What If You Could Describe Your Dreams While Dreaming?
It’s a bit of a bummer that dreams are as fascinating as they are hard and expensive to study. Famed psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung may have made big names for themselves mining the meaning and significance of our dreams, but even today, with powerful brain-monitoring technology, it’s tough to get a handle on what, exactly, is going on. Researchers, if they wait to wake up their subjects from sleep in the morning, have to contend with “rapid forgetting.” A better method is to wake people up while they’re dreaming, but this requires running a sleep lab, which doesn’t offer that much of an advantage. The dreamers are groggy and still forgetful.
If only it were possible to communicate with people while they’re still dreaming! Being able to ask dreamers to do things, even simple things at first, like counting backward, could nudge open a door to new insights. There is substantial disagreement on the function of dreams. Some theories say it’s for strengthening weak memory associations, others say it’s for rehearsing dangerous situations. Some say they don’t have any function at all.1 Perhaps these theories could be better tested with dreamer communication. But there are a whole lot of smaller problems to be addressed, too.
Dream characters can come up with the most creative
