Why You Dream

Scientists have yet to fully explain the precise reason for dreaming. Some say dreaming is an immense housecleaning effort by the brain, as it chemically sorts out the day's events from past and recent memories—a sort of clearing of the mind's cobwebs. Other researchers credit a random firing of neurons; they say chaotic electrical impulses travel from the brain stem to the cortex (the center of higher reason and vision), which struggles to organize those random impulses by affixing images and plots culled from memory. Over the years, and before technology afforded a view of actual mental activity, others have attached far more complex and exotic philosophies to dreaming.

The ancients often attributed dreams to external sources, although they saw dreams as rich in personal meaning. One of the earliest reportings of dream therapy occurred in Grecian times, hundreds of years B.C., when dream healers used "incubation" temples for dreamers to sleep in and work with their dreams. The Greeks believed that dreams brought messages of hope and healing from the gods. Contrast this to other periods in history when dreams were not regarded in a positive light, but were rather considered evil invaders of the body by the devil and bad gods. Freud, in the early 1900s, was the first to explore the meaning of dreams from a perspective of unconscious impulses. Freud suggested that the body attempted to "act out" its wishes and desires, often sexual, through dreams. Freud's disciple, Jung, attached a more mystical meaning to dreams, choosing to interpret them as symbols of universal human experience.

Modern researches have been drifting towards a behavioral explanation of dreaming. For example, some say that dreaming may be a purely adaptive response, allowing the dreamer to periodically "wake up just a bit" throughout the night to check out the environment. If it is safe, the dreamer can go back to sleep. Richard Coleman of Stanford University Medical School writes in Wide Awake at 3:00 A.M. that "REM sleep and dreaming may serve as an adaptational process. The amount of REM sleep of recently divorced women has been shown in recent studies to increase, supporting the theory that dreaming enhances the capacity to cope with emotional problems.

With all the controversy surrounding the origin and purpose of dreaming, two things remain certain:

Researchers have concluded that dream content relates to pre-sleep thinking and tasks. Thinking anxious thoughts and/or doing anxiety-provoking activities before bedtime will likely encourage disturbing dreams. Obsessions and desires that haunt you as you lie down to sleep will often find their way into your dreams. For example, laboratory dreams of patients with anorexia nervosa (an eating disorder) contain oral images and preoccupations with food and drink. Ex-smokers will often report vivid dreams of smoking a cigarette for as long as one year after they quit.

Several other factors complicate dream content, such as physical condition and substance abuse. Some researchers have found an increase in dream anxiety and hostility during the premenstrual and menstrual phases of a woman's monthly cycle. Others have shown that "REM rebound" occurs with withdrawal from substances such as alcohol and some sleeping pills, resulting in frequent and vivid dreams that can seem like nightmares.

It is not surprising that people with vivid and frightening dreams come to dread bedtime. Going to sleep can seem like giving oneself up to forces of evil. But the lucid dreaming techniques described at the end of this chapter can help you regain control over your nights. A series of steps can help you recognize the fact that you are in a dream while you're still dreaming an awareness that alone can ease your fear. With practice you can find a way out of your nightmares, and even turn them into positive learning experiences. As with other sleep disturbances, such as night terrors and sleepwalking, an effective treatment is really a double cure. It eases the problem itself, and removes the resistance to sleep the problem brings on.