Sledding
at the Speed of Light
Einstein once said his entire career was a meditation on a
dream about soaring downhill on a sled. Despite advances in neurobiology and
decades of research, the significance of dreaming still eludes science.
MARCH/APRIL 2002—In 1983, when Marc Barasch was thirty-three, he began to
dream. For months he had as many as four or five terrifyingly vivid dreams a
night, “flooding in as if a hellish levee had burst,” he recalls.
“But those dreams ultimately saved my life. In one I was being chased by a
maniac who had escaped from a jail cell and was billed in the dream as the greatest
mass murderer in the history of mankind. He was trying to chop my head off. In
others there was something wrong with my neck: I was shot in the neck, or I was
suspended by my throat and something was eating away my larynx. In another, six
long needles were stuck in my ‘neck-brain’ by a circle of primitive tribesmen.”
Barasch reluctantly went to his doctor and explained he was convinced that he
had cancer—a ‘mass murderer’ escaped from a ‘cell’—though he was young and
healthy and his only symptoms were, as he put it, “a fistful of nightmares.” He
asked his physician what the medical name for the ‘neck-brain’ would be. “The
thyroid,” answered the doctor.
Barasch insisted on a full workup and shortly after, he was diagnosed with
thyroid cancer—and successfully treated. But his dreams had torn open his life,
and inspired a worldwide pilgrimage in search of the meaning of dreaming. The
result was Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life
(Riverhead Books, 2000).
“I discovered that dreams are a window onto a whole different realm of
consciousness,” Barasch says. “They’re like the experience Alice had in
Wonderland when she goes through the looking glass, cries a tear, and then
shrinks and drowns in the tear. Dreams can seem small but their meaning is
huge. They call to us to evolve and grow.”
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Some scientists might raise a skeptical eyebrow at that sentiment, since the
neurobiology of dreams has become increasingly precise in recent years. There’s
little doubt dreams are in part a product of brain function, and they are
probably crucial for laying down long-term memory. For many scientists, even
dreams of hallucinatory intensity are simply markers of brain activity. Others
might grant a certain emotional significance to dreams but still see their main
purpose as physiological. These scientists would explain Barasch’s experience
as the capacity of the brain to amplify the body’s subtle signals during sleep,
mainly because response to external stimuli are shut down.
But then there are researchers like Harry T. Hunt, author of The
Multiplicity of Dreams: Memory, Imagination, and Consciousness (Yale
University Press, 1989) and a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario,
Canada. Hunt sees dreams as a kind of litmus of consciousness, measuring a wide
and fluid range of states.
“Dreaming isn’t one thing,” Hunt says. “It’s a variety of forms, even though
that truth flies in the face of both Freudian and laboratory dream studies.
There are ordinary dreams, or what tribal people call ‘little’ dreams. There
are prophetic-telepathic kinds of dreams. There are ‘big’ dreams that seem
mythic and archetypal. There are nightmares, especially post-traumatic
nightmares, that tend to endlessly repeat an actual trauma. And there are lucid
dreams, which go all the way back to Aristotle—dreams that the dreamer controls.”
Dreams, then, are a moving target at the intersection of mind, body, and
spirit.
Scientists began to eavesdrop on the sleeping, dreaming brain in the
laboratory about half a century ago, in 1953. It was University of Chicago
researcher Eugene Aserinsky who first noticed periods of brain activity in his
sleeping eight-year-old son, whom he had hooked up to an old EEG machine.
Aserinsky believed the machine must be malfunctioning because it indicated that
the brain is as active in sleep as when awake. At the time, scientists believed
the brain slept just as the body did. Aserinsky was advised to drop his work,
but he and his mentor, Nathaniel Kleitman, persisted and eventually discovered
that every night, people undergo both REM (rapid-eye-movement) and non-REM
sleep. It was a remarkable breakthrough that ushered in a new era of sleep and
dream research.
Although we can dream at any time, it’s generally accepted that our vivid
dreams occur during REM sleep, which accounts for about 20 percent of our sleep
time, when brain stem activity surges and brain stem cells churn out a chemical
messenger called acetylcholine. That messenger pumps up activity in our brain’s
emotional centers, yet at the same time, the parts of our brain that handle
external sensations and logical analysis are shut down. Our body is almost
completely paralyzed.
Sleep—and dreams—are a physiological necessity. REM sleep is so important
that when rats are deprived of it for two months, they die. Mammals, birds, and
even tiny insects sleep. In January 2002, the journal Neuron published
findings that at night fruit flies crawl off to resting places and slump “face
down,” staying still except for a few occasional twitches. As the night
progresses, the flies fall into progressively deeper sleep. Whether fruit flies
dream is yet to be seen, but animals do dream, according to Matthew Wilson of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Learning and Memory: While
rats were being trained to run through a maze, their neurons showed a
distinctive pattern of firing in the hippocampus, a brain area known to be
involved in memory. The same pattern emerged while the rats slept afterward,
indicating that they dreamed of the task.
To sleep, perchance to dream—but why dream at all? In 1977, Harvard psychiatrist
J. Allan Hobson, author of The Dreaming Brain (Basic Books, 1988),
published research arguing that dreams were merely random activities carried
out by neurons in the sleeping brain—specifically attributable to bursts of
activity in a brain stem area that regulates breathing and other basic body
functions. These neural fireworks supposedly activated the frontal brain,
leading to the fantastical but meaningless images of dreams. In 2000, Hobson
published a revision of this theory, which still depicted dreams as vivid
hallucinations but concluded they were informed by strong emotions. Even so,
Hobson contends that, contrary to the Freudian view, dream emotion is
uncensored and undisguised.
Hobson’s theory has a staunch opponent in neuropsychologist Mark Solms of St
Bartholomew’s and Royal London School of Medicine, United Kingdom. Solms
believes dreams begin in the frontal areas of the brain that regulate
motivation, emotion, and memory. Brain-imaging studies show elevated activity
in these areas during REM sleep. If dreaming begins in the brain stem, Solms
says, how is it that patients whose brain stems are damaged continue to dream?
Patients whose frontal-brain areas are damaged still have nightly REM sleep,
although they report they no longer dream.
In addition, there is some evidence that our dreams may predict our
vulnerability to depression, according to Rosalind Cartwright, chairman of
psychology at Rush University and director of the Sleep Disorder Service at
Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. For six years
Cartwright has analyzed the dreams and REM sleep of volunteers who are about to
end their marriage. Those who are depressed about the impending divorce
typically experience their first REM-dream sleep much too early in the night,
their rapid-eye movement is unusually active, and their dreams of their
ex-spouses remain negative and anxious. Volunteers whose mood improves over
time reflect that change in their dreams: The ex-spouse still appears but
without the same emotional impact.
Yet another theory is that dreams are the body’s way of filing away the
day’s experiences—discarding some and preserving others. How does the brain
integrate new experience, and adjust behavior accordingly? Some dream
researchers think the brain’s revolutionary solution is linked to REM sleep and
dreaming. The same neurons and brain structures that guide action in our waking
hours might consolidate and integrate experience while we sleep.
Harvard psychiatrist Robert Stickgold and his research team devised an
ingenious experiment that supports this theory. Stickgold asked twenty-seven
people, including five with amnesia, to play the computer game Tetris
for seven hours during the course of three days, and then report their dreams
during the first hour of sleep each night. Two-thirds of the participants
reported dreams similar to the game. Even three of the five amnesiacs, when
awakened after their first hour of sleep, had Tetris-like dreams—even
though they had no conscious recollection of playing the game earlier in the
day. That may mean that when the brain dreams, it relives the day’s events and,
in normal brains, consolidates those events in conscious long-term memory.
Other evidence suggests sleep and memory are linked: A study by Pierre Maquet
of the Institute of Neurology at University College of London, United Kingdom,
carried out brain scans on volunteers trained in a simple task. Improvements in
performance were detected after a single night’s sleep, and brain scans taken
during the task as well as during REM sleep detected similar patterns of
neuronal firing.
Still, much of dreaming remains a beautiful mystery. If dreaming helps us
create memories, why do most of us forget our dreams upon awakening? Why, when we
dream, are we utterly unaware that what we’re experiencing is not “real”? And
how do we explain an experience like Barasch’s, in which an avalanche of dreams
warned him of a deadly problem in his neck-brain, or thyroid? The hallmark of
dreams is their astounding ability to create unusual montages and fantastical
associations.
What of dreams that solve incredibly difficult problems—often with an image
or picture? Nineteenth-century Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev had been
struggling to group elements into tables based on their properties. In 1869, he
wrote: “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as
required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” His
dream brought the world the periodic table.
Similarly, Albert Einstein told a journalist that as a teenager he’d dreamed
he was sledding down a hill at night. His sled traveled faster and faster,
until it approached the speed of light. At that speed, the stars and night sky
were transformed into a dazzling spectrum of colors. “You could say and I would
say,” Einstein told the journalist, “that my entire scientific career has been
a meditation on that dream.”
“It’s a shame that the prevailing view of dreams is increasingly given over
to cognitive biologists and neuroscientists,” Barasch says. “The notion that
dreams are a way of parsing experience, or a kind of neural dumping, may be
true but that leaves out this entire other realm of experience. The Bible says
that God talks in the still, small voice. An Australian aborigine told me that
the dream is happening all the time, and if you’re very still and pay
attention, it’s like a butterfly that perches on your finger.”
Dreams may be as light as a butterfly, as volcanic as a nightmare, or simply
awe-inspiring. “I had a dream once that I had an invisible double,” recalls
Brock University’s Hunt, “and it wouldn’t make itself visible, so I wrestled
with it, and we spun up in the air wrestling with each other as I shouted to it
to show itself. But as we reached the ceiling my double passed right through
and I couldn’t. It was a very powerful dream, and I was very shaken afterward.
These kind of dreams leave you more awestruck than terrified. Jung used to call
them archetypal dreams, dreams that have a spontaneous fairytale or mythic
quality to them.”
But perhaps the dreams that provoke us the most—and like the butterfly, seem
to elude us or die when we try to study them in the lab—are the dreams that
upset our notion of reality. Psychologist Jayne Gackenback of Athabasca University
in Alberta, Canada, and a contributing editor of Dreaming: Journal of the
Association for the Study of Dreams, reports on years of study of dream
function in the Cree culture. She tells the story of a Cree woman in her
twenties, Jose Youngchief, who was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Shortly
before the diagnosis, five long-haired, heavyset Native American women appeared
in her dream. Each stopped Youngchief and told her they could help her. Each
time Youngchief turned away. Finally she came to Chase, an old boyfriend, who
took her to an elder Indian who offered to help. Youngchief told her mother
about the dream; not long after, she learned she had cancer and submitted to
radiation therapy, which made her extremely ill. Remembering her dream, she called
Chase and asked to meet him. Youngchief had not told Chase about the illness or
the dream, but when he saw her he gave her the name and phone number of Harold,
a Cree medicine man. Harold took her to a Cree elder, who Youngchief recognized
as the man in her dream. The elder approved the healing relationship and during
the next year, under Harold’s care, Youngchief recovered.
Such stories provoke and intrigue, hinting that time may not be linear, that
certain experiences may be destined, that meaning and not chance governs our
lives. And yet, as Hunt says, “paranormal dreams are so hard to get hold of.
People have these experiences, and all cultures have spoken of them, but the
attempts to bring them into the laboratory are inconclusive. If these experiences
exist and literally defy our categories of causation, then perhaps it’s a
paradox to turn around and theorize about them in cause and effect language.”
For now, they remain a mystery and perhaps one we don’t need to solve. Gertrude Stein asked before she died, “What is the answer?” When she was greeted with silence, her final words were: “In that case, what is the question?” To live with the paradox of dreams is to live with the question—a very good way to live.
Originally published in Science & Spirit Magazine.
