What it is:
Revered by some and brushed off as nonsense by others, dreams are highly personal experiences that perplex and entertain us all. Whatever your relationship with the dreamworld, you may be surprised to learn that some of culture's greatest contributions have indeed been borne from the sleeping mind. Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Anne Rice, Stephen King, Paul McCartney, and Jack Kerouac are great artists for whom dreams inspired ideas.
Sigmund Freud believed that the purpose of dreams was to reveal to us that which we most desire. Carl Jung offered a different perspective in that dreams offer insight into the unconscious (both that of the individual mind and of collective society).
Today, partners may discuss dreams over morning coffee, in ceremony, in therapy, or in the sleep lab. Every day, we're learning more about their potential role in self-development, memory, and creativity.
The purported claims:
Dreams can occur during any stage of sleep but are most often associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
There are three main theories for the role of dreams.
Dreams can be modulated and “incubated,” which may boost creativity but may also leave us vulnerable to invasion by advertising.
What the science says:
Dreams can occur during any stage of sleep, though they are most often associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This type of sleep is characterized by sharp, rapid eye movements, muscle paralysis, and a very active mind. In fact, if you looked at an electroencephalography (EEG) trace from REM sleep and compared it to that of a waking brain, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
During a normal night of rest for a healthy person, REM sleep usually doesn’t make an appearance until the latter half of the night. We cycle through light and deep non-REM sleep for the first few hours and then slowly begin to trade off the deep sleep for time spent in REM sleep as night transitions to morning ( e.g., hypnogram below).
There are instances, however, when REM might insert itself earlier than usual into a sleep episode. This is typical for individuals with narcolepsy, a sleep disorder characterized by trouble maintaining wakefulness. However, early REM sleep onset can also occur as a kind of “rebound” when a person has been REM sleep-deprived for some time. Marijuana use, for example, typically reduces REM sleep duration, and heavy users often experience sleep problems for a short time after discontinuing use as a disproportionate amount of time is spent in REM sleep compared to usual. This is often accompanied by intense dreams and even nightmares. Antidepressants also dramatically reduce REM sleep duration, as do very early morning start times.
The fact that REM sleep often rebounds after it has been curtailed suggests that it serves an essential purpose. Deep, or slow-wave, sleep is typically emphasized as the “holy grail” of the sleep stages. While true, REM sleep is uniquely necessary for memory consolidation and emotion processing. The dreamworld also offers fascinating psychological, creative, and even spiritual insights for many people.
REM sleep dreams often contain colorful and even bizarre elements that can leave us wondering how our brains managed to come up with such imagery. Particularly for those of us who do not identify as particularly creative people, dreams can be woven with fantastical and even shocking elements that seem as though they were placed there by some other source rather than created from our own minds. REM sleep dreams have been compared to a kind of acceptable psychosis that happens each night, and may serve an important purpose.
Areas of the brain involved in memory consolidation are highly active during REM sleep, and when people dream, their visual cortex is also switched on. Experiments have shown that when individuals are given a learning task before bed and dream about it that night, they can recall it with greater success the next day. It is thought that dreams both help to solidify new memories, as well as periodically reorganize existing memories. They can also help us solve problems. One of the founders of the sleep research field, Dr. William Dement, once asked his students to try falling asleep while actively thinking through a brainteaser. Of the 87 brainteaser-related dreams that were reported the next day, 7 included solutions to the problem.
Dream Theories
There are currently three main accepted theories for why we dream:
Perhaps dreams serve no real purpose at all but are artifacts left behind during the development of consciousness.
Dreams may propel us toward our deepest desires, ignite creative ideas and inspiration, or remind us of forgotten memories.
Given sleep’s role in memory consolidation, dreams might serve us by facilitating the integration of new information learned each day. This might help us create better models of reality to ensure our success and survival.
The first theory is particularly unsatisfying given the nature of evolution, which conserves what works for our success as a species to thrive and reproduce and attempts to let go of that which no longer serves us. Evolutionary anthropologist David Samson directs the Sleep and Human Evolution Lab at the University of Toronto. He has investigated sleep in many different primates and humans living in various societies and communities, such as remote tribes around the world. Samson has shown that while humans sleep the least of any primate, we have the greatest proportion of REM sleep. Interestingly, when he and colleagues analyzed dream content in small forager societies, they noted pro-social themes in which individuals would encounter a problem similar to what they might experience in a regular day (i.e. “a buffalo hit me” or “I fell into a well”). Still, the problem was resolved by a friend, family member, or another person who offered help.
The “Continuity Hypothesis” states that dream themes reflect waking life. This was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic when many people reported themes of hygiene, claustrophobia, or even death. Dreams can offer powerful insight into our mood and general mental state, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in post-traumatic stress-related nightmares, which can leave individuals terrified of sleep and chronically sleep-deprived.
Approximately 75% of people woken from REM sleep will recall a dream, compared to just 5-10% from non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep dreams tend to be procedural and lack the bizarre elements that occur during REM sleep.
If people experience more awakenings during the night, they will also be more likely to recall a dream. Particularly if these awakenings occur during the early morning hours when REM sleep is more likely to occur. If a person experiences insomnia with middle-of-the-night or early-morning awakenings (rather than, say, trouble falling asleep,) and also has negative dreams, these dreams might provide clues for some of the themes that are causing the insomnia. Dream journals can be a powerful way of keeping track of common themes or symbols that can be explored in therapy or meditation.
Dreams might also provide insight into an underlying sleep disorder. Sometimes, individuals with untreated sleep apnea can have dreams of drowning or choking triggered by the shallow breathing or breath-holds that occur in this disorder. Those with sleep paralysis, which is a lingering of muscle paralysis into waking consciousness, can find themselves dreaming of being chained down or having an evil spirit holding their chest down.
Dream Incubation
Image Reversal Therapy or the "Dream Completion Technique" are two powerful ways of overcoming distressing, recurring nightmares. The general idea is that a person dedicates time during waking life to thinking through alternative outcomes for the way a nightmare usually pans out. For example, instead of waking up terrified from being chased by a bear, a person might imagine the bear shrinking into a non-threatening teddy bear. The more believable and rehearsed this alternate dream-reality becomes, the more likely a person is to actually dream it and overcome the nightmare. However, a dream can also be "incubated" for reasons other than a distressing nightmare scenario. Problem-solving, a new creative idea, or self-exploration can also prompt dream enthusiasts to experiment with techniques that persuade the sleeping mind to pursue a particular path.
Several years ago, scientists at Harvard and MIT experimented with the optimal time to incubate dreams using a hand-worn device called Dormio. This glove-like device measures muscle tone in the hand and is connected to a phone app that can deliver an audio cue of a word or theme and record a dreamer's dream story upon awakening.
The researchers found that hypnagogia (the blurry line between awake and asleep) was the ideal time to incubate a dream theme. The Dormio device waits for the loss of muscle tone to be detected in the hand, then cues the phone app to deliver an audio prompt to the person entering sleep (i.e. "think of a tree".) The dreamer is woken up a few minutes later and asked to recall what they were dreaming about. It was found that sometimes when this was repeated every few minutes, the dreams became increasingly bizarre. It was also shown, however, that dream incubation improved post-sleep creative performance.
Hypnagogia has been utilized by many creative people over the years as a rich resource for creative inspiration. If you have ever been jolted awake in the middle of reading as the book falls on your face, you were probably unknowingly using a technique that Thomas Edison swore by, which was to capture the image fragments and thoughts that appeared during this blurry boundary at the edge of sleep. He would fall asleep holding a ball in each of his hands, soon to be dropped when he drifted off to sleep. Next time this happens, consider jotting down any images you saw.
While a rich source of creative insight, dream incubation can also be used for a more insidious purpose. Some of the researchers on the Dormio studies have sounded the alarm bells about dream incubation being used by advertisers to sell more products after this was put to the test by one of the 2021 Super Bowl advertisers.
In a 2021 American Marketing Association survey, 77% of 400 companies reported plans to experiment with dream advertising by 2025. There's essentially zero policy to protect consumers from this. It's one thing to practice mindfulness during the day, but what measures need to be put in place to protect our sleeping minds? It's an ongoing discussion by dream ethicists.
Our take:
There is so much that we still do not understand about the dreaming mind, but it is clearly a powerful environment from which hopes and desires may be revealed to us, complex problems may be solved, and ideas may be birthed. We can dream during any stage of sleep and may even find that the border between sleep and wake (“hypnagogia” is the period when we drift off to sleep, and “hypnopompia” is when we aren’t quite yet awake) offers our greatest capacity for creative thought. Simply having the intention to become more aware of one’s dreams and keeping a dream journal at the bedside can be a powerful way of gaining more insight into our unconscious mind’s inner workings.
Sleep expert and dream psychologist Dr. Rubin Naiman has written extensively about the benefits of dreams for better understanding ourselves and living more fulfilling lives. In a “wake-centric” world, he argues that we might be missing out on an inner richness by routinely depriving ourselves of sufficient sleep and time spent in the dream world. In an article on Aeon titled “In Exile from the Dreamscape,” he writes, “Dreaming is a place, a state of consciousness, somewhere we can, with practice, choose to visit.” Perhaps lucid dreaming, or even greater awareness of dreaming, allows us to rehearse scenarios we hope to find ourselves in during waking life. This rehearsal might improve our rates of success or even fine-tune specific details that we hadn’t previously considered.
Thankfully, most of us no longer face the problems of early humans, such as food shortages and predators. But modern society presents a whole suite of new hurdles over which we must attempt to creatively leap. Dreams may offer novel solutions and insights to some of these, but we need to provide ourselves the opportunity to have them if we are to reap their benefits. We can set ourselves up for success simply by giving ourselves enough time in bed each night. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 7 to 9 hours for adults and about 8 to 10 hours for adolescents.
Will this benefit me?
Some people claim that they never dream. In these instances, typically, mindfulness is all that is required. Having the intention of remembering one’s dreams is the best place to start, followed by keeping a journal by the bed to make notes of fragments that linger upon waking. One technique for increasing the chance of remembering a dream is to pause when waking and replay the dream before moving. As soon as we move, this can quickly dissolve the dream. With time, it is surprising what dream themes might be revealed.
Still curious to try it? Here’s what to keep an eye on if you do:
Given that REM sleep is more likely to occur during the second half of the night and into the morning, do what you can to avoid setting a very early morning alarm. If it helps to get to bed a bit earlier the night before so that you naturally wake up bright and early, this may give you the benefits of dream time without cutting sleep short mid-cycle.
References and additional materials:
A gateway to the unconscious - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28618458/
Contemporary theories of dreaming - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20079677/
Dreaming and memory - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24477388/
Dreaming and problem-solving - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28640937/
Characteristics and contents of dreams - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20870066/
Human REM vs other primates - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26662946/
Samson dreams across cultures - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37783728/
David Samson “Our Tribal Future” Book - https://davidrsamson.com/#book
David Fontana “Teach Yourself to Dream” Book - https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Yourself-Dream-Unleashing-Subconscious/dp/0811816281
Thomas Edison’s Napping Technique - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-naps-inspire-a-way-to-spark-your-own-creativity/
Dormio device study - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32480292/
Dream incubation and creativity study - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37188795/
Advertisers hacking dreams - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/05/advertisers-targeted-dream-incubation
Coors dream hacking - https://www.forbes.com/sites/robpegoraro/2021/01/27/this-beer-company-didnt-buy-a-super-bowl-ad-it-wants-into-your-dreams-instead/?sh=1da4eafa38d6
The nightmare of dream advertising - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4361477
Rubin Naiman Dreaming as a Way of Seeing - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dream-eyes-dreaming-as-a-way-of-seeing_b_5794998de4b0b3e2427c7eee#new_tab
Rubin Naiman Aeon “In Exile from the Dreamscape” - https://aeon.co/essays/we-live-in-a-wake-centric-world-losing-touch-with-our-dreams#new_tab
Rubin Naiman Aeon “Falling for Sleep” - https://aeon.co/essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-love-with-sleep-again#new_tab
Figures created using BioRender.com
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