The other night I dreamed I went into a Montreal restaurant with TV chef Emeril, where he annoyed the restaurant’s chef by taking over the cooking of a two-metre-long fish filet, which, when split open, contained a trilobite. “Monster darts!” exclaimed the restaurant’s chef, then demonstrated how to pull the legs off trilobites and throw them at a dart board for fun.
According to a new British study, one reason I had such a strange dream may be because I like to read fiction.
Dr Mark Blagrove and a team of researchers from the University of Wales in Swansea distributed more than 100,000 questionnaires to libraries across the country, asking people about the books they read and the dreams they had. They received more than 10,000 responses, making the study, called Dream Lab, one of the largest dream research projects ever carried out.
They found that adults who read fiction have stranger dreams than those who don’t, and are more likely to remember them. Adults who read fantasy novels reported more nightmares, as well as more lucid dreams–that is, dreams in which they were aware they were dreaming and could even direct the action. Adults who read romantic novels had more emotionally intense dreams. Children who read scary books were three times more likely to have nightmares than those who didn’t, and the younger the children, the more likely their reading was to affect their dreams.
Do dreams serve a useful purpose? Back in 1900, Sigmund Freud thought dreams preserved sleep, keeping us from being awakened by minor physical sensations.
But in the 1950s we learned that dreams typically happen during REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, which lasts from 10 minutes to half an hour, four to six times a night–much more often than would be required by Freud’s theory. During REM sleep your previously comatose brain suddenly erupts with activity. Your eyes move rapidly under your closed eyelids, and your heart rate, breathing rate and blood pressure, which dropped with your body temperature as you fell asleep, all go up.
Carl Jung thought the function of dreams was to compensate for those parts of the psyche which are underdeveloped in waking life, but alas, studies show our dream personalities and waking personalities are essentially the same–introverts don’t usually turn into extroverts in their dreams.
Another suggested purpose for dreams is that they help us solve problems we can’t solve in waking life. Studies have failed to support this idea, either.
REM sleep is thought to have benefits for the brain, since if we don’t get enough REM sleep one night we try to make up for it the next night. Researchers used to take that as evidence that dreams were equally important–but now we know that we don’t dream every time we’re in REM sleep and sometimes we dream when we’re not in REM sleep.
Today, many (though certainly not all) scientists think dreams serve no important purpose at all. Some have suggested that dreams are nothing but a by-product of a “test program” run to see if the brain has had enough sleep yet, and if it has, to wake it up.
PET scans of dreaming brains show that while we’re dreaming the frontal lobes, which integrate information, help us interpret the outside world, and contain working memory, are shut down. That could explain why our dreams are vivid, yet nonsensical. (“Monster darts?” Please!) With our frontal lobes inactive, our dreams are driven by emotion, not logic. And without working memory, the dreaming brain forgets what just happened in the dream–which is why in a dream you can step out of your kitchen onto the Empire State Building.
On the other hand, the hippocampus, where memories are processed for long-term storage, is active, so some have suggested that dreams are part of the filing process for long-term memory.
Just because dreams may not serve a physiological or psychological purpose doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning. As the Welsh study shows, they reflect what’s on our minds.
Of course, all such studies are based on research subjects remembering their dreams. Many people don’t.
That’s bad news for dream researchers, but good news for those who have unpleasant or disturbing dreams–as is the possibility that dreams are, ultimately, unimportant.
If that’s true, there’s no need to spend hours worrying about or analyzing your dreams if they trouble you–you’re free to simply forget them.
Especially if they involve Emeril.
