The first questions I am always asked about dreams are what are they and why do we have them? Dreams are universal. Everyone has them, even if they don’t remember them. We suspect that our animal friends have them as well. Anyone who has been delighted by their dog’s shaking leg can attest to this. Our fascination with dreams is understandable, as they are powerful and mysterious. But at the end of the day, when it comes to these fundamental questions of what and why, we simply don’t know the answers.
Dreams: In the Beginning
While it is impossible to know exactly how and why humans began to gather together in groups, one could easily imagine the reason for this being connected to fire. Cooperation is the cornerstone of civilization, and at some point roughly forty or fifty thousand years ago, bands of human beings began to come together in a way that was more united than ever before. We began to collaborate while hunting and gathering, and through the spirit of true democracy, we began to thrive—and so was born the idea of community.
Imagine it this way: There is no television, no Real Housewives of the Serengeti to keep you entertained. Instead, you find yourself sitting around the fire and you want to share your dream about Grandma, who recently died. You speak of how Grandma visited you while you were sleeping. From across the campfire, someone shouts, “Me too! She also visited me last night.” The landscape of the dream world is a place where Grandma, no longer among the living, seems to be available to those who are still around. Suddenly, we see the beginnings not only of what will become known as the collective unconscious, through which all of humanity is connected, but also the notions of ancestors and an afterlife, where we remain in touch with those who have passed over.
Time marches on, and from Mesopotamia to Egypt and then to Greece and Rome, dreams were featured in mythology and poetry and were a major part of all spiritual disciplines. In fact, the original appearance of a religion-based split between good and evil was found in the early civilizations of Babylonia and Assyria. In almost all of these early cultures, dreams were considered to be signs sent directly from the gods. There was a sense that the land to which the dreamer was taken during nighttime narratives was literal; the dreamer would actually leave their body and travel to another dimension where dreams took place. Good dreams were thought to be divine, and bad dreams the result of demonic influences.
These notions evolved into what became modern religious beliefs. The Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, are filled with references to dreams as part of the spiritual life of humans and the way that God speaks to people. The Quran is the same. The Hindu religion has a good deal of reverence for dreams and dream interpretation; however, most symbols are understood to be portents of good and bad events that are likely to befall the dreamer and their loved ones. Though dreams have no place in Buddhism as a practice, even the life of the Buddha himself started with a dream his mother had in which she felt it was prophesied that her child would be a spiritual leader with the whole world as his domain.
You know that dream dictionary you have by the side of your bed? Even those have been around for a while. The very first in history may be one that was unearthed in and preserved from ancient Egypt. Housed in the British Museum and known as the “Dream Book,” this document, written on papyrus, divides dreams into good and bad, much like the Babylonian and Assyrian notions that preceded it. This document presents a little over a hundred dream scenarios and just about as many waking-life emotions and behaviors, and offers an interpretation for each.
The Founders of Dream Interpretation
There was a major shift in the interpretation of dreams from a religious to a scientific approach that came with the emergence of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the mid-nineteenth century. When we consider Freud today, most people think of “Freudian slips” and an obsession with sex. And indeed, Freud was about as sex-obsessed as you can get. By virtue of this, he attributed just about every behavior to this primal drive that makes us human. Freud’s heir apparent and student, a younger Swiss psychologist by the name of Carl Gustav Jung, had a bit more to say about where dreams come from and what they are about. This difference in perspective ultimately led to the demise of their collaboration in a fascinating tale of bitterness and rivalry.
Both men were brilliant theorists whose original ideas have so thoroughly entered our day-to-day consciousness that their work has impacted how modern human beings understand our humanity. Very excited about the work Freud was doing, Jung—himself a near-famous up-and-coming young doctor—traveled from Switzerland to Vienna to study with him. Jung was captivated by the idea of dreams being what Freud so aptly called “the royal road to the unconscious.” Freud, the elder of the two, thought he had found in Jung the perfect apostle. In fact, both men felt this was the beginning of a lifelong association. It was not. In fact, it ended badly. Freud demanded a rigid loyalty from his followers that left absolutely no room for disagreement. Jung was authoritative and opinionated and often brutal in the expression of his opinions. The two didn’t mix well.
The role of dreams was central to their discussions. But Freud was utterly obsessed with sex, which permeated all his theories to an extent that is considered almost ridiculous today. Here’s an example of Freudian dream interpretation. You dream of climbing stairs: that represents sex. You dream of a mountain: that’s a penis. You dream of a cave in the mountain: that’s a vagina. There is a train: that’s a penis. The train goes through a tunnel: that’s intercourse. At the end of the dream, you smoke a cigarette—and, well, we all know what that means.
By all accounts, Jung liked sex just as much as the next person. He knew, however, that there was much more to the story of dreams than that. Freud felt that the sex drive was the only mechanism that inspired human beings. Jung knew instinctively that there were many drives and the human mind was far more sophisticated and interesting. He left Freud and headed back to Switzerland and devoted the rest of his life to figuring it all out.
Over the years, Jung began to treat the local, wealthy neurotics in his own way, and dream interpretation became a foundational pillar of that work. One thing he noticed was that all his patients seemed to have the same dreams. Falling, flying, losing their teeth, and being chased all recurred with alarming regularity, even in his own dreams. When he later traveled to Africa and spent some time with tribal communities, he was astonished to learn that these aboriginal people were having the very same dreams as his white, upper-class Swiss brethren. Everybody was falling, flying, losing their teeth, and being chased. Of course, the Africans were being chased by lions and the Swiss were being chased by bankers or assailants with guns, but the essential content was the same. Jung surmised that there must be some plane of thought that all people share, regardless of where they live, what culture they come from, or how they have been raised. Thus was born his notion of the collective unconscious, which is a major factor in the interpretation of dreams, as you will see.
The Sleeping Brain
Of course, science has come a long way in the century or so that has passed since Freud and Jung popularized the notion of dreams having significant psychological meaning. Ironically, the hubris of the scientific approach has done enormous damage to the mystical appreciation of dreams. As we discover various structures in the brain that participate in dreaming and chemicals that are responsible for sleep, the empirical hubris declares, “And therefore, dreams have no meaning.” Of course, anyone who has ever had a powerful dream experience (which is most people) will tell you that the notion that dreams are important and meaningful is simply undeniable, even if they don’t know exactly how or why this is true for them.
That being said, I think it is important to be aware of the growing body of knowledge that focuses on the technical side of dreaming. The sleeping brain is filled with fascinating constructs, and science is offering us more details about what is happening inside the brain at a rapid pace. Rather than letting this expanding body of knowledge take away from our appreciation of the mystery of dreaming, we can actually allow it to enhance it.
There are five distinct stages of sleep. Most people are very familiar with REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, where the eyes move rapidly. It is during this stage that typical dreams occur, and in some ways REM is the actual goal of sleep itself. However, there are four other stages of sleep, which are simply numbered in the order in which they occur. From the perspective of the sleeper, there would be very little difference between each of these four partitions of the sleeping experience. They are named based solely on the progression of the waves of energy that can be measured in a sleep lab.
Anyone who has ever had a powerful
dream experience (which is most people)
will tell you that the notion that
dreams are important and meaningful
is simply undeniable,
even if they don’t know exactly how
or why this is true for them.
REM sleep is the fifth and final stage of a cycle that repeats itself several times in one night, usually once every ninety minutes or so. We spend somewhere between fifteen and twenty minutes per cycle in REM, and as the night progresses, the amount of time we spend in this segment increases. Though our dreams during REM are particularly vivid, most people tend to remember only the dreams they have upon waking, such that dreams during the middle of the night are generally lost.
In the REM stage, the brain begins to act very much like it does when awake. The same is true for the body, though the limbs are paralyzed, so there is no ability to move about in response to this. The heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, both men and women experience genital engorgement, and the body fluctuates in temperature. In essence, the brain and body act very much like they do when a person is awake, reexperiencing, in many cases, the events of the day. In fact, there is evidence that the brain is indeed revisiting the day’s events. If the paralysis that is a natural part of this stage is ineffective, the individual may sleepwalk, talk, or experience night terrors.
But what is the brain really doing during sleep? All the cells in the body—including those in the brain—are like miniature self-contained factories. They are dedicated to a singular purpose at which they excel, and their design and structure are oriented toward whatever that purpose is. Each cell is regulated by a nucleus, a central hub of intelligence that manages all the activity that takes place there and is akin to the executive offices at a manufacturing business. The cells take in and use fuel to create the energy they require to get their job done. And, of course, that process of turning fuel into energy creates waste that must be managed and eliminated—in other words, cell poop.
Your brain has about 100 billion neurons in it. Each neuron is directly connected to about 1,000 individual cells and is capable of firing at a rate of about 200 times per second. That’s roughly 20,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information transmitted per second. A single thought or momentary experience gets recorded in the brain in this way in a seemingly infinite crisscrossing web of data, firing up countless cells engaged in powerful activity. This creates a lot of poop to clean up. No wonder the brain needs sleep to rest from this enormous effort!
During sleep, the brain cells actually shrink. At the same time, there is an increase in the amount of cerebrospinal fluid that circulates throughout the brain. This increased volume of liquid, in combination with the added space created by the shrinking cells, is like a faucet being turned on. Then, as the cells return to their normal size, the excess amount of waste products from brain-cell activity is flushed out. This helps explain why, after a bad night’s sleep, we tend to feel foggy and cognitively impaired. Long-term sleep deprivation can be harmful or even fatal, and the culprit ultimately is the waste product of brain cells converting fuel into energy.
Another primary action being attended to during REM sleep is the formation of memory. As we go about our lives, we see, hear, touch, and experience all sorts of events. Our sensory receptors collect this data and send it to the brain, which in turn converts these stimuli into electrical impulses that record the data. Each sight, sound, or interaction with the world is stored as a path of countless neurons rapidly firing in a string, in the same way that a digital recorder “hears” sound and immediately converts it into a pattern of ones and zeros.
Then in REM sleep we are essentially reexperiencing the same stimulation and reliving the events that were recorded during the day. Remember that the waking alertness of the brain looks pretty much the same as the activity of REM sleep. This is where the events of the day are being reactivated, ostensibly for permanent recording in other areas of the brain where short-term memory is made, stored, and eventually turned into the permanent record of our life unfolding, event to event, as part of our long-term memory.
And what is it that we are left with at the end of the day? Are dreams random, meaningless events based on the chaos of the brain, or are they deep, profound messages from the unconscious mind? Do they connect us to the mysterious realm that exists just beyond the veil of reality where our ancestors dwell, or are they just fodder for interesting tales told around the fires of the ancient world or the modern-day office water cooler? Do dreams connect us to the power of the collective unconscious, or do they tell us more about our repressed sexual desires? Truly, none of this matters, because if you picked up this book, you are like the millions of people who know from personal experience that the significance of their dreams is undeniable because of how meaningful they feel.
Many a time I have suffered
a sort of dream envy over people
who find themselves in wildly fantastical
landscapes and mind-bending narratives.
And yet there are those who dream
so often of their workplace that they
can’t seem to escape their office,
even in their sleep.
