Stories In Our Sleep
Newly announced studies cast doubt on the idea that nightmares serve as outlets to vent our anxieties. Instead they show that subjects display heightened anxiety after waking from disturbing dreams. This certainly squares with my own experience of being emotionally shaken after a particularly distressing nightmare.
The anxiety processing hypothesis proceeds from the assumption that there must be some evolutionary advantage to nightmares. Another explanation would be that they’re an unpleasant side effect of another advantageous adaptation. In his book The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness
( previously discussed), Jeff Warren surveys a hypothesis that treats them as a consequence of our perceptual apparatus. Dreams, it says, result when our visual processing mechanisms are left running with no visual input to process. With nothing to perceive, the processing centers of our brains create images, drawn from our memories and imaginations. The brain’s pattern-recognition functions then kick in, wrapping an explanatory narrative around the resulting image jumble. By arranging them into a linear pattern, our brains transform these images into stories. The leaps required to connect the images result in fragmentary, surreal narratives, but narratives nonetheless. Such is the power and persistence of our pattern-making brains.
Some adherents of the jumbled images model argue that it blows out of the water the technique of dream analysis as practiced by Freud and Jung. Sounds like an overreach to me. Jung famously stated that an unexamined dream was like an unopened letter from the subconscious. Although not all of our dreams are necessarily meaningful on a literal level, the choices our brains make in weaving stories out of the image flood might be revelatory of our concerns, moods, and personalities. Certainly being trained, as one would while undergoing psychoanalysis, to find profound personal metaphors in dreams, would focus one’s pattern-making in that direction.
With a powerful narrative, you can change the world. You can found, spread, or alter a religious tradition. You can impel others to fall in line with your political agenda. At the deepest levels, even in slumber, we are storymakers.