MODERN SCIENTIFIC
BACKGROUND OF DREAMS
1. SIGMUND FREUD
Freud, this century’s most famous pioneer psychoanalyst and psychologist, was not the first to study dreams. Distinguished predecessors such as Scottish physician Robert McNish (1802 ‑ 1837) noticed that "a man wearing a damp nightshirt" dreamed of being dragged through a stream. This brought up the question of whether sensations of the body produce dreams so that by the time Freud came onto the scene, research on how physical stimuli affect dreams was quite the rage. Recent research disproves this notion, but confirms that outside factors affect details of a dream, but not overall scenarios.
Freud was the first, though, to identify the "subconscious" as part of the mind which stores all of our memories and desires. In the area of dreams, this became his major contribution which linked dreams to daily activities and motives, confirming that dreams act as a mirror of the psyche's contents. Freud thus revived and explained an idea readily accepted by the ancients, namely, that dream content is linked to our waking life.
Freud left us many brilliant observations which opened up our understanding of the mind and psyche. Nevertheless, he also left us some muddy waters, especially some distortions about dreams. One of the most pronounced of his distortions was to link too much dream content to sexual themes, a perspective we no longer hold in modern times. Speculating on how Freud came to this mistaken perspective, I imagine him as a modern‑day Columbus sailing out into the middle of a mysterious ocean, the unconscious realms, and, being the first to chart these waters, he wondered which way to go. His biographers describe Freud's struggle with his own sexuality which may explain how sex questions within the psyche came to strike him as a major area of study that perhaps applied to everyone in the same way as it affected him. It was, after all, the Victorian Age. Sex was a hidden, but a hot topic! All things considered, Freud's brilliant legacies in understanding ourselves will always be acknowledged gratefully throughout all history.
2. CARL JUNG
Jung was a young contemporary of Freud who led us further into the understanding of dreams with the amazing insight that dreams are a focus point for growing into one's full potential. Jung restored balance to Freud’s perspective by adding dimensions of spirituality, self‑awareness and growth as major aspects of dreams.
3. DREAM LABS
The next major breakthrough in our understanding of dreams and sleep came with the work of Nathaniel Kleitman, a physiologist at the University of Chicago who set up a "sleep laboratory" in order to better understand the physiology of sleep. Finishing work well into the night, in 1952 he and a colleague returned home to unwind. They looked in on his infant child sleeping peacefully, and noticed the eyes, though closed, moving back and forth as though watching a tennis match. Kleitman wondered whether this was when a "dream" was taking place. And indeed, in following weeks, after hooking up electrodes to the eyes of sleeping adults in the sleep lab, and waking them when their eyes moved back and forth, they were astonished that each time, a person reported a dream. They named this phenomenon "Rapid Eye Movement" or "REM sleep" for short.
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Using this technique of attaching electrodes (tiny metal plates) to the eyes of a sleeping person, scientists were able to discover a great deal more about dreams and sleep. They noticed that everyone dreams each night, whether or not they remember their dreams. In fact we dream like clockwork every ninety minutes or so for a total of 20% of our sleep time. They showed us that a dream can last from 10‑30 minutes and tends to be the longest and clearest just before waking.
Next, dream researchers William Dement and Charles Fisher of New York's Mount Sinai Hospital were the first to show that the dream or REM portion of sleep is important for psychological well-being, not only for the for the physical rest of the body. In their "dream deprivation" experiments, subjects were awakened whenever a dream began and were not allowed to begin or finish any dream. In fact, they were "not allowed to dream" at all for a few nights (up to six for some subjects), nor to nap during the day. These "dream‑deprived" subjects became more and more anxious and irritable, and their decisions became poorer and less in accord with choices they would normally make. For example, they drank more, smoked more, and showed increasingly more and more hostility, resentment and falling apart of personality, as compared to their normal state.
These scientists suggested that "lack of dreams" rather than "lack of sleep" was related to this strange behavior, since they had kept a second control group of subjects awake during the same nights. They were awake for equal amounts of time, but during "non‑dreaming" time of sleep, so that they were equally sleep-deprived, but not allowed to dream. This second group showed no change in personality or behavior. Such research brought to our attention that dreams are critical to our psychological welfare more than to our body's needs for rest.
4. DREAM CONTENT
As scientists began to ask the question, "What does this dream mean?", they looked at the content of dreams. This led to two crucial observations. First, they noticed that dreams are stories linked to waking scenarios revolving around our daily problems and activities. Secondly, these story‑lines or "themes" make a significant, relevant statement about the direction our waking lives are taking. This is true even for what appear to be mere snatches of a dream.
5. CONCLUSIONS OF
EARLY SCIENTIFIC
STUDIES
Researchers went on to conclude that dreams are worthy of serious consideration. This substantiates ancient words from many traditions, such as the Hebrew text found in the Talmud that dreams are "A letter unopened from a friend." It is time for us to become adept at opening these letters. More recent work by laymen and professionals has added even more dimensions to our understanding of dreams and their interactions with us. Now that we know we experience dream insights as a powerful transformative force as well as a stabilizing effect, we begin to see vistas of potentials for working with dreams as a natural, therapeutic tool of the psyche.
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