The Dream in Western Culture

By Susan Parman

THE DREAM IN WESTERN CULTURE is an anthropological and historical investigation of conceptions of the dream (its meanings, connections with other ideas, and uses) in Western culture from Greco-Roman times to the present. A byproduct of mammalian biology, dreaming is universal among humans, but cultures differ in how they define and use it. In the West, “the dream” emerged as a significant symbol that provides a window on Western conceptions of divinity, humanity, health, knowledge, and power as shaped by an underlying structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Homeric conception of the dream as a messenger from the gods (whose complex behavior provided a mythological charter for a unified human self that contained both good and evil) gave way, with the rise of Christianity, to an absolutist model in which the true self (good, god-fearing, rational, masculine, creative, conscious, white/Western, etc.) was bifurcated from the untrue self (evil, humanistic, irrational, feminine, unconscious, non-white/non-Western), the categories of “true” and “untrue” dependent on what was considered important in a particular historical era. How we think about dreams in the West is affected by this underlying cultural structure. Originally published under the title DREAM AND CULTURE: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE WESTERN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, the second edition includes two additional chapters that provide biographical information about the author's introduction to dream studies in the sleep lab of Allan Hobson and Fred Snyder at the National Institutes of Health during the 1960s, and how, during her career as an anthropologist and writer, she applied this experience to an understanding of play, creativity, and poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grithman Orm Publishers
• Release date: Jan 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953218001

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Bibliography

1

THE ART AND BIOLOGY OF DREAMING

National Institutes of Health

9000 Wisconsin Ave.

Clinical Center 6 West

Bethesda 14, Maryland

On October 3, 1962, I arrived at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to begin a three-month program as a normal volunteer as part of Antioch College’s work-study program. I had just turned seventeen.

NIH was a sprawling complex. The map I was given when I arrived showed forty buildings, including the Child Research Branch, Interdepartmental Committee on Nutrition for National Defense, National Library of Medicine, Greenhouse, and Dog Kennels. There were institutes dedicated to cancer, allergies, arthritis and metabolic diseases, infectious diseases, neurological diseases and blindness, mental health, and dental research. Entire buildings were dedicated to incineration, plant safety, electrical power, chemical storage, chemical disposal, and establishing Biologics Standards. I lived in the Clinical Center on the 6th floor of a fourteen-story building, which I described in my first letter home as plush, with a gym, solarium, libraries, and pianos.

Most of the NIH buildings were occupied by workers who went home at the end of their work, but the Clinical Center housed full-time residents: patients and normal volunteers. Patients were usually those for whom normal treatments had failed, such as those with rare metabolic diseases or Stage IV cancer. Normal volunteers were healthy people who had volunteered to serve as controls in medical studies.

The patients had been recommended for treatment by their physicians and accepted by an NIH doctor to participate in experimental clinical trials. These patients, accompanied by family members, could live in the clinic for an indefinite amount of time, without charge, as long as they participated in the trials. The rooms were large and comfortable, like living in an upgraded college dorm.

Normal volunteers were college students, like me, or members of religious groups doing alternative service, or in some cases former patients who had been cured but didn’t want to go home. In addition to free room and board, we received $35 a week.

Coal miners with black lung, wheelchair-bound paraplegics, schizophrenics and psychopaths, Mennonites and Antiochians, we lived side by side, and often participated in events organized by The Patient Recreation Activities Committee. These events included films (Rear Window), hobby crafts (rug weaving, collage), table games (shuffleboard, bumper pool, cribbage), costume parties (Walpurgis Night on Halloween), and horse races (in which we watched films of horse races, bet with fake money, and then spent our millions-of-fake-dollars in an auction for NIH pencils). Special events for children included finger painting and tricycle riding on the solarium. The Patients’ Library on the fifth floor was open between 8:30 am and 5:00 pm, and a book cart delivered books to those confined to bed. NIH was also riddled with technical libraries to which access had to be granted by a doctor.

On my first day I slipped in and out of pajamas, subjected to a rigorous examination by Dr. Colman, a lively doctor who looked like a red-headed schoolboy with a mustache. He identified himself as my problem doctor, or as he put it, the one whose job was to keep me alive. Dr. Steinberg, whom I hadn’t met yet, was the doctor to stave off (Hold that syringe, Steiny). Within the next month Dr. Colman would, in fact, intervene to halt a fat metabolism experiment during which my heart began to beat erratically.

In addition to having their blood drawn, salt intake manipulated, and heart rate raised and lowered with experimental drugs, normal volunteers in the Antioch work-study program were expected to attach themselves to research projects. NIH posted job lists, and researchers showed up to recruit free labor. My roommate Eva and I were visited by Dr. Sklarew to work on his project on courtship, in which we would type tapes of interviews and compile statistics and test scores. Shortly after his visit, a man identifying himself as Dr. Hobson knocked on the door and asked us to participate in a sleep and dream study. Although he looked young, he was balding rapidly, and his quick smile revealed buck teeth.

Eva shot me a No Way, Jose look and found an excuse to leave the room. Less quick-thinking, I said I would have to check with Dr. Steinberg, who was running the fat metabolism study; and, I added, I had just agreed to work for Dr. Sklarew. He said he would clear my participation with Dr. Steinberg.

The next day I got a message to report to Dr. Hobson’s office. I walked down four flights to the second floor, knocked, and got a shout to come in. Dr. Hobson sat at one of two metal tables on which were stacked sheets of paper covered with rows of squiggly lines—my first introduction to an electroencephalographic (EEG) recording of sleep. On the other table were scattered soldering irons, graduated cylinders, saline and acetone, tapes, batteries, fuses, a jar of shimmering mercury, and bottles of red ink. Would you like some coffee? he asked.

He opened a cabinet labeled foodstuffs and removed powdered coffee, powdered milk, sugar cubes, cups, and spoons. He poured hot water from a boiling kettle into the cups and told me that Dr. Steinberg had raised no objections to my participating in the sleep and dream study, and could I start tonight.

My mother had a reputation for brewing the best coffee in the Sandia Mountains where we lived about twenty miles outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had been initiated into morning coffee-conversation rituals three years ago, when I turned fourteen, and shared the view that powdered coffee was the equivalent of sewer water. I took the cup he offered me and sat down. A Scrabble game sat on the table.

We sometimes play at night between dream cycles, said Dr. Hobson. He asked if I would be interested in working for him rather than Dr. Sklarew. He would tutor me and give me reading lists. I could work as much or little as I wanted, the minimum involving typing of dream reports, the maximum involving doing some experiments of my own. I was also welcome to monitor dream subjects, but since this work was done at night, such participation would be optional.

My first reaction was no, I didn’t think I could do research that required me to be up during the night. I was from birth an early bird, up with the dawn, early to bed and early to rise, the lights in my head turned off by 10 at night.

But then I showed up that night to participate in the dream study. It was 10:00 and I was yawning heavily. The room was small, the hospital bed shoved up against a large one-way window behind which the sleep-and-dream observers would sit, monitor the EEG machine, and wake me during the night. Electrodes attached to wires splayed over the pillow. The astringent smell of acetone filled the room as my skin was rubbed to remove oils that might interfere with electrical signals picked up and conveyed by the electrodes attached to my scalp, ears, the side of my eyes, the base of my neck, and shoulders. My pulse was taken with a balloon taped to my ankle; a blood pressure cuff attached to my leg expanded and contracted 480 times during the night. A flexible tape around my ribs recorded respiration. There were other wires whose function I didn’t learn until later, and they all ran through the wall to the room behind the one-way mirror. A microphone was linked to a tape recorder that was turned on during dream tellings.

Sue, wake up.

What? Did I go to sleep yet?

Were you dreaming?

Not really. A series of images separate from each other, without activity or change. One was a window with venetian blinds half pulled. Another was my rug. The earliest and most vivid was a piece of paper with a large square and circles and triangles outlined in heavy black ink and colored in, the paper cut about three fourths of the way through with scissors that are still in the act of cutting but are not moving.

Good, you tell it well. Is that all? Go back to sleep.

Dr. Hobson?

Yes, Sue?

I had a dream and fell out of it.

In the morning Dr. Hobson came into the room, looking red-eyed and disheveled but enthusiastic. As he dissolved the glue holding the electrodes to my skin, he muttered.

A most productive night, Sue. At least two types of dreams that we’re particularly interested in.

What are those?

Later, later. We’ve already spent an hour on your EEG. I’ve got to go home and sleep for a few hours so that I can get up and live like real people. Will you work for me?

When I got back to my room, I told Eva I would be working on sleep and dreams rather than courtship. You’re working for that balding guy with the buck teeth? she asked.

Only two days had passed, and I’d forgotten that first impression. All I remembered now was that Dr. Hobson smiled when he was excited, and it was the excitement I paid attention to, not the teeth. They play Scrabble, I said. They use words like ‘axon’ and ‘patellar.’

She rolled her eyes.

I would later learn that the head of the sleep and dream lab was not Dr. Hobson but a man named Frederick Snyder, whose children I would babysit and whose wife I would still be friends with fifty years later. But whatever lab he occupied—whether as a junior researcher under Dr. Snyder or later running his own lab—J. Allan Hobson was throughout his life a consummate educator. He sought engagement, asked questions, shared knowledge, sent speculations spinning into the unknown, encouraged students to make mistakes. From his point of view the mystery of the brain was part science, part art. As a psychiatrist, he knew how to ask probing questions, and he seemed to know something about almost everyone he met, from the nurses on the wards to the janitors cleaning the store rooms in the vast underground tunnels that joined the buildings like tree roots.

Snyder and Hobson were both psychiatrists. But rather than study the dream as a complex of symbols interpreted in a psychoanalytic framework, they followed the ground-breaking work of two researchers at the University of Chicago who had attached electrodes to the surface of volunteers’ skulls and discovered a consistent pattern of brain-wave alteration over the course of a night’s sleep (Aserinsky and Kleitman 1953, 1955). Not only did the sleeping brain go through cycles of slow-wave and fast-wave sleep, but one stage (to be identified as Stage I REM sleep) consistently resulted in dream reports whereas the others did not.

Over the course of a normal night’s sleep, human adults hooked to an EEG machine demonstrated a series of cycles of increasing synchronization of neurons (increasingly larger brain waves) followed by progressive desynchronization (faster, flatter waves). During each cycle, which lasted about ninety minutes, the sleeper passed through Stages II and III, reaching greatest synchrony at midcycle (Stage IV, characterized by high-voltage delta waves of 1-2 Hz), after which the synchrony began to break up. The sleeper cycled from Stage IV to III and II, and finally to Emergent Stage I, which was very similar to the asynchronous low, fast waves of a person who was actively awake, alert, anxious, or deep in thought. Emergent Stage I was sometimes called paradoxical sleep because, although the brain waves indicate that the person was awake, they were nevertheless asleep.

In the faint glow of the room where the sleep researchers watched the hypnotizing flow of ink on eternally moving paper, someone muttered, Ah! or It’s starting! The waves had flattened, but what was most distinctive was the sudden activity picked up by the electrodes beside the eyes. The pens linked to them jerked and jittered, recording rapid eye movements. The chief researcher made the call on when to activate the microphone and recorder to wake the subject. Oh, man, the sleeper might say, I just had this incredible dream! The dream was recorded, the researchers looking for clues about the relationship between eye movements and dream content, but usually found none. The furiously active eye movements mirrored the intensely active cortical waves. Humans are primates, and among primates the brain invests more heavily in vision than in other senses. Perhaps, some speculated, the brain was recharging its batteries, running through its programs, jetting off steam. Whatever it was doing, it was doing it with impressive regularity. Of all the stages of sleep during which sleepers were systematically interrupted, it was only Stage I, paradoxical, REM sleep that produced vivid dream reports. Waked during other stages, a sleeper might report static images if they reported anything at all (the kind of report I gave during my first night of sleep in the lab).

Raised in and distrusting a family culture in which Freud played an important tool of insight and manipulation, I embraced the non-symbolic view of dreams as a byproduct of a cyclical biological process. This approach appeared to be more scientific; it gave me a place to stand outside my family culture—just as I was later to embrace anthropology in graduate school, thinking it gave me a more universalistic perspective than the culture-bound psychological theories that constituted my undergraduate major. All my life, to quote Margaret Mead, I’ve been a fish trying to see the water in which I’ve been swimming.

Soon I joined the sleep researchers behind the one-way mirror. They included Dr. Hobson, Dr. Snyder, an Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Ernest Hartmann (a Scrabble enthusiast), and a bearded stringbean Ph.D. student from the University of Chicago, Fred Goldfrank. As soon as the lights in the sleeping room were turned off, we gathered around the EEG machine, mesmerized by the flicking of delicate pens that, like machines tracking the movement of earthquakes, recorded the electrical activity taking place within the vicinity of each electrode.

There’s a K-complex. What does it mean?

I don’t know. Except that they occur infrequently and always alone and are similar to the slow waves in deep sleep except they have a spindle on the end.

Should we wake him up?

Darn, the parietal electrode is loose and he’s just beginning to dream.

Look, he’s dropped back into the fourth level. He ought to be in his third dream sequence and he hasn’t even had one.

The dream cycle may be connected to the sense of time. When he wakes up will he think it’s 5:00 or 2:00 as it would normally be if he were following the sequence?

Ah, the waves are flattening out. Third…oops, back to fourth… ah, second and third. Now he’s coming into first. Shalom! There’s an eye movement. Steady now… no, not back into second! There, that’s better. Let’s give him ten minutes.

Cliff, wake up. Were you dreaming?

In between dream cycles we played Scrabble. Dr. Hartmann, bored with the usual game, wanted to change the rules; you had to use all seven letters, and anything was acceptable as long as you could think up an explanation for it. Dr. Hobson ignored him and looked slightly pained; Fred looked stressed, a look he wore often. Dr. Snyder didn’t look up from his tinkering. I said I would play and drew seven tiles, which turned out to be almost all vowels. I laid out EEIOWER: Old MacDonald who had a farm. He countered with THANEUKE, a musical instrument owned by a thane. I responded with AUTILAYS: sex as practiced by autistic children. Well, he said, Of course you know those people, those city slickers, who come to the country and wear their smart-talking on their lapels, they sort of broadcast it all over. One of them is called IQLEAPEL.

I objected. You don’t spell ‘lapel’ like that.

That’s exactly what I mean, he said, You smart-talking city slicker.

As we got down to the last few tiles, we started adding letters to absurd words (VERTIGUT: the feeling you get when you fall from a plane; MOATVERTIGUT: the feeling you get when you fall from a plane into a moat), while Hobson and Snyder speculated about the relationship between neurophysiology and Freud. Could repression be related to a neurohumoral stimulation of the reticular formation (a region of the brain that Moruzzi and Magoun, in an experiment on cats in 1949, proved to be responsible for a state of cortical alertness)? What was the physiological basis for the ego?

Dr. Hartmann, whose father was the ego psychologist Heinz Hartmann, would go on to publish books on dream imagery and its emotional content (e.g., Hartmann 2010). Dr. Snyder preferred to speculate about the evolutionary significance of sleep stages, and in 1966 would argue that while extended sleep enabled a warm-blooded mammal to conserve energy, the REM stage served a sentinel function, allowing the animal to wake up periodically and be prepared for fight or flight. Dr. Hobson was the most adamant about dismantling Freud’s legacy, although his later writings about offline vs. online, and protoconscious vs. conscious (e.g., Hobson 1988, 2010), reveal the same pattern of cultural bifurcation that affected Freud.

From Dr. Hobson’s point of view, Freud had veered away from science into a sewer of mystic musings. Stick to what we can prove, he argued, and one of the most surprising things I learned was that the mechanism that triggered dreaming sleep was not the relatively recently evolved cortex but the ancient brainstem.

In a 1949 article titled Brain Stem Reticular Formation and Activation of the EEG, Moruzzi and Magoun described a neurophysiological system of arousal that extended from the brain stem to the cerebral cortex that they called the reticular formation. Their insights excited researchers because of their implications for understanding attention and consciousness. The ascending reticular activating system aroused the cortex so that it was awake to receive messages arriving via specific sensory channels. Subsequent research explored the specific parts of the reticular system that stimulated dreaming sleep as opposed to waking arousal (e.g., Jouvet 1967). Sleep, once believed to be a passive state created by lack of stimuli, could now be studied as an active process; and dreams, mined by Freud as a complex symbolic road to the Unconscious, could be seen as a survival mechanism of a large, evolving, mammalian brain.

The drawings I copied out of anatomy textbooks of the cross section of the brain looked like a dissected mushroom: the brainstem with the more