Chasing The Dream

Michelle, what would you like this podcast to be about? What I mean is that there's a realistic Michelle. What it could be, what it's probably going to be and then there's your wildest dreams kind of thing. What it could be.

Well, I think to start I would really like the idea of having conversations with dream researchers that are doing really good work for a long time and it would be great to kind of collect or form like a collection of dream researchers and interviews. I've met a lot of people at conferences or visited research labs and it's just I think it would be nice to showcase all of the work that's being done. Because I think outside of our field, not many people really know that dream research is a real field of science and we're making progress. 

So, do you think a lot of people still think of dreams as nothing but bizarre flux in the night kind of thing?

Well, I think outside of our field maybe people don't realize how much we've learned. We're learning about how we can study it and how we can capture it. 

What is your view of the current popular view of dreams? Is it still Freudian or something along those lines.

It depends a bit on culture. I think a lot of people have been relatively dismissive of dreams. 

That's my sense, that the average person thinks dreams are something that we really don't need to pay attention to. They're not that medically important, not that scientifically important and they are sort of bizarre things that happen during the night. We don't need to pay attention to them at all. There's no good reason to. Occasionally we have a memorable dream and it's mildly bizarre and we want to tell some friend about it. Because it was so unusual or occasionally there might be some very emotional dream that haunts us for a few days. But I think most people just think of their dreams as, "I just don't understand them", "I don't need to" and "I don't want to". 

They don't know how to use them and so if you don't know how to use something, then we just say well then it's useless. Pay attention to it!

Is science saying that we should pay attention to them or there is a benefit?

Depends on the science. I think a lot of people say different things. I think we can learn a lot about ourselves through working through and paying attention to dreams. But the science is still at a phase of deconstructing. What it is that's creating the dream and how dreams are generated. I think that science versus how we can personally use them are still a bit disconnected. 

I think that there's some good scientific evidence that paying attention to your dreams will confer great benefits or can confer great benefits, but it's not established science. On the other hand, I agree with some philosophers and some scientists who say that if you really want to understand human beings and human consciousness. you'll need to grapple with dreams because they're central to creating the human experience. 

Sometimes philosophers understand our dreams more than scientists do. When I first started studying dreams, as a scientist, I took a very limited approach to trying to scientifically study dreams. Because it's hard to study them. There's so much variation, they're so hard to capture and they're so hard to get reports from. I would take a very limited view, 'Is the dream bizarre', 'Is it emotional' and scaled ratings of what your dream was like. Now over time I've started to really do more research, where I'm having hour-long interviews with somebody about their dream. Going more deep into the dream experience is necessary and it's hard for a scientist to do that, but I think it's a necessary step.

You miss so much if you don't take the narrative dream report seriously. You miss something essential about what dreaming is. Sometimes the dream report seems nonsensical and there's a lot of bizarre elements and some of the actions violate the laws of physics and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we tend to dismiss them as crazy things that happen in the night. But when you read hundreds of dreams and you really take that content seriously, some patterns begin to emerge. 

If you ask people more questions, a lot of times what seems bizarre to us for the person there's a very simple link. I had a dream (I was in the sleep lab and I was acting as a participant for one of my colleagues) and in the dream she came into my room to wake me up, but she was a cat. She was this gray cat that jumped on my bed and that might just seem like a bizarre dream element. But if I think about it for a second, then it's like every day my gray cat jumps on my bed and wakes me up. So the fact that I was in the sleep lab and she was going to come in and wake me up, that association is actually a very direct one. It's not a real bizarre out of nowhere association. So, I think a lot of times, if you get more information from the dreamer, they can reveal what the associations are. They can say if they had a recent experience that's related to the dream. That's how we discovered that there's the day residue which is pretty obvious. So you dream about things that are related to your experiences of the previous day. But then we see these patterns emerging over longer periods of time, like something that happened recently is associated to something that happened like a week ago. Where you can see associations with 'a month ago' or 'when I was a child' and you can see patterns; in what types of information and when the information is coming from. 

Do you think dreams are just about memories? Just involve memory processing or is the jumble of just started memory images? 

I think it's about memory, but my idea of memory I guess, is pretty broad. I think all of human experience is based in memory. The way that I perceive the world is based on my experience of the world. I don't think it's just a brain based memory. I think it's a whole bodily awareness and knowledge of 'what it is to be me', 'what my world view is' and 'what I think the world is like'. 

Does your view of memory then encompass things like, totally new phenomena, that you haven't encountered before? That can't be memories right. If it's totally new, you've never encountered it before, it can't be memory.

That is a conundrum. 

That occurs in dreams, totally new stuff. They're very creative. Therefore dreams can't just be about memories. I encounter in my dreams at night and I see stuff in dream reports that is totally new. That I've never encountered before, as far as I can tell. When I really probe my memories those images are not there. Therefore the source of that image in the dream is not my memory, it's coming from someplace else. 

It's a creative process that can happen and so it's an imaginative process.

There is a form of imagination that's based on memory, no question about it, but there's another form of imagination that's totally creative and brand new. It really comes out in dreams even more than during the daytime. There's something that dreams can do that our awakened consciousness can't do. 

There's a LaBerge quote 'Waking experience is constrained by the concreteness of the external world'. So we're like constrained because the world is continuous and solid, so we are limited in what we can imagine and experience. Whereas in dreams because there's nothing concrete or continuous, the whole world is changing as we imagine it. 

That's just one example. There's many other examples of creativity and dreams. But if you agree with the hypothesis  'Dreams are creative and they yield information that we can't get through other means'. The question becomes, 'What are dreams doing for us that nothing else is doing for us?' The more I study dreams, and I've been studying dreams for over well 30 years now, the more I'm convinced that the information that dreams are yielding to us is absolutely vital. There's this phrase, 'The unknown unknowns' from United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. So there's the known knowns, there's the known unknowns and then there's the unknown unknowns. Stuff that we don't even know that we don't know. Most of the really important stuff is the stuff that we don't even know. I think that's the kind of stuff that we can get in dreams. Therefore you as an individual viewing this podcast, it's absolutely vital for you to pay attention to your dreams. If dreams are yielding that kind of information, then that's gold for you, it's like finding gold.

Patrick McNamara, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University, Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and Research Associate Professor of Neurology at Department of Neurology, University of Minnesota School Of Medicine in Minneapolis. He is the author of over 60 papers on sleep and dreams several single author books and co-edited volumes on sleep and dreams. His most recent book is 'The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams'. He maintains a blog on sleep and dreams for Psychology Today online. He has been awarded grants from the National Institutes of Health to study evolutionary biology and functions of sleep and dreams as well as REM and NREM dream differences. In 2009-10 he appeared on the PBS (NOVA), program ‘What Are Dreams?’ In 2012-13 he appeared in PBS 'Closer to Truth' series on sleep and dreams. In 2013 he was named Chief Science Advisor to Dreamboard.com. He is regularly interviewed on sleep and dreams in international media forums including online blogs, traditional radio and TV, and traditional print magazines/newspapers such as Time magazine, Science Weekly, and the Daily Mail in London. His work on nightmares and dreams has been turned into a theater production and an art installation in Washington DC.

Michelle Carr, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Rochester in the Department of Psychiatry, working in the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory with Dr. Wilfred Pigeon. She previously completed postdoctoral training at the Swansea University Sleep Laboratory with Dr. Mark Blagrove, and received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Montreal in 2016, conducting research with Dr. Tore Nielsen at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory. Her research interests center on sleep psychophysiology, disturbed dreaming, and dream engineering - applying technologies to influence sleep and dreams to benefit memory, creativity, emotional or physical well-being. She led the organization of the Dream Engineering Workshop at MIT Media Laboratory in January 2019, and guest edited a Special Issue on Dream Engineering with the journal Consciousness and Cognition. She also translates dream science research to the public by writing for Psychology Today.

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