How our dreams help us make sense of our waking experiences
SEVERAL decades ago, a woman living in a second-floor apartment dreamed of falling through the wooden staircase in her building. A few days later, one of the steps collapsed under her weight, and she barely avoided a serious fall. Did her dream somehow predict the accident?
The woman’s neighbour was a young dream researcher named Antonio Zadra. After hearing her story, he inspected the steps and noticed signs of rot. She swore she had never noticed any damage, and he believed her.
He knew, however, that we consciously perceive only a subset of the total information our minds absorb from the world. He suspected she had unconsciously registered the rotting stairs, and her dream was a vivid depiction of the threat.
For those of us whose neighbours do not study dreams, it’s not surprising that such episodes can inspire a sense of wonder verging on mysticism. Even professionals often struggle to avoid implausible accounts of the origins and meanings of dreams.
Just consider the explanatory roads not taken by Zadra: he does not posit her dream as an instance of suppressed wish fulfilment (Freud), a protrusion of a collective unconscious archetype (Jung), a random burst of neural activity (the activation-synthesis hypothesis) or any sort of mystical, supernatural event (much of the Internet).
Zadra and co-author Robert Stickgold’s fascinating new book, When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, steers a reasonable and broad-minded course between the many interpretive whirlpools that have swallowed previous explorers of dreams.
Though they tour a broad range of contemporary research and theorising, they ultimately propose that a primary function of dreaming is to detect and dramatise the possible meanings of information latent in memories and associations that we rarely access while awake.
They begin with a helpful clearing of brush from the path of inquiry. Despite his towering stature in the popular imagination, Sigmund Freud is just such a shrub blocking further progress. Not only did he neglect to acknowledge that major aspects of his 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams had already been articulated by earlier 19th-century pioneers in dream research, he also presented his conclusions in dogmatic and categorical terms.
As the long shadow of Freud gradually dissolved in the mid- to late 20th century,
