Zzzzz!!!

Analysis, interpretation, buffet dinners,
costume balls and more. A report from
The International Association for the
Study of Dreams conference

by JULIET WATERS

I haven’t read The New Science of Dreaming, a three-volume set edited by Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara. It currently retails for close to $300, so even if I had a review copy, I wouldn’t expect Mirror readers to run out and buy one.

Last week, however, I did attend the 25th annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, held for the first time in Montreal. There I got a chance to meet, listen and talk to some of the people who’ve contributed chapters to this book.

After four days of early morning dream groups, workshops (one with Barrett herself), research symposiums, one Hawaiian buffet dinner, one late evening scotch drinking session and one delightfully nerdy costume ball, I may have the gist of where the new science of dreaming is at.

The ability to get the gist of information, according to Harvard’s Robert Stickgold, is one of the main advantages of a good night’s sleep and a healthy dream life. Sleep helps us sort out and consolidate patterns. Research subjects given puzzles involving pattern recognition routinely find the answers better after they’ve slept on it. Sleep also consolidates memory in fairly predictable patterns according to Montreal’s Tore Nielsen, who runs the pioneering dream and nightmare laboratory at Sacré-Coeur Hospital.

Much of the current research in neuroscience looks at how waking life gets processed in dream life. Relatively little seems to be looking at how content in dreams influences our waking life. This is still the domain of dream therapists who were well represented at the conference, but don’t often factor into neuroscience.

There’s one good reason for this. While EEG waves are accepted as sound scientific evidence, collecting dream content depends on reports from sleepy research subjects. The value of dream reporting is still pretty vulnerable as scientific evidence. First person reports are already open to scientific skepticism in waking life, add the bizarro disorientation of dream life, and the challenge of quantifying evidence seems insurmountable.

This was brought home in a brilliant symposium chaired by Berlin-based neurophilosopher Jennifer Windt. The typical dreamer has a hard enough time grasping who the hell they are, or what’s happening in a dream, let alone provide an accurate report of what’s happened.

So where is the new science of dreaming headed? Maybe it will start looking more deeply into the reverse dynamic: how purposeful alterations of consciousness in dream life get consolidated in waking life. Since the ’90s, there’s been a boom of interest in lucid dreaming, the ability to become conscious and pro-active in dreams. But there has been relatively little serious research.

This may have something to do with the proportion of sleep research that is currently funded by the pharmacology industry. The profit being made on drugs that suppress REM in sleep is unlikely to be invested into showing how long, pro-active REM cycles might improve our lives. But interest in lucid dreaming has been percolating into more independent and government funded sleep research.

Laboratories, like Nielsen’s, have been able to replicate experiments in which dreamers, who become conscious in their dreams, purposefully blink their eyes to signal lab technicians that they’ve achieved lucidity. Mark Blagrove from Swansea University in Wales presented one intriguing experiment that suggests dreams skills might improve waking skills. In his experiment, lucid dreamers were less vulnerable to the “Stroop Effect,” the tendency to struggle over the colour of a word if the word itself spells out a different colour.

In other words, lucid dreamers may be less prone to the disadvantages of gist thinking. Maybe normal dreams help to consolidate patterns, while lucid dreams help us to unlearn those patterns when they need to be unlearned. This may be just a hunch, but I suspect we’ll know more when someone patents a drug that makes us dream more instead of less.

The New Science of Dreaming
Eds. Deirdre Barrett and Patrick
McNamara, Praeger,
hc, 992 pp, $275