The Science and Symbols
of Sleep and Dreams
That we come to this earth to live is untrue.
We come but to sleep, to dream.1
– Aztec poet
This chapter takes us into a creative investigation of the sleep cycle. Drawing on a dream-based narrative to portray the relationship between sleep and dreams, we first move imaginatively through real-world knowledge of sleep health and disorders to dreaming states, including an introduction to lucid dreaming. We then look more closely at what advances in research suggest about how dreaming helps to shape our sense of self, from the womb through to the end of life. In light of this research, we consider how therapeutic dream-work enhances our emotional life by enabling us to re-access our dreams and to apply the energy and learning held in them so as to transform our waking life. A series of my own dreams, appearing in chronological order throughout the chapter, brings to life the concepts discussed and also gives you a personal sense of the points I am making.
Let us begin our creative exploration of sleep and dreams by imagining ourselves sitting next to a stone-ringed campfire on the shore of a still lake on a warm, moonlit summer’s night. Here we sit, companionably watching the play of firelight and shadows as we talk about the nature of sleep and dreams. As fireside conversations invite storytelling, to prepare you for an exploration of the sleep cycle, I will tell you one of my own dreams as a story, one that gives a picture of the relationship between sleep, dreams and the imagination:
A young man and woman in their twenties stand looking out over a mountain lake set in an immense, granite basin. The lake’s shiny pitch-black surface does not appear to reflect the moonlight. Naked, the young man dives joyfully into the water, calling out for the young woman to join him. Suddenly, she finds herself naked too, and dives into the black waters.
Upon diving in, she feels surprised to see shafts of golden light illuminating the lakebed, where large squares made of copper carved in intricate patterns, like the designs of Islamic prints, cover the ground. Through the backdrop of the design, more darkness appears, suggesting that the lake has further depths. As the woman admires the beautiful squares, the young man swims over to her, laughing, and then swims on playfully. She swims after him, aware that she can breathe underwater. Then she awakes.
Reflecting on the dream now, I associate the young man with the ancient Greek god of sleep, Hypnos, enticing us into the depths of sleep and dreams. Born of the goddess Nyx (or night), Hypnos has a sweet, playful disposition, a natural innocence, in contrast to his twin brother, Thanatos, who portends Death. Yet, in our nightly sleep, we do, in one sense, ‘die’. We die to consciousness of the waking state as we enter other realms, whose characteristics and benefits we have only recently begun to understand. This symbolic ‘death’ takes us out of the routine and stress of the work-a-day world into the ‘Imaginal World’ of sleep and dreams.2 Imagination in this ‘world’ acts as an ‘image-making, form-giving, creative activity’, rather than a superficial fantasy.3
No matter how much we may try to evade the nightly call of Hypnos, distracting ourselves with endless to-do lists, diversions and detours, or taking stimulants to keep us going, ultimately we must become stripped of our waking consciousness and surrender nakedly to sleep.
Returning to our lakeside campfire, we leave behind the night-defying artificial light of the urban world that dims the stars and moon and instead look up and wonder at the incandescent stars. We can rest our eyes from the incessant glare of technologies that obscure our natural light–dark cycle, our body’s circadian rhythm, as the fire’s hypnotic flames and glowing embers calm us. Our circadian ‘clock’, set over 4 billion years to the spinning timepiece of the earth’s rotation, pivots between the sun and moon. Every cell in our bodies responds to the cycle of day and night, sleep and waking, as does all life on Earth, hardwired to respond with extraordinary biological sensitivity to the daily cycle of the planet’s 24-hour circadian rhythm. Awake and alert by day, by night we sleep for seven to nine hours, not uniformly but in 90-minute cycles, four to five times a night, with momentary periods of waking between cycles.4 Living close to Nature, we follow the natural pattern of sleep in accordance with our internal body clock.
However, many of us living in the ‘developed world’ regularly attempt to circumvent this rhythm by staying up late. A 2016 survey revealed that 75 per cent of Britons go to bed after 11:00 pm and routinely get only five to seven hours’ sleep – a loss of one whole night’s sleep a week and resulting in a 20 per cent loss of dream time!5 Overriding the evolutionary forces that determine our sleep/wake cycle has proven to be seriously detrimental to public health. In 2007, the World Health Organization included long-term ‘circadian disruption’ as a possible cause of carcinogens in humans, particularly breast and prostate cancer.6
The body takes the forced pace of modernity literally to heart. Chronic, work-related sleep disruption has been linked to coronary heart disease – a bruising, 12-hour-plus work shift increases the chances of heart problems by as much as 40 per cent.7 When we work longer to get more done, far from achieving more, we increase our chances of making errors on the job threefold, dulling the very qualities we need to be truly productive: concentration, recall, accuracy and decisiveness.8
In 2016, the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) noted that by the year 2000, sleep disturbance had already been identified in the United Kingdom as ‘the most common expression of mental ill-health for men and women over the previous 15 years.’9 Hoping to wake us up to the health benefits of sleep, the RSPH has compiled an eye-opening list of risks associated with sleep deprivation, with no less than a total of 36 potential ill-effects linked respectively to our physical and mental health, as well as to our behaviour and performance.10 In addition to the increased risk of cancer and heart disease, loss of sleep weakens the immune system, causes metabolic imbalances and adds to weight gain. Poor ‘sleep health’ destabilises our emotional equilibrium, contributing to depression, anxiety, outbursts of anger and, tragically, an increased risk of suicide. Losing out on just one hour of sleep not only detrimentally effects our performance at work, but also interferes with getting to and from work, contributing to an estimated 20 per cent of road traffic accidents.11
Accordingly, the RSPH recommends the inclusion of sleep health in the school curriculum and the creation of a ‘Slumber Number’, a national helpline for sleep advice. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) now posts helpful tips for ‘Sleep Hygiene’ online, advocating regular sleeping hours, a gadget-free hour to wind down before bedtime, a warm bath, a sleep-friendly bedroom – one without a television – and a sleep diary to track sleep patterns.12 To this can be added avoiding stimulants like alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, especially in the evening, when the body and mind are meant to shift from the daylight focus on doing to the nocturnal emphasis on being.
Following these guidelines, along with other suggestions found throughout this book, will also improve your ‘Dream Health’. Perhaps one day, the addition of dream health programmes to school curricula as well as a ‘Dream Dial’ helpline will also be recommended! The simplest prescription for a good night’s sleep would be to ‘listen to your body’.13 Thankfully, most of us recognise that we feel better after sleeping for at least seven hours a night. I recall a dream of mine that reminded me of this:
I am in a room with two women, the one on my left a hard-headed, sophisticated businesswoman, and the other, on my right, a gentle and sweet artistic type. We talk about work and what needs to get done. The young woman on my right teaches a choir full-time and says that she does so on Saturdays as well. Thinking of how I also end up doing dreamwork over the weekend, early in the morning hours, after a full week at my day job, I exclaim, ‘Six days a week! You’ll wear yourself out!’ She comes over to me, her eyes deep and round, and says, ‘I want to introduce ever more people to the Holy Choir.’ She says this with incredible sweetness and musicality in her voice. With this, I awake.
The dream invites me to redirect my efforts towards what matters most to me. Only upon waking does the dream’s dramatic irony strike me – I have given the woman in the dream the very advice I don’t follow myself! The dream warns me that by overworking I am putting my health at risk, no matter how laudable my intentions. Here, it is important to dispel the myth that we can make up for sleep that we have lost. Sleep specialist Matthew Walker states this in stark terms: ‘The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of. We cannot accumulate a debt without penalty, nor can we repay that sleep dept at a later time.’14
Having acknowledged the importance of sleep to our wellbeing, let us now come back to our lakeside fire, a million miles away from the reality of 24-hour-plus round-the-clock ‘days’ fuelled by artificial light and the frantic economics of the modern world. Here, as we meditatively watch the hypnotic flames, photosensitive cells in our eyes respond to the soft wavelengths of firelight and the encircling darkness. These receptors signal the pineal gland to increase production of the hormone melatonin that induces and maintains sleep. Our natural tendency towards sleep/wake homeostasis brings us into balance with the circadian cycle, and we begin to feel sleepy. Hypnos has arrived. Night’s coolness cocoons us in still darkness. As our core body temperature begins to fall, additional thermosensitive cells within the brain also induce a rise in the melatonin levels that prime our internal systems for rest.15 Sleep becomes irresistible.
Drifting off, it is as though we have dived into a lake whose surface waters, illuminated by moonlight, reveal strange hypnagogic forms. Within a few minutes, we pass through the initial shallow stage of sleep towards deep sleep, in which our brains begin to fire up with electric charges. These charges form sharp wave-ripples in the deep brain structure of the hippocampus, in which recent events are consolidated into long-term memories. Thalamocortical sleep spindles sift, filter and transform the sensory input from our waking life into memories and help constellate our sense of self. For the next 50 minutes or so, as more spindles flare up across the grey matter of our brain, we become increasingly able to process new information from the preceding day.16
The spindles also protect us from external sounds that might otherwise waken us, so that, shielded, we move into the furthest reaches of what neurologists call non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. In this state, the brain operates at one tenth of the speed it does while we are awake,17 while it regulates essential physiological processes at a cellular level. Our body temperature falls by two to three degrees, and the pulse slows, allowing cerebrospinal fluid to wash away the waste products of cell metabolism.18
Importantly, this fluid appears to wash out the protein beta-amyloid thought to be responsible for the shrinkage of grey matter found in patients with Alzheimer’s disease; thus, a chronic lack of deep sleep may significantly contribute to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.19 Also, in deep sleep, the pineal gland secretes the restorative human growth hormone (HGM), which activates tissue repair in muscles and bones through cell regeneration. This hormone facilitates neuronal repair, key to the neuroplasticity inherent in healthy brain tissue.20 If we miss out on our delta sleep, then we become moody, injuries take more time to heal and the immune system weakens.
Our deep sleep has healing properties for our body and mind. However, during the sleep cycle, the body’s lowered temperature makes it vulnerable, especially during the REM state wherein our body’s inner thermostat loses its capacity for regulating our body temperature.21 To protect us from the dangers of hypothermia, if the temperature of the atmosphere becomes too cool (or too warm), we will wake up before entering the REM state. An ambient temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius), like that of a pleasant summer’s eve, proves ideal for sleep and for dreaming.22
As we move into REM sleep, where the extended narratives characteristic of REM dreaming occur, our heart begins to beat faster and our breathing rate increases. Our brain activates in ways surprisingly similar to the waking state, while our body musculature, apart from that involved in respiration and eye movement, becomes immobilised.
Towards the end of each 90-minute sleep cycle, we embark on ever-longer REM dreaming sessions, from around five minutes in the first 90-minute cycle to some 30 minutes of dreaming in the final cycle of the night. But for the healing balm of nightly sleep across both NREM and REM stages, before long a person would develop signs of mental distress: depression, anxiety, paranoia and, not least, hallucinations.
Thus, whenever the long-distance runner Dean Karnazes ran 100 miles over a period of three days and nights consecutively, he began to hallucinate. Karnazes inherited a genetic characteristic that – combined with his extensive training regime – inhibits the accumulation of lactic acid in his muscles. After running continuously for 72 hours, he had to stop, not because of muscle fatigue, but because he would experience hallucinations.23
It seems likely that both NREM and REM sleep work synergistically in laying down memories that serve to underpin our sense of self.24 This process is thought to begin before birth, during the third trimester, when we spend most of our time asleep in the womb. New technology has vividly shown that the eyelids of a baby asleep in the womb flicker in ways similar to REM sleep.25 We might wonder about what kind of dreams are taking place: auditory impressions from the orchestra of sounds made by the mother’s digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, the rhythmic pulse of her heart, feelings sensed via the mother’s nervous system, the muffled sounds of conversation, the mother’s voice, her singing, fragments of music, modulations of lightness and darkness. During this period, half a million neurons are laid down per day, until at eight months the brain has formed 100 billion neurons – comparable to the number of stars in our galaxy!
Babies born prematurely need to sleep up to 75 per cent of the time, and studies tracking the EEG of premature infants suggest a positive correlation between the proportion of REM sleep and better cognitive outcomes.26 Consequently, neonatal units have taken steps to improve the quality of the infant’s sleep: lights dimmed in the night, routine procedures completed around wake times, and, touchingly, ‘kangaroo care’, whereby the baby sleeps at an upright angle, lying on the parent’s bare chest.27 Newborns spend nearly half of their sleep time in REM sleep compared with 20 per cent for adults.
If we look at the neurochemistry of the dream state in adults, we find a curious paradox: as areas of the brain involved in processing emotional memories become 30 per cent more active than in the waking state,28 there is a surprising drop in the level of the chemical noradrenaline, normally associated with the body’s fight-or-flight response.29 Based on these findings, Walker has proposed that dreams comprise a ‘Biological Theatre’ for ‘overnight therapy’.30 He hypothesises that the fall in noradrenaline during REM dreaming dampens down our emotional reactivity, thereby allowing us to work through painful emotions, for the most part without waking.31
The nocturnal therapy of dreams can be compared with psychotherapy, where, with the support of the therapist, we can safely recall and re-engage with deeply emotional memories. At the same time, the therapy encourages a reflective awareness that gives us a more objective perspective on life. Drawing on language of the theatre, Carl Jung remarked that ‘if the observer [the dreamer] understands that his own drama is being performed on this inner stage, he cannot be indifferent to the plot and its denouement.’32 As ‘Biological Theatre’, the dream, coupled with subsequent dreamwork, provides a new and therapeutic perspective on challenging emotional content, enabling us to better integrate the emotion of the dream scenario and to work more confidently with its meaning.
Sometimes, however, the dreamer can feel overwhelmed by the emotional pain of a real-life trauma revisited in a dream, especially a recurring dream that awakens the dreamer repeatedly, as happens in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this condition, due to the intensity of traumatic flashbacks, noradrenaline levels become unusually heightened. The drug prazosin, normally used for treating high blood pressure, additionally supresses the effect of noradrenaline. On the basis of his research on REM sleep, Walker trialled the use of prazosin in cases of PTSD, and it is now recognised as an approved treatment for recurrent nightmares.
Therapeutic dreamwork, which has also been shown to be successful in the treatment of PTSD patients, gives people a sense of mastery over their nightmares without the use of medication. This matters because two thirds of those who have distressing nightmares mistakenly believe they can’t do anything to change them.33 One of the most widely recognised interventions, Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT), focuses on re-scripting a person’s dreams, thus transforming the experience. Essentially, the person having nightmares rewrites the dream narrative by changing the dream in any way they would like and rehearsing this new version in their imagination at brief interludes during the day and before sleep.
One of the groundbreaking studies in this field, which looked at the dreams of PTSD patients who had suffered sexual abuse, reported dramatic improvements; not only did the participants’ nightmare severity and frequency lessen, so did their PTSD symptoms.34 Nearly 50 per cent of those who completed the study reported using imagery for dealing with problems in waking life.35 Researchers have attributed the participants’ sense of mastery over their nightmares as being at the ‘heart’ of the therapy’s success.36 As we shall see in Chapter Nine, ‘Nightmares: From Fear to Freedom’, mastery over our own fear also proves key in facing nightmares.
For a small number of people, vivid or frightening dreams give rise to strange or out-of-character behaviour while still asleep, including, rarely, acts of self-harm or violence towards others.37 Such sleep disorders, known as parasomnias, sometimes stem from brain lesions or chemical imbalances. If your dream life drastically interferes in unwanted ways with your sleep and your waking life, a medically qualified specialist can help you rule out or identify biological causes that may require specific treatment.
In contrast to the parasomnias, normal REM dreaming provides for neural networks to reconstruct emotionally significant events,38 the theme of a dream often reflecting emotions from the previous day, while details of the dream hold important personal, symbolic meanings.39 Here we can pause in our journey through the sleep cycle to consider how this might play out in an actual dream. I will illustrate this process with a dream of my own that I had shortly after my marriage of 18 years ended in divorce:
I dream that I own an open-plan, two-storey log cabin. One of my brothers has come for a visit. He suddenly tells me the house in on fire, so we have to get out, but that I have time to get a couple of things. I feel sad, but also glad to think, ‘Well, I can start over again.’ The only ‘thing’ that I want to take is my doll Honeybunch that had belonged to my mother. My brother and I are on the second floor, and I can see the flames lapping up from floor to ceiling, but do not feel their heat. I begin to feel worried about how we will get out if the stairs are on fire. Will we have to jump? Then I awake.
Honeybunch has been part of my life as long as I can remember. When my mother was seven, she received Honeybunch as a gift from her own mother for Christmas. At that time, my grandparents had lost their family home because of financial losses during the Great Depression. Grandmother cut off her long thick curls and sold them to buy each of her three daughters a doll. She had a dollmaker weave strands of her cut hair to make each doll’s cascading curls.
Honeybunch has always felt precious to me, but since my mother’s death, she gives me a tangible connection not only to my mother but to all the women in my family tree. She also puts me in touch with the innocent ideals of childhood.
The spontaneous appearance of Honeybunch in my dream connected me to a quiet sense of loving confidence, exactly the feeling that I needed to be reminded of at a time in my life requiring me to take yet another life-changing leap into the unknown. Her silent presence acts as a symbolic reminder of where I have come from, and of my need to remain close to an earthly sense of time and place, as well as a heavenly sense of hope for what is to come.
In the dream, my mind seemingly sifts instantly through all my belongings and their meaningful associations as I discern what choice I need to make before the fire consumes my belongings. I remain calm, for I feel the fire not only destroys but also purifies. Curiously, the fire does not feel hot. Somehow, my dreaming mind created this scenario, along with actors, actions and symbols, scripted perfectly for me. In the short term, this dream helped to lift my mood. In the long term, the dream, and others on a similar theme, supported my emotional recovery from the divorce. This experience of mine anecdotally supports research by Rosalind Cartwright suggesting that, over time, REM dreaming of a specific emotional trauma such as divorce can help to resolve the feelings associated with the waking life event.40
As the dream foregrounds, the highly charged emotional content of a dream can be a powerful catalyst for decisionmaking. How would it be if we could only use formal logic to list, categorise and organise data? We would endlessly weigh up every course of action without being able to draw on the intuitive ‘gut feelings’ we need when deciding to take a course of action in the world.41
Having to make do without the guidance of ‘gut feelings’ occurs in people who have damage to the basal ganglia, located in the brain’s limbic system, fundamental to processing emotions. Studies have shown that such people suffer from a neurological condition called auto-activation deficit (AAD) that causes them to be apathetic, lacking in imagination and emotional range.42 Nor can they take initiative or make decisions. Upon being awoken from REM sleep in the sleep laboratory, people with AAD report unimaginative dreams, with only basic representations of actions and an absence of feelings. In contrast, when the basal ganglia function normally, the limbic system works in tandem with areas of the brain associated with cognition and intuition, enabling dream imagery to facilitate decision-making processes.43
In lucid dreams, when we become aware in a dream that we dream, decision-making comes powerfully to the fore. Research indicates that over half of us will recall having had a lucid dream at least once in our lives, but that fewer than a quarter of us will regularly have lucid dreams.44 Later, in Chapter Ten, ‘Journeys into the Deep: Lucid Dreaming and Lucid Surrender’, we shall see that our capacity for lucid dreaming can be cultivated.
Importantly, in lucidity the dreamer can explore the nature of dreams consciously and in ‘real time’. Lucid dreams provide a dream laboratory for exploration of our personal psychology and of transpersonal awareness. As Jung observes, ‘The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.’45
Prefiguring this vision of the transpersonal, as early as the sixteenth century the alchemist Heinrich Khunrath called the visionary dream space ‘The Theatre of Secrets’.46 In Khunrath’s view, the dream ‘theatre’ served as both an alchemical laboratory, where the dreamer could experience the ‘labours’ associated with the features of everyday life, and as an ‘oratory’, a hallowed space, in which the sacred quality of human spiritual nature could be realised.47
Such has been my own experience in lucidity, as in the following dream in which I become fully aware that I dream and so make a conscious choice:
I swim in a deep pool of golden water. Although I swim underwater effortlessly, I suddenly become concerned about my breathing. In a panic, I try to get up to the water’s surface. But as I become lucid, I recall that in the spiritual teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, water symbolises spiritual knowledge. Then I understand that what appears to my mind as ‘water’, a kind of liquid amber, actually is Spirit, expressed in golden light. I remind myself how when we use ‘inner breathing’48 in the ‘Spirit’ we can breathe in this ‘water’. With this in mind, I realise there should be no problem in breathing, for the water itself is no less than the inner breath of the Spirit. Suddenly, I can begin to breathe calmly again, and so I swim in the depths of Being with a feeling of absolute delight, until I awake.
In this dream, my recognition of the essential, spiritual quality of the ‘water’ frees me to overcome my fear and to stay in what becomes a healing, rather than frightening, experience.
In ancient Greece, on the entrance of the Temple of Apollo, the words ‘Know Thyself’ were inscribed. Dreams invite us to enter into this knowing. Laden with feelings and meaningful subjective qualities, dreams can feel more real than ‘real’. In dreams, we come alive in ways that may beguile, frighten, enliven, inspire, puzzle, empower, guide and heal us. We wake up to the mysteries of Being!
When we begin to pay attention to our dreams and learn how to feel at home in their subtle domain, it feels as though we can begin to ‘breathe’ underwater. Unconstrained by the usual earthly limitations of time and space, our dreams may seem irrational from the perspective of the logical mind and yet, paradoxically, their creative interplay helps to maintain the ‘rational’ consciousness of everyday reality by consolidating memories, modulating our emotions, and effectively shaping how we construct a personal sense of our self with a past, present and future.49 Whether we are conscious of it or not, the process of dreaming thereby contributes to our sense of who we are.
Having undertaken our creative exploration into the depths of nightly sleep and dreams, we can now swim back up through the waters of the realm of sleep towards the surface, where, above us, the light of waking consciousness dances. As the levels of melatonin in our blood decrease and the surge of nocturnal neuro-chemistry in our brains subsides, we move steadily towards full wakefulness, then gently open our eyes and awake from sleep, bringing with us the rich potential of our dreams, to know ourselves more feelingly and to live our humanity more fully.