One of the mind's most exciting creations is the dream. Dreams are the portals through which we gain access to the unconscious and its miraculous content and process. We do not know what exactly exists in our unconscious mind, precisely because it is unconscious! -- but the dream is our greatest and most prolific tool for comprehending what we have stored in this vast part of the mind.

Virtually every person dreams, and with amazing regularity! In fact, dreaming appears to be a necessary function for biological and psychic well-being. Sleep deprivation is a known tool of torture, and it is now believed that the most harmful component of sleep deprivation is dream deprivation. We suffer from dream deprivation sooner than from sleep deprivation! Rats who are prevented from dreaming die after 10 days, even if they are allowed to sleep. Interestingly, they die of starvation. Newborns of all species spend 50-95% of their time in dream states, and it is hypothesised that dreaming helps store memories. The fox kit who has just pounced on its first mouse may dream of the experience and thus remember it more easily the next time it is out hunting! So, on the physiological level, dreaming serves to regulate metabolism, as well as to consolidate memories.

Through out the course of the night, the brain emits four specific patterns of waves referred to as the four stages of sleep. Before a person fall asleep, their brain produces alpha waves. They indicate that the person is in a relaxed state of mind, yet still conscious. As you're laying down and your breathing rate slows and becomes rhythmic (but you're still awake) so do your brain waves. This is considered stage one of sleep, when the alpha waves turn into theta waves. You know that weird sensation of falling that tends to jerk you awake? This is when it happens. After that comes stage two, which is classified by the periodic appearance of sudden bursts of rapid brain-wave activity known as sleep spindles. Lots of times this is when people talk in their sleep. About twenty minutes later starts stage four, when sleep spindles cease and the slow, deep sleep of delta waves take over. If you tend to walk in your sleep, then this is when you're bound to do it. Night terrors (not to be confused with nightmares) occur during this time as well. Night terrors is a term used to describe when kids wake up screaming for no apparent reason. Heart rate and respiration increases-all the symptoms of fear. They can't ever remember the dream though, or what it is exactly that they're afraid of(fortunately most children stop having night terrors as they age). As dreams and eye movement become more intense, stage four transforms into a fifth stage known as REM sleep, which consists of constant eye movement, much more than any of the other four stages of sleep. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and it has a definite connection with dreaming. " because during these times, our eyes are literally darting back and forth beneath the closed lids. When you're asleep your body becomes literally paralyzed, all but the respiratory system and eye muscles. The REM would seem to represent a link between your motions in your dream and your physical body, if you look around in a dream, your REAL eye balls move in accordance.

We tend to dream at specific periods throughout our sleep cycle, during times known as REM sleep. We have several such REM cycles throughout the night, in fact we move up and down through sleep stages, lighter to deeper and back again, a few times throughout the average night. REM sleep is not a particularly heavy sleep; it is characterized by low amplitude, high frequency energy waves, almost like a waking state EEG! Dreams are caused by energy firings at the base of the brain. It is hypothesised that, because these firings land near the visual cortex of the brain, dreams are primarily visual in nature. And since the gait center is also located in this specific area, we tend to move in dreams. However, it is only in dreams that we move while sleeping, for we are almost immobilized during REM sleep. Our major muscles groups tend to be virtually paralyzed, an adaptive response which keeps us from acting out our dreams!

Of course, you may not be dreaming about the exact picture which appears in your dream! Because dreams use visual representations, and because these are often very symbolic, the pictures in your dreams may actually stand for something else. So, say you dream about an ocean voyage. This does not mean, necessarily, that you have unfinished business around ocean voyages! It means that you have unfinished business around whatever that ocean voyage really represents, perhaps a psychic journey into a new inner place, perhaps beginning therapy, or something of that nature.

Freud, the first person to take dreams seriously and the first person to analyze his own dreams to explore the content of his own unconscious mind, has strong beliefs about the meaning of dreams. His theories continue to influence scholars to this day, for it was his entire theory about the unconscious mind which gave rise to the study of dreams as we know it now! Freud said many important things about the dream. 1. It is the function of the dream to safeguard sleep! Freud believed that the dream was an attempt on the part of the mind to present the issue in a visual form in an effort to work out the issue, and allow the sleeper to remain asleep, to be undisturbed by the problem. 2. The dream is a wish fulfillment. Freud believed that every dream –if properly analyzed-could be seen to hold a wish. And not just any kind of wish, but a very specific wish, one originating in childhood and based on the sexual longings of the child. Freud's overall psychology was one based on the stages of childhood development, and he was the first to talk about the sexual nature of the individual, even the child. Sexual drives, which must be controlled, socialized and sublimated, continue to manifest in our dreams, throughout our entire lives.

Because there is so much conflict around the sexual nature of dreams, it is impossible to experience them directly. Therefore, our minds engage in a sort of hide and seek game, to present the dream, but in a heavily disguised way. Freud spoke at length about the mechanisms the mind uses to disguise these dreams. One of these is condensation, whereby we might take characteristics from several things or people in life and put them all together in one dream symbol. So, perhaps there is a person in your dream who has your father's nose, your boss's car and your husband's pipe. This one dream person is a symbol for those other 3 men, and a condensation of their characteristics! Displacement is another dream tool, whereby we take the characteristic which is important to us and replace it with another, less conflictual one. So, for example, if you see a naked person carrying a bunch of flowers, displacement might lead you to dream about a bunch of flowers, and leave out the naked form entirely! There are other dream tools which are fun to play with, and in fact, figuring out the meaning of a dream is great fun altogether! One person reported a dream of her mother and father floating on a raft on the Nile. As she reported this dream, it sounded very much like she said "...on de Nile" and I asked her to repeat the narrative. Then I told her that I had heard her say, "...mother and father floating on a raft on denial." This, in fact, is a very good picture of her family, and we both had a chuckle at the tricks the mind can play. Watch for puns!

So our dreams can capture the personal history and experience of the dreamer, from early life experiences which have not been mastered, to the state of the present self. Dreams of falling, emptiness or empty things etc. capture the inner state of depletion; dreams of desert-type landscapes capture the state of inner alienation and loneliness; dreams of chaos and confusion capture states of fear, chaos and inability to self-soothe. There is, in fact, a self component to most dreams, and our dreams can be very useful in helping us figure out what is going on with ourselves.

Lucid dream reports abound with counter examples, showing that dreamers can at times have their own feelings, intentions, and ideas. When dreamers realize that they are dreaming, they often experience a feeling of exhilaration. This feeling is more like a response to a higher order perception, rather than to a random brain-stem stimulus. As for intentions and ideas, when dreamers attain lucidity, they typically remember intentions about what they wanted to do in their next lucid dream, and can remember ideas in the form of ideals and principles of behavior such as "face your fears," "seek positive outcomes," or "remember your mission." Our oneironauts routinely make use of this last principle when sleeping in the laboratory.

Finally, if all of the eye movements of REM sleep are randomly generated by a madman in the brain stem, how are lucid dreamers able to voluntarily execute eye movement signals in accordance with pre-sleep agreement? Of course, the answer to all of these rhetorical questions is that the Hobson-McCarley hypothesis cannot be the whole story. On the contrary, I believe Hobson and McCarley are right about much of what they say about physiological determinants of the form of dreams; it is evident that dreams also have psychological determinants, and therefore any satisfactory theory of dream content ought to include both. It also ought to explain why and under what conditions dreams are sometimes coherent, brilliantly witty narratives, and in other conditions, incoherent ravings. And why in some dreams are we deluded and in others lucid? And why are some dreams profoundly meaningful and others pointless nonsense?

As for meaning and nonsense, the Activation-Synthesis model of dreaming seems willing to completely disregard the possibility that dreams could have any intrinsic or interesting meaning whatever. Given the "forebrain making the best of a bad job..." from the random signals sent up from the brain stem, the most we could reasonably expect if this were the case is what is called in computer terms "GIGO," an acronym for "Garbage In, Garbage Out." Hobson, at least, seems to say as much in a recent interview: "Dreams are like a Rorschach inkblot. They are ambiguous stimuli which can be interpreted any way a therapist is predisposed to. But their meaning is in the eye of the beholder--not in the dream itself." I can hear it now: a psychiatrist asks a patient, "What does this dream make you think of?" And receives the reply: "An inkblot!"

Among the psychophysiologically minded dream researchers a major criticism of the Activation-Synthesis model was that it was essentially a one-way street, allowing traffic only to proceed upward from brainstem to forebrain (from lower mental function to higher mental function). But the way the brain is actually put together would require a two-way street, allowing forebrain control of brain stem activation, and therefore allowing higher cortical functions such as thinking and deliberate action to influence the dream. This is the same criticism I just made regarding the inability of the Hobson and McCarley model to deal with lucid dreaming.

Some sleep and dream researchers argued that the Activation- Synthesis model missed the central question about dreaming altogether. According to Dr. Milton Kramer of the University of Cincinnati, Hobson and McCarley's approach is "not central to the functional problems of dreaming. When it comes to dreams, two things are important--meaning and function. Do dreams enlighten us about ourselves? Will they make us smarter, change our personality, change our mood, solve our problems, have an application to our daily lives?" Kramer concluded that "I think the essence of dreams is psychological. It's all very well to find in dreams that a person is walking. The important questions are, 'Where is he walking? Why is he walking there?' Those are the continuing mysteries of dreams and that is what we want to know."

So how does the Activation-Synthesis model measure up if we use Kramer's two criteria: meaning and function? As to the meaning of dreams, in Hobson and McCarley's model there is none. Regarding function, Hobson has offered a possible function of the dream state:

"A crude analogy to computers helps to make a point even if it may violate the reality of brain function: Every information processing machine has both hardware and software components. To create a nervous system, the genetic code must program both a structural blueprint and a set of operating instructions. To maintain the neurons it would make sense to utilize a standard set of operating instructions to activate and test the system at regular intervals. From an intuitive point of view, it is appealing to consider REM sleep as the expression of a basic activity program for the developing CNS that would ensure the functional competence of neurons, circuits, and complex activity patterns before the organism was called upon to use them. It would be particularly important for such a system to have a high degree of reliability in both time and in space. These features are to be found in the periodicity and duration constancy of REM and in the stereotyped nature of the activity."

Elsewhere, Hobson elaborates:

"I believe that dreaming is the (sometimes outward) sign of a genetically determined, functionally dynamic blueprint of the brain designed to construct and to test the brain circuits that underlie our behavior-including cognition and meaning attribution. I also believe that this test program is essential to normal brain-mind functioning but that you don't have to remember its products to reap its benefits."

Dreaming To Forget?

In a paper published in 1983 in the British journal Nature, Nobel Laureate Francis Crick (one of the team that cracked the genetic code and unraveled the mystery of DNA) and co-author Graeme Mitchison proposed that the function of dream sleep

is to remove certain undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells in the cerebral cortex. We postulate that this is done in REM sleep by a reverse learning mechanism, so that the trace in the brain of the unconscious dream is weakened, rather than strengthened by the dream.

That, in a nut-shell, is their "reverse-learning" theory of dreaming.

Crick and Mitchison's theory is derived from two basic hypotheses: the first is that the cerebral cortex, as a completely interconnected network of neurons, "is likely to be subject to unwanted or 'parasitic' modes of behavior, which arise as it is disturbed either by the growth of the brain or by the modifications produced by experience."

Their second hypothesis is even more tenuous than the first: it proposes that if these hypothetical 'parasitic' modes of neuronal activity do in fact exist, then it might be that they "are detected and suppressed by a special mechanism" hypothetically operating during REM sleep. This mechanism is described as having "the character of an active process which is, loosely speaking, the opposite of learning." Crick and Mitchison call this hypothetical process "reverse learning" or "unlearning," and explain that it "is not the same as normal forgetting" and that "Without it we believe that the mammalian cortex could not perform so well."

"The mechanism we propose," write Crick and Mitchison, drawing on the Hobson-McCarley conception of the neurophysiology of dreaming,

is based on the more or less random stimulation of the forebrain by the brain stem that will tend to excite the inappropriate modes of brain activity...especially those which are too prone to be set off by random noise rather than by highly structured specific signals. We further postulate a reverse learning mechanism which will modify the cortex...in such a way that this particular activity is less likely in the future...Put more loosely, we suggest that in REM sleep we unlearn our unconscious dreams. "We dream in order to forget."

To reiterate: what they are suggesting is that everything that happens in any of your dreams is being actively unlearned by your brain--that is why you are dreaming about it: merely "in order to forget it."

What exactly does this mean? According to the reverse- learning theory, when we remember our dreams we are re- learning exactly what we were trying to unlearn. This would seem to represent at least a partial failure of the reverse- learning mechanism, and "one might wonder what effects its failure might have." Crick and Mitchison suggest that complete failure (remembering all of one's dreams) might lead to "grave disturbances-a state of almost perpetual obsession or spurious, hallucinatory associations..." A partial failure (remembering several dreams a night) "should produce unwanted responses to random noise, perhaps as hallucinations, delusions, and obsessions, and produce a state not unlike some schizophrenias."

Crick and Mitchison's motto is, "we dream in order to forget." Well, maybe they do for all I know. Unfortunately, they go further than that, seeming to feel that it would be better for all of us to learn to forget our dreams: "In this model," they write, "attempting to remember one's dreams should perhaps not be encouraged, because such remembering may help to retain patterns of thought which are better forgotten. These are the very patterns the organism was attempting to damp down."

Certainly, if the reverse learning model were followed to its logical conclusion, it would seem to call for the shut-down of all psychological analysis of dreams, all attempts at remembering and interpretation of dreams, in fact the complete shutdown of the dream work industry. Fortunately, it appears that there is absolutely no direct evidence for "unlearning" during REM. In fact, there doesn't appear to be even any evidence for "unlearning" of any kind in any state, in any living organism, anywhere. "Unlearning" as it now exists is only a hypothetical concept, perhaps of some relevance to computers, but there is no proof that it has any application to human beings. In fact, Crick and Mitchison admit "A direct test of our postulated reverse learning mechanism seems extremely difficult." [9]

There is, in short, no convincing argument for this theory. It just might be true or partially true, but until direct evidence supporting it is brought forward, it must be viewed as an unlikely possibility. Even if there were some substance to reverse-learning theory, Crick and Mitchison's conclusions about the desirability of dream recall are not necessarily correct. On the contrary, the strongest argument against the theory may be the catastrophic effects they predict to result from even partial failure of the reverse-learning mechanism. Certainly, people who habitually remember their dreams do not seem any more prone to "hallucinations, delusions, and obsessions" than are people who habitually forget their dreams. Similarly, if the unlearning theory were true, dream deprivation would interfere with the "reverse-learning" process, producing disastrous effects. However, people have been deprived of REM sleep for many nights and in some cases years without showing any signs of mental breakdown. So for any of you dreamers concerned about whether you may be messing up your mind by remembering your dreams, I would suggest that you need not worry!

The Functions Of Dreaming And The Advantages Of Consciousness

Let us return to the question with which we began this chapter: "Why do we dream?" Though we have considered only a few here, there are many answers that could be and have been proposed to this question. But we can justly rule out in advance any theory of the meaning and function of dreams that does not make as much sense when applied to the dreams of a tree shrew or a whale as to the dreams of a hairless speaking primate--meaning us! Whatever the explanation for dreaming must be, we must dream for the same reason that all mammals have dreamed for more than a hundred million years. Then, why do all mammals dream? Because all mammals have REM sleep. Since humans are mammals, the biologically correct answer to the question "Why do we dream?" is, "For the same reason that any mammal does, because we have REM sleep." Yet, while technically correct, this answer is not completely satisfactory; for it merely leads to the question, "But then why do all mammals have REM sleep?"

This is a question for evolutionary biology. According to the available evidence, it seems that Active or REM sleep evolved about one hundred and thirty million years ago, when early mammals gave up laying eggs and first began to give birth viviparously (born live, not hatched). Non-REM or Quiet Sleep, on the other hand, seems to have arisen some fifty million years earlier, when the warm-blooded mammals first evolved from their cold-blooded reptilian ancestors.

The evolution of sleep and later of dreaming was far too widespread and behaviorally significant to have occurred by accident, and they presumably came into being through the usual mechanism which Darwin made famous: "natural selection". The idea is that just those genetic variations which provide the organism with some survival advantage are selected by evolution. Due to genetic variability, at any one time there is a wide range of characteristics exhibited in the population of every species. For any given environment, some of these characteristics will be more favorable than others to a species, increasing the probability that those individuals of the species which possess the favorable variation will live long enough to reproduce, passing on their genes to progeny who in turn will be likely to survive long enough to replicate, and so on. If an inherited trait offers a large enough advantage, before long all members of a given species will possess it, and carry the genes to pass it on. Since this must have been the case with sleep and dreaming, we can assume that they serve some adaptive (i.e., useful) function or functions.

All animals cycle once a day through a "circadian" (approximately 24 hours long) rest-activity rhythm. Some animals such as owls and mice rest in daylight and are active at night; others, such as humans, usually act in the light and rest in the dark. Sleep tends to occur during the rest phase of the 24-hour cycles. Thus, one of the primary adaptive advantages or "functions" of sleep is to enforce immobility on the animal during the rest phase of the circadian cycle, both to ensure its resting and keep it safely in its nest, burrow, or home. Mother nature's original idea of sleep (probably also familiar to your own mother) was to keep you off the streets after dark, and out of trouble.

If you recall that NREM sleep arose at the same time that mammals evolved from reptiles, you will have a hint as to an additional function of sleep. Reptiles were dependent upon external energy sources (primarily the sun) to maintain a high enough body temperature to allow them to undertake the business of living (principally feeding, fleeing and sex). Although reptiles enjoy a lifelong free energy subsidy from the sun, it wasn't always at their disposal, for example at night, when they might have an urgent need to escape from some hungry nocturnal predator. Warm-blooded mammals, on the other hand, were no longer completely at the mercy of weather and time of day, because they maintained their own constant internal temperatures. The cost, however, was great: being warm-blooded took much more energy than being cold-blooded. Their inner fires had to be fueled with food that had to be caught at no small energetic cost to the mammal. The need of warm-blooded mammals to economize energy made energy conservation therefore, an adaptive survival trait. To see how effectively sleep accomplishes this function, consider the case of two little mammals with high metabolic rates, the shrew and the bat. The shrew sleeps very little and has a life expectancy of no more than two years; the bat, in contrast, sleeps twenty hours a day and as a result can expect to live as many as eighteen years! If we convert these lifetimes into years awake, the bat is still ahead with three years of active life compared to the shrew's two. There seems no doubt that sleep serves an energy conservation function keeping warm-blooded, fast-moving creatures from burning out too fast. This suggests that there is more truth than fiction to the old aphorism about getting a good night's sleep!

All right, you might say, so that's why we have Quiet Sleep, but why did Active Sleep evolve and with it dreaming? Certainly, there must have been very good reasons for it, since this state has many disadvantages. For one, your brain uses much more energy during dreaming than it does while awake or in Quiet Sleep. For another, there is the fact that the body is paralyzed while you are dreaming, significantly increasing the sleeper's vulnerability. In fact, the amount of dreaming sleep for a given species is directly proportional to the degree of safety from predators; the more dangerous life is, the less a species can afford to dream.

Given these drawbacks, Active Sleep must have offered particularly useful advantages to the mammals of one hundred and thirty million years ago. We can guess one advantage if we remember that this was just the point in evolutionary history when mammalian mothers gave up laying eggs in favor of bearing live young instead. So what advantages might Active Sleep have offered to our ancestral mothers? The answer can be seen, I think, if you recall that egg-hatched lizards or birds break out of their own shells already sufficiently developed to survive on their own if necessary. Viviparous offspring, of which the human baby provides an unexcelled example, are, on the contrary, less developed at birth and often completely, helpless. Viviparous infants have to get through a great deal of learning and development, especially of the brain, in the first few weeks, months, and years of life.

In contrast to the hour and a half an adult spends in REM sleep each night, a new-born baby, who sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours a day is likely to spend of all this time-- as much as nine hours a day--dreaming! The fact that the amount and proportion of REM sleep decreases throughout life suggested to several dream researchers that REM sleep may play an important role in the development of the infant brain, providing an internal source of intense stimulation which would facilitate the maturation of the infant's nervous system as well as help in preparing the child for the limitless world of stimulation it will soon have to face.

The foremost French sleep researcher, Professor Michel Jouvet, of the University of Lyon, has proposed a similar function for Active Sleep: according to him, dreaming permits the testing and practicing of genetically programmed (i.e., instinctual) behaviors without the consequences of overt motor responses--thanks to the paralysis of this Paradoxical state of sleep. So the next time you see a newborn baby girl or boy smiling in their sleep, don't be surprised if they turn out to be perfecting their perfect smile to charm a heart they are yet to meet!

Well then, so now we know why babies dream. But if that were all there is to it, why wouldn't REM sleep completely disappear by adulthood? Well it might, except that there does seem to be something more to it, providing adults with a good reason to continue to dream. The reason is this: Active Sleep has indeed been found to be intimately involved with learning and memory.

The evidence connecting the dream state with learning and memory is of two kinds: the most direct evidence is an extensive body of research indicating that learning tasks that require significant concentration or the acquisition of unfamiliar skills is followed by increased REM sleep. The second type of evidence is less direct but still quite convincing: many studies have shown that memory for certain types of learning is impaired by subsequent REM deprivation. Psychologists distinguish two varieties of learning: prepared and unprepared learning. Prepared learning is easy and quickly acquired while unprepared learning is difficult and only slowly mastered with great effort. According to Boston psychiatrists Dr. Ramon Greenberg and Dr. Chester Pearlman, it is only unprepared learning that is REM- dependent. In of their experiments, which involved rats, they easily learned that cheese was located behind one of two doors--and an electric shock behind the other: this is called "simple position" learning, and most animals are well equipped for it. If on the other hand, the position of reward and punishment are reversed on successive trials, so that each time shock is to be found where cheese was on the previous trial and vice versa, most animals find it difficult (or impossible) to work out this more complex pattern and learn where to expect what; in other words, for rats, "successive position reversal" is an instance of unprepared learning.

After Greenberg and Pearlman subjected rats to these two varieties of task, they deprived them of REM sleep and then re-tested the rats for learning. They reported that while simple position learning was unimpaired by REM deprivation, successive position reversal was "markedly" impaired. "This finding is noteworthy" they remarked, "because successive position reversal is a task which clearly distinguishes the learning capacities of species with REM sleep (mammals) from those without it (fish)." The implication is that REM sleep makes more complex learning possible than would otherwise be the case.

Greenberg and Pearlman conclude that dreaming sleep "appears in species that show increasing abilities to assimilate unusual information into the nervous system." They suggest that the evolutionary development of the dream state "has made possible the increasingly flexible use of information in the mammalian family. That this process occurs during sleep seems to fit with current thinking about programming and reprogramming of information processing systems. Thus, several authors have pointed out the advantage of a separate mechanism for reprogramming the brain in order to avoid interference with ongoing functions."

One of these authors is Christopher Evans, whose computer- analogy theory of dreams is presented in his recent book, Landscapes of the Night: How and Why We Dream. The late Dr. Evans was an English psychologist with an abiding interest in computers who proposed that dreaming is the brain-computer's "off-line" time when the mind is assimilating the experiences of the day and at the same time updating its programs.

Not only is dreaming associated with learning and memory, but it also appears to play a somewhat broader role in the processing of information in the nervous system, including coping with traumatic experiences and emotional adjustment. The dream state has also been proposed as a restorative for mental functioning; according to Professor Ernest Hartmann, REM sleep helps us to adapt to our environments by improving our mood, memory, and other cognitive functioning through restoring certain neurochemicals that are depleted in the course of waking mental activity.

Dreaming sleep has also been shown to play a general role in reducing brain excitability. It can have a favorable effect on our moods, making us, for example, less irritable. Janet Dallet, in a dissertation, has reviewed a number of theories of dream function, concluding that "contemporary theories tend to focus on the function of environmental mastery, viewed from one of three perspectives: (a) problem solving (b) information processing, or (c) ego consolidation."

Finally, psychologist Ernest Rossi has attributed to dreams a developmental function:

In dreams we witness something more than mere wishes; we experience dramas reflecting our psychological state and the process of change taking place in it. Dreams are a laboratory for experimenting with changes in our psychic life...This constructive or synthetic approach to dreams can be clearly stated: Dreaming is an endogenous process of psychological growth, change and transformation.

It might be said of the diverse theories of dream function that they all are partly right and they all are partly wrong: right in so far as they say what a function of dreaming is, and wrong to the extent that they say what the function of dreaming is. The situation is analogous to the traditional tale of the blind men and the elephant. In this story the blind men each sought to discover the nature of an elephant by means of touch alone. From the part they grasped, they believed they knew the nature of the whole. An elephant was like a rope for the blind man who grasped it by the tail; like a rug for the one who grasped its ear; like a pillar for the one who grasped its leg; and so on. In like manner, the proponents of the various theories of dreams have each grasped not the whole as they thought, but a part of the function of dreams. Freud, for example, in surveying the many opinions about dreams, judged almost all of these previous views to have missed the forest for the trees. His own theory, which placed great importance on sex as the basis of all dream content, he considered a "view from the heights," but--as it is perhaps apparent today--Freud himself mistook a wood for the world. And as the irreverent have put it, he seems to have grasped the elephant by the balls. Things could be worse though, for others seem to have grasped the elephant by "the feathers"!

Putting aside, for the moment, the question of the special functions of dreaming, let us ask what is the most basic or general function that dreaming is likely to serve. Since dreaming is an activity of the brain, we must first ask what function brain activity serves? And because the most general biological purpose of living organisms is survival, this must also be the most general biological answer to the purpose of brain activity. The brain fosters survival by regulating the organism's transactions with the world and with itself. These latter transactions would perhaps be best achieved in the dream state, when sensory information from the external world is at its minimum.

As organisms proceed up the evolutionary ladder, new forms of cognition and corresponding actions emerge. The four major varieties of action are reflexive, instinctive, habitual and intentional, in ascending order. Behaviors lower on the evolutionary scale are relatively fixed and automatic, while behaviors higher on the scale are more flexible. Automatic behaviors are best if the situation they are designed for is relatively invariable. So, for example, since we must breathe every minute of our lives, this is very efficiently accomplished by a reflexive mechanism. Likewise, instinctive action is effective as long as the environment we are in is not too different from the one our ancestors lived in. Habit, too, is useful while the environment we have learned to get along in doesn't change too much. Intentional or deliberate action has evolved in order to handle environmental changes ("novelty") that our habitual behavior is inadequate to cope with. This highest level of cognition, which allows intentional action, is usually referred to as reflective consciousness. It is the same cognitive function that we call lucidity, when speaking in the context of dreaming.

Reflective consciousness offers the advantage of flexible and creative action as much to the dream state as to the waking state. More specifically, consciousness allows dreamers to detach themselves from the situation they are in, and reflect on possible alternative modes of action. Lucid dreamers are thus able to act reflectively, instead of merely reflexively. The important thing for lucid dreamers is their freedom from the compulsion of habit; they are capable of deliberate action in accordance with their ideals, and are well able to respond creatively to the dream content. Seen in this light, lucid dreaming does not at all appear as a mere abnormality or meaningless curiosity; rather, it represents a highly adaptive function, the most advanced product of millions of years of biological evolution.

The Meaning Of Dreaming

Since the evidence indicates that dreaming serves important biological functions, dreaming cannot be "meaningless biology." On the contrary, dreams are, at very least, meaningful biology. But does this mean that dreams must be meaningful psychology? I think the answer is "not necessarily." If you ask, "What do dreams mean?" the answer will depend upon just exactly what you mean by "meaning." But perhaps we can agree to use "meaning" to mean placing anything--let us say, in this case, a dream--in some explanatory context or other. Please note, however, that explanatory contexts vary widely from person to person. For some, interpretation or translation seems most appropriate under the assumption that dreams are messages to ourselves. Others will seek mechanistic explanations in a physiological or psychological context, and still others will be inclined to treat the dream on its own terms as it relates to itself. Which approach is right? Or, rather, which is right for which dream?

Freud assumed that the events occurring in dreams (lucid or otherwise) were by their very nature necessarily symbolic of unconscious motives. This assumption, although undoubtedly correct in certain circumstances, is equally undoubtedly misleading in others. Many dream interpreters would like to believe that every element of every dream is equally subject to symbolic interpretation, or that "all dreams are equal." This is an understandable belief, for dream interpreters could not expect to stay in business for very long if they were to say of a dream presented for analysis that "this dream is meaningless," or even, "not very interesting." Dreamers meeting with such responses would be inclined to take their dreams elsewhere until they found someone more willing to tell them what their dreams "really" meant. Also, it is a sensible working hypothesis when presented with a dream for interpretation to assume that the dream does have meaning, or, at least, that part of it does.

In the case of psychotherapists and their clients, the relevant kind of meaning assumed and sought is psychological. However, the assumption that every dream contains significant psychological information is yet to be subjected to rigorous test. It seems to me that to assert that every dream is equally informative psychologically or otherwise, informative is like supposing that every sentence you say is equally interesting, coherent, or profound!

There is a contrary way of looking at dreams, the "existential" view, which treats dreams as lived experiences composed of imagined interactions and elements which could be symbolic, or literal, or somewhere in between. Flying, for instance, could be in one case the symbolic expression of any number of unconscious desires, such as the wish to transcend all limitation, or as Freud would suggest, the wish to engage in sexual activity. While in another case, it might be merely the most convenient mode of travel available to the dreamer who wants to move from one place to another within the dream world.

From these foregoing considerations, we would probably be wiser to leave the degree of symbolic significance attributed to a given dream event as an empirical rather than an axiomatic matter--as something to test rather than to assume. It seems safe to conclude that for a given dreamer and dream, flying was apparently symbolic of this or that for a certain dreamer and dream only if such an interpretation either impresses the dreamer as having a sufficiently significant explanatory power for his dream, or if it is otherwise supported by compelling evidence.

It is important to realize that just because a particular dream can sometimes be interpreted in symbolic terms doesn't mean that it was intended as a communication in the first place. If dreams are important messages to ourselves, as suggested by the oft-repeated proverb--"an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter", then why do we throw most of them away? This is surely what we do when we forget our dreams and we forget the great majority of them. The "letter- to-yourself" theory of dreams is in even worse trouble when we remember the mammalian origins of dreaming. Consider the family dog: of the tens of thousands of dreams that Fido will dream in his lifetime--how many are likely to be interpreted? By Fido, none at all! By his owners, perhaps a few. But if humans are the only mammals equipped with the linguistic skills to use symbolic language, what purpose could dreaming serve for the thousands of species of non-human dreamers? And if it could serve no purpose to our ancestors, how could it have ever evolved?

I think that the answer is clear. Dreaming must serve purposes other than talking-to-ourselves, as I spoke of earlier in the chapter; moreover, these purposes must be achievable without requiring dreams to be remembered, to say nothing of interpreted. In fact, there is a good reason why remembering dreams might be maladaptive for all non- linguistic species, including our ancestors. To see why, consider how we are able to distinguish memories of events that we dreamed and those that actually occurred. It is something that we have learned to do thanks to language. Remember Piaget's account of the child's development of the concept dream. When, as children, we remembered our earliest dreams, we assumed, at first, that they had "actually" happened just like everything else. After enough repetitions of our parents telling us that some of our experiences were "only dreams" we learned to distinguish memories of inner dream events from memories of external physical world events. But how would we ever have been able to untangle the two realities without the help of other people telling us which was which?

Animals, however, have no way to tell each other how to distinguish dreams from reality. Imagine your favorite cat living on the other side of a tall fence that protects it from a vicious dog. Suppose your cat were to dream that the wicked dog was dead, and replaced by a family of mice. What would happen if the cat were to remember this dream when it awoke? Not knowing it was a dream, it would probably hungrily jump over the fence, expecting to find a meal. But instead, it would find itself a meal--for the dog!

Thus dream recall would seem to be a bad thing for cats, dogs, and all of the rest of the mammalian dreamers except humans. This could explain why dreams are difficult to recall. They may be so, according to this view, because of natural selection. We and our ancestors might have been protected from dangerous confusion by the evolution of mechanisms that made forgetting dreams the normal course of affairs. But if the theory I have proposed for why dreams are difficult to recall is correct, contrary to Crick and Mitchison, remembering dreams should do humans no harm, precisely because they can tell the difference between dreams and waking experiences.

In conclusion, I would suggest that the dream is not so much a communication as a creation. In essence, dreaming is more like world making than like letter writing. And if, as we have seen, an uninterpreted dream isn't like an unopened letter, then what is it like? Having demolished a popular proverb, let us replace it with another, that seems to come closer to doing the dream justice: "an uninterpreted dream is like an uninterpreted poem". If I am right, dreams have much more in common with poems than they do with letters. The word poem is derived from a Greek very meaning to create, and I have already argued that the essence of dreaming is closer to creation than to communication. Are all poems equally worth interpreting? Are all poems equally coherent, effective, or worth reading? If you wrote a dozen poems a night every night of your life, what do you suppose you would find among your several hundred thousand poems. All masterpieces? Not likely. All trash? Not likely either. What you would expect is that among great piles of trivial doggerel, there would be a smaller pile of excellent poems, but no more than a handful or perfect masterpieces. It is the same with your drams, I believe. When you have to do five or six shows every night, many of them are likely to lack inspiration. It is true that you can cultivate your dream life so that the time you spend there will grow more rewarding as the years pass. But why should you expect that every one of your dreams is worth taking the time to interpret? And yet, if a poem or a dream calls out to you to interpret it, by all means find out what it means.

It would be a very unusual poet who created poetry primarily for the amusement and instruction of critics or interpreters. He or she doesn't need a critic on hand in order to be affected, perhaps even transformed, by the poem's creation. When we read a poem, we don't need to interpret it to be deeply moved, edified, inspired, and perhaps even enlightened. Having said that neither poems nor dreams have any need of interpretation doesn't mean that it is never useful. On the contrary, it seems clear that intelligent criticism or interpretation can at times greatly increase the depth of our understanding of a poem and in the best of circumstances, of ourselves as well. It is the same with the dream.