until quite recently, however, it seemed there was one thing that everyone agreed about—that dreams are important.
From ancient times, when biblical characters like Joseph or Daniel could ascend to high position based on their ability to interpret dreams, to Freud, whose revolutionary book The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, there has been a sense that dreams are occurrences we can learn from. At first it was believed that dreams could tell us about the future of an entire society—whether there would be famine, for instance, or whether an invasion was coming. More recently, the importance of dreams was seen in more concentrated terms: If dreams could no longer tell us about the world at large, they could still reveal important truths about the individual dreamer.
I personally believe that dreams are important, or at least some of them are. Aside from the issue of interpretation, there’s no doubt that certain dreams, such as nightmares, can influence how you feel and how you behave the following day. It’s also true that certain happy dreams can allow you to start the day feeling particularly well; some can even cause you to wake up laughing. Quite as much as the actual amount of time spent sleeping, dreams can mean the difference between a good night’s sleep and a bad one.
Let’s now consider some of the more interesting and enigmatic qualities of dreams, especially those qualities that seem related to insomnia. We’ll also see how modern scientific methods, as well as the tradition of Ayurveda, have understood these dream characteristics.
As discussed earlier, the purpose of sleep is to rest and restore the physiology. Like a rechargeable battery, the sleeping body goes into a sort of diminished state of functioning for a period of time that allows it to regain the energy that was used up during the hours when it was “on.”
This model of the recharging battery makes perfect sense when applied to many of the bodily functions—except during the REM (rapid eye movement) period of sleep, which is when dreaming occurs, and which lasts about two hours during a normal night’s sleep. For most of our sleep time, such measures as heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure are lowered. But with the onset of REM, metabolism reaches a higher rate, the kidneys begin working harder, and, in men, the penis becomes erect. With respect to the brain, the metaphor of the battery begins to grow even dimmer. That is because in some important respects—blood flow to the brain, for example—the dreaming brain is even more active than the waking one.
According to Dr. William C. Dement, a leading sleep researcher at Stanford University, it makes perfect sense that the brain is so busy during the REM period. The dreaming brain is, after all, doing everything it does during waking hours, and even more. During waking hours the brain needs only to respond to a preexisting external reality, and then to implement the appropriate physiological responses. These responses can take the form of bodily movements, spoken words, or thoughts. The dreaming brain, on the other hand, has to create an entire internal reality, as well as respond to it.
If, for example, a runaway horse is charging toward you during your waking hours, your brain will receive a message that the horse is coming, and it will respond by sending a message to your legs to take you out of the way. But when a horse charges toward you in a dream, your brain has had to create that horse, not just receive a message about it. Furthermore, the neural response that your dreaming brain sends to your legs is every bit as highly developed as it would be if you were awake. The response message travels through your nervous system all the way to your legs, only to be neutralized at the last instant by the unique bodily paralysis that characterizes the REM period. The impulse to run away turns into, at the very most, a barely perceptible twitch of a muscle—but that isn’t because the brain didn’t try its hardest.
Remember: Nature doesn’t do anything for nothing. If the purpose of sleep is indeed to restore the body, we must account for the fact that during a significant portion of our sleep time this restoration isn’t accomplished simply through passive rest. Instead, a positive, active process is taking place that requires significant energy.
This seems a paradox. How can the energy expenditure be justified in the cause of rest? Why doesn’t nature, which we’ve described as always taking the path of least resistance, simply take the easy way out and shut everything down all night long?
There must be some way to account for the physiological work that’s required to create all the animals, answering machines, and antique stores that comprise the parables of our dreams. Any number of solutions have been proposed to explain. Unfortunately, they don’t lead to any single overwhelming conclusion, but are instead as paradoxical as dreams themselves.
One of the most hazardous concepts in scientific thinking is known as the Ptolemaic fallacy. This term is derived from the description of the universe according to the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, whose work accurately accounted for the observable phenomena, but was in fact wrong. In other words, the sun seems to be rotating around the Earth, and you can develop a whole cosmology based on that appearance. But the sun isn’t rotating around the Earth, regardless of how it seems.
With respect to the purpose of dreams, there are many approaches that seem to account for what is taking place, but in reality they may be accurate representations of nothing except the creativity of the investigator. That doesn’t mean they don’t seem convincing, however. It is easy for an extremely intelligent person, especially a scientist, to build an argument that can convince a layperson or even the public at large. In the eighteenth-century novel Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson, a scientist explains a set of mechanical wings he’s invented which will allow people to fly like birds. His argument is beautifully wrought and extremely convincing, even to the modern reader. It’s very difficult to find anything wrong with it. Of course, when the character jumps off a roof, the elegance of his reasoning doesn’t help him.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, thought that dreams were a way of processing wishes that could not safely be acted out in the waking world. Instead, they’re acted out in the dreaming world, with the body paralyzed and unable to get into any trouble. But does anyone really wish to have a horse come charging at him, as in the dream I mentioned above? Perhaps not—but the dream is only a disguised form of the repressed wish. If the wish were dreamed in a too straightforward fashion, the dreamer would awaken in fear of the productions of his own brain, and the biological benefits of sleep would be lost. In fact, according to Freud, this is exactly what happens in nightmares.
So Freud sees dreams as a sort of compromised version of fulfilling wishes that are unacceptable to the conscious mind, under the need of the body to get the rest that sleep provides.
Freud’s thinking has been of monumental influence throughout this century, of course. Even those more recent investigators who disagree with his conclusions (as most of them do) find themselves having to deal with the issues that Freud raised, and even use some of his terminology.
For example, studies of sleeping cats by researchers at Harvard University revealed that bursts of brain activity occur at intervals during REM sleep. These “brainstorms” flood the neural pathways. Believing that similar bursts of activity occur in humans, the researchers infer that it’s the task of the sleeping human brain to deal with these sudden floods of random sensory data. In order to do so, the brain does its best to create a story that weaves everything together. The brain naturally draws upon the dreamer’s wishes and fears in order to accomplish this, as in the Freudian theory, but repression has no place in the brainstorm doctrine. Far from trying to hide anything, the brain is looking for whatever it can find to help make sense of the data.
In a related theory, the sleeping brain is again described as weaving together a large amount of raw data, but instead of originating as sudden neural bursts from inside itself, the random material now derives from the events of the previous day in the waking world, with all its comings and goings, conversations, and so forth. During REM sleep, the brain creates a story line that allows this large volume of events to be stored and remembered in a coherent form, albeit at an unconscious level. According to this theory, the dream is an elaborate mnemonic device for the events of your life. A dream is really a memory aid.
Or perhaps the purpose of dreams is to help us forget. Research by the eminent Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule, concludes that the neural bursts that occur during REM are really a form of cleansing the system. The brain is simply dumping its electrical garbage. This approach has an undeniable logic in its favor. After all, we usually don’t remember our dreams, so it must not have been nature’s intention that we should do so.
Ayurveda is above all a practical system. Since dreams have a less direct influence on health and well-being than issues such as digestion or nutrition, Ayurvedic authorities had less to say about them than did other, more mystical traditions. But Ayurveda does offer a number of insights about dreams and dreamers.
As in waking life, the key influence on an individual’s dreams is his or her body type.
Vata types typically have very imaginative dreams that are colored by fear or anxiety. This tendency becomes more pronounced as the dosha goes out of balance—so if you are a Vata type and you notice your dreams becoming more intense, you should take steps to restore stability. Of course, even if this is not your primary dosha, you can have frightening dreams when your Vata is unbalanced. In Ayurveda, such dreams are understood as a natural correction, your body’s way of getting disturbed Vata back into balance. We’ll deal more specifically with this in a moment, when we discuss nightmares.
Pitta types have active, adventurous dreams, often characterized by angry or conflicting situations such as fights or mysteries. It’s interesting to note that dream research shows these themes to be primarily male characteristics. Women’s dreams typically feature more conversation than hard action. Women’s dreams also tend to be set in interior locations more than men’s.
Kapha types have serene dreams that are usually not recalled. It’s possible that Kaphas, who are typically very deep, sound sleepers, spend more time in the dreamless, delta phase of sleep than in the REM phase.
One of the reasons I think dreams are important is that they’ve had a profound influence on our cultural heritage. For instance, it’s very difficult to imagine what Western literature would be like if human beings didn’t dream. For example, in the works of Shakespeare, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, and a number of other plays would have to be fundamentally different. This central importance of dreams is true for Oriental literature as well.
But it’s not just dreams that are important to the history of the human imagination—it’s nightmares that are important. The paintings of Goya and Fuseli, the novels of Dostoyevsky and Kafka, and the music of Schoenberg come to mind as being explicitly influenced by the experience of anxiety-laden dreams.
And for our purposes here, nightmares are significant as well. Because while they may foster the creation of a great work of art, they can most definitely wreck a good night’s sleep.
Sleep research has revealed a number of characteristics by which nightmares can be defined:
A nightmare causes the sleeper to awaken from REM usually in a state of fear but without physical symptoms such as rapid pulse or sweating. These in turn are characteristic of “sleep terrors,” which occur during delta sleep.
Nightmares are often recalled in their entirety by the dreamer, and often in great detail.
Frequently, people who suffer from nightmares can recognize recurring themes, and sometimes a whole dream repeats itself many times, occasionally for many years.
Considered by themselves, nightmares are not an especially important cause of insomnia: approximately 5 percent of the adult American population is bothered by them at any given time. Nightmares may, however, be a symptom of other, more basic issues. For example, a high percentage of chronic nightmare sufferers have experienced a traumatic event or period in their lives that has remained unresolved, perhaps even unrecognized. Another large segment of the nightmare-troubled population have had these dreams since childhood, often for reasons that contemporary medicine is unable to identify—although an Ayurvredic diagnosis would most likely be able to identify the cause in a dosha imbalance. I will have more to say about this in the next chapter, when we discuss the problem of childhood-onset insomnia.
If your insomnia is caused or exacerbated by nightmares, the best course is probably what we’ve been saying all along: You must look to your waking life to understand what’s happening to your sleep. Many nightmares don’t have a deep underlying cause. There may be tension at work or within your family. Clinical experience shows that once this is identified and dealt with, the troubling dreams disappear. It’s as simple as that.
While it used to be said that eating certain foods shortly before bed could cause nightmares, this has not been demonstrated in any rigorously structured studies. There is no doubt, however, that nightmares can be brought on by taking the wrong medication, and especially by drinking too much alcohol. Once again, the solution is quite simple.