WHY DO WE DREAM?
For pretty much all of human history, people have been fascinated with dreams. Not fully convinced? Take the sheer number of songs, books and movies all centering around dreams as an example. To add to our growing library of source material, they’ve also been seen as sources of religious inspiration, prophecy or even personal insight, but scientists still have a ton of unanswered questions. One of them being whether dreams are telling us something meaningful about ourselves, or whether they’re just a random jumble.
The Fulcrum spoke with U of O psychology professor Joseph De Koninck from the Brain and Mind Research Institute, to better understand the role dreams play and how we can better comprehend their meaning.
Dream research
Looking at dreams from a historical perspective, De Koninck explained they’ve existed in written literature for a long time, dating back to the antiquities to be precise. Skipping forward a few hundred years, it’s the 20th century and Sigmund Freud has just released The Interpretation of Dreams, which really woke up the scientific and medical community — pun intended.
“The interesting thing is that he brought attention to [the fact that dreams] are important in discovering what the mind is.”
However, sleeping and dreaming scientific research became more serious in 1953, when it was discovered that during sleep we have rapid eye movements (REM). This was recorded using a tool known as an electroencephalogram, which functioned by attaching electrodes to the scalp in order to measure electrical activity. From this, researchers were able to detect when people were sleeping and eventually lead to the discovery of REM that would occur every hour and a half. Interestingly, when researchers woke up individuals during the REM periods, they always remembered their dreams.
Jumping to modern times, it became clear to scientists that in addition to REM occurring every 90 minutes, there’s also mental activity from beginning to end during sleep. This discovery added a new layer of complexity and explained why, according to De Koninck, we continue to study dreams to this day.
“Experts in this field know far more about the mechanism of sleep itself and what puts us to sleep than they do about dreaming. This is because we don’t yet have access to the dream activity itself with tools like an electroencephalogram. As a result, we don’t even know exactly how the brain’s structures involved in sleeping and dreaming operate.”
And so, the mystery continues.
One night of sleep
Imagine you’re tucked into bed all ready to drift off to sleep; this portion of the night can be characterized with certain brain activity or perhaps a lack of. As it turns out, our activity has a tendency to slow down in what are known as alpha waves, which are extremely synchronized waves that are associated with relaxation. When it comes to the point of closing our eyes, these waves are the most intense until we eventually lose consciousness.
Here’s where the most interesting phenomenon known as dreaming or hypnagogic reverie takes place. As we fall into deeper sleep, this hypnagogic reverie can be characterized by mainly visions or images. Meaning, we count sheep and then we start to see them.
This imagery phase is interesting because, “it has some very profound creative potential, for example, many artists like Salvador Dalí used these images as inspiration for paintings,” said De Koninck.
“[Following this is] another phase known as deep sleep where the brain mechanism for producing images is not very well present and [our electroencephalographer] would show slow waves or delta waves. During this phase what can happen is a reaction of the brain being put into an emergency situation, caused by the reduced mental activity. As a result the brain will react by waking us up.”
This is where night terrors that cause you to suddenly wake up can originate from. These are especially common in anxious people and young children. In addition, researchers found when they woke up individuals during this period they were mainly just thinking and not picturing any specific thing.
So, we have this going down into deep sleep and then coming back up, and then we experience REM sleep. This type of sleep is when we become paralyzed — obviously during this time we can still breath and our autonomic nervous system is still working. It’s during this phase though where we have our more elaborate hallucinations that typically last five minutes until we fall back into deep sleep.
For context, if you were to fall asleep at 11 p.m., “by about one o’clock you’d be in the first period of REM sleep, and then another one at 2:30, followed by another each time increasing in length. Later in the morning REM sleep can last up to 40 minutes, this is where you have dreams that are much more elaborate.”
Does dreaming serve a purpose?
According to De Koninck, emotional regulations along with hormone control, immune system regulation, and a whole host of survival systems are organized during sleep. It’s for this reason why emotions dominate in dreams. Thus, REM sleep involves the integration of complex emotion, however, there’s no reasoning in REM sleep.
“I call it open season for the mind, you can make discoveries during this period (REM sleep) but they’re just associations, they’re not organized. You can do anything in dreaming, irrational things, you can kill, you can be killed, etc.”
Aggression in dreams
On the topic of aggression, De Koninck’s research has found that aggression is more common in dreaming than friendliness. To add, it also manifests in different manners depending on if the dreamer is male or female.
In women, aggression tends to be more social and verbal, whereas in men it’s more physical. Interestingly, as the roles women play in society and the jobs they occupy changes, aggression in dreams does as well. As such, women occupying traditionally male-dominated roles tend to have more male-characterized dreams about aggression. Therefore, it appears dreams can reflect our waking state, but at the same time they have this quality of not being in contact with reality.
Pay attention to your nightmares
In terms of the mechanisms of nightmares, “we know that during REM sleep the amygdala (found in the lower part of the brain) is very active, this is important because it’s responsible for the expression of fear and emotions. During nightmares, what happens is that the amygdala which is connected with the frontal lobe is completely taken over by the nightmare. Thus, dreams tend to express emotions that are under the control of frontal executive brain. Meaning dreams can be used for creativity, because you have new association.”
He added, “nightmares are usually a sign of some emotional dysregulation, if you have a lot of them by the time you’ve reached adolescence the first thing we’ve noticed is that firstly, most of (the dreamers experiencing nightmares) are girls. Secondly, the frequency can be a sign of issues, so pay attention to that.”
Lucid dreaming
Through the understanding of the dream mechanism, researchers eventually learned we can control our dreams. De Koninck has found that dreamers can use suggestions before they fall asleep to achieve better control over their dreams. For example, if you wanted to dream about a white horse the best thing you could do is to rehearse that thought before you go to sleep. This is known as pre-sleep suggestions and it can be used to treat chronic nightmares.
“[You can ask] children to write down their nightmare, and then make a drawing of it. After, ask them to then change the context of the story so that the next time they sleep, if in their dream they’re being chased by a bear, have the bear turned into a squirrel or a rabbit.”
It’s in this manner that dreamers can begin to shape their dreams, but this process does not occur overnight and in fact takes several weeks to accomplish.
For those interested in learning more about De Koninck’s research you can visit his research profile here.
