What Dreams Are Made Of: History of Dream Research

I am with an older, "lecherous-looking" Freudian analyst who wants me to lie on the couch and recall the moment of my birth while he counts 1, 2, 3. I pretend and then tell him the truth. Then he gets undressed and wants to make love to me but just then Mother looks in by the door! And I lie very still; she closes the door. I awaken. (Then I remember wishing that I was still with my analyst.)

Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, in order to receive dreams that would heal them.

Modern dream science really begins at the end of the 19th century with Sigmund Freud, who theorized that dreams were the expression of unconscious desires often stemming from childhood. He believed that exploring these hidden emotions through analysis could help cure mental illness.

The Freudian model of psychoanalysis dominated until the 1970s, when new research into the chemistry of the brain showed that emotional problems could have biological or chemical roots, as well as environmental ones. In other words, we weren't sick just because of something our mothers did (or didn't do), but because of some imbalance that might be cured with medication.

After Freud, the most important event in dream science was the discovery in the early 1950s of a phase of sleep characterized by intense brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM). People awakened in the midst of REM sleep reported vivid dreams, which led researchers to conclude that most dreaming took place during REM. Using the electroencephalograph (EEG), researchers could see that brain activity during REM resembled that of the waking brain. That told them that a lot more was going on at night than anyone had suspected. But what, exactly?

Scientists still don't know for sure, although they have lots of theories. On one side are scientists like Harvard's Allan Hobson, who believes that dreams are essentially random. In the 1970s, Hobson and his colleague Robert McCarley proposed what they called the "activation-synthesis hypothesis," which describes how dreams are formed by nerve signals sent out during REM sleep from a small area at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals, the researchers said, activate the images that we call dreams.

That put a crimp in dream research; if dreams were meaningless nocturnal firings, what was the point of studying them? More recently, new theories have made some scientists take dreams more seriously. In 1997, Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa published the results of his study of people with damage to different parts of the brain; he found that there was more than one mechanism in the brain for activating dreams. Since then, Solms has argued that technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) might actually lend new weight to Freud's ideas because the parts of the brain that are most active during dreaming control emotion, the core of Freud's dream theory. Today, many therapists have a looser view of Freud, accepting that dreams may express unconscious thoughts, although not necessarily childhood conflicts.

Many others think the answer ultimately lies in a reconciliation of the different disciplines that study dreaming: neurobiology and psychology. "Both are useful, but they're different," says Glen Gabbard, professor of psychoanalysis and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "To have a truly comprehensive understanding of dreams, you have to be bilingual. You have to speak the language of the mind and the language of the brain."

3 Intro: We are all Fellini in the Middle of the Night

Continued

4 Page 2: Born to be Dreamers

4 Page 3: Different Dreamers: Age And Gender

4 Page 4: How We Use Dreams