Chasing The Dream

In the modern age, we've lost our reverence for the dream state. But REM sleep is what has made us special. We see glimpses of these other possible worlds in our dreams, and more and more evidence is accumulating, which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities that human beings; evidence and therefore, critical to our cultural evolution, and our special creativity.

And what REM sleep normally does is it creates this very high cholinergic environment in the brain. And that environment allows for intense creativity because it promotes connections between otherwise disparate ideas. So it creates all kinds of bizarre ideas, but all kinds of creative ideas as well. So, when our ancestors in the upper-Paleolithic acquired greater access to the REM sleep state, both during sleep and during waking consciousness, it helped to fuel the onset of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes.

We know that REM sleep is especially important for human beings because we, as a species, have invested some 22% of our total sleep time in REM, and that's 10% more time devoted to REM than our primate relatives. So it's constantly creating these dream worlds for us, and we can then compare our current world with these alternative simulations of possible worlds. And it gives us something to say, "That world is valuable and this world is less valuable — so let's strive for the ideal." And that creates tremendous forward goal-seeking behaviors in all human cultural groups.

So REM has been crucial to human creativity. Human REM sleep has a lot of very peculiar characteristics. Every 90 minutes, we go into REM sleep, and our bodies become paralyzed. Yet our brains are more activated than they are during waking consciousness, and we're forced to watch these things we call dreams. So why would Mother Nature do something like that? We don't know. But among its effects are, it creates these dissociative experiences and associative experiences. The dissociative experiences are something that lots of us experience.

There's dreamy states where you feel like you're not quite yourself and you're in like a déjà vu experience or a fluid mental state, a flow state, but you're not sure what's real, what's unreal because you're immersed in all this imagery. But as you go through those kinds of dissociative states, it starts to relax or resolve into an associative state so that things that were previously unrelated get combined. And when unrelated ideas combine, creative, innovative things happen; and REM sleep promotes that associative state big time.

So, one might wanna harness REM given its contributions to the human evolutionary project and human flourishing. To do so, I'd recommend two things: One is to seek out surprise because what triggers REM is when you find that your current self model isn't operating that well, you need a new self model. What happens with a surprising event, particularly if it's intense, is it triggers an orienting reaction. The more intense the orienting reaction, the more likely it's gonna recruit what's called PGO waves. So seek out surprise so that it will trigger these PGO waves and then more intense REM states.

And then just traditional methods, like keeping a dream diary and trying to trigger lucid dream states might be advisable as well in some people, not everybody. Our culture has lost its reverence for the dream state, whereas traditional cultures absolutely reverenced dreams, and I think some due reverences would help the culture because it would create more openness to creativity and disparate ideas. This can help us solve the unknown unknowns, and help us get creative solutions to the problems people are facing.

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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