Elephants on Acid (13 page)

Meanwhile, if you wake to find your carpet shredded and your vases broken, don’t believe your cat when it plays innocent and offers the sleepwalking excuse. The odds are it knew perfectly well what it was doing. It’s just messing with you, as cats often do.

The reels of the movie projector turn, and a grainy black-and-white image springs to life on the screen. A man sits in the darkened laboratory, watching the picture. A researcher standing behind the projector addresses him, “What you are going to see is footage shot by the anthropologist Géza Róheim. It shows a subincision initiation ritual practiced by Australian Aborigines. Please pay careful attention. We ask that you not look away, no matter how much you might feel like doing so.” The man nods that he understands.

In the movie, a group of naked aboriginal men—four older and one younger—are standing around. The men crouch down on all fours, and the young man lies face upward on their backs. Other men appear and hold the youth down. A medicine man walks on screen. He is holding a sharp stone. Abruptly he grasps the young man’s penis and moves the stone toward it.

The man watching this squirms in his seat. “Tell me he’s not going to . . . ,” he mutters. “Oh no! Oh my God! Yes, he is! I can’t watch!”

“Please continue to watch,” the experimenter immediately instructs.

The medicine man uses the stone as a knife, deftly slicing the underside of the youth’s penis open lengthwise, from the tip toward the base.

“Oh, that’s got to be painful,” the viewer moans. And indeed, the youth’s face is contorted in agony. He is being held down tightly. The view changes, and now the bleeding penis is being held over a fire, cauterizing it.

“Oh, good grief!” the viewer exclaims. He twists in his chair, holding his head at an angle as though it’s physically painful for him to continue watching.

Finally, the penis-burning scene ends, and the action switches to a hairdressing ritual. The film closes with Aborigines performing a rhythmic dance.

“Thank you for watching,” the experimenter says as he turns off the projector. “Now please prepare yourself for sleep.”

Do emotionally charged events that happen to us while we are awake influence the content of our dreams? If they do, in what way? These were the questions posed by psychologists Herman Witkin and Helen Lewis. To find the answer, they conducted an experiment in 1965 at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.

The methodology of the experiment seemed straightforward. The researchers exposed subjects, right before they went to bed, to a dramatic event—something that would evoke a strong psychological reaction. After falling asleep, the subjects were periodically awakened and asked what they were dreaming. Witkin and Lewis hoped the arousing event would act as a “tracer element.” In theory, its influence on dream content would be readily identifiable because the event itself was so unmistakable, and its transformations through the various stages of sleep could be followed.

The subjects were men from various blue-collar professions—post-office employees, guards, airplane-factory workers, telephone engineers, and bakers—who worked at night and slept during the day. They each received ten dollars a day for participating.

The emotionally arousing events the researchers exposed them to were three different films—and they definitely weren’t Hollywood tearjerkers. Forget
Doctor Zhivago
or
Gone with the Wind
. The researchers wanted in-your-face shock value, something the men wouldn’t be able to ignore. One film showed the subincision initiation ritual as described above. A second film showed an obstetrician delivering a child with the help of a Malmström Vacuum Extractor. The researchers wrote that the movie showed

the exposed vagina and thighs of the woman, painted with iodine, in other words, brown. The arm of the obstetrician is seen inserting the vacuum extractor into the vagina; the gloved hands and arms of the obstetrician, covered with blood, are then shown pulling periodically on a chain protruding from the vagina. The cutting motion of an episiotomy is also shown. The baby is then delivered with a gush of blood. The film ends by illustrating that only a harmless swelling of the skin of the baby’s head results from the vacuum extraction method.

The third film was perhaps the most horrific of all. It was shot at the State University of New York’s primate laboratory:

In the film a mother monkey is shown eating her dead infant. The mother is seen hauling her dead baby about, dragging it with her by arms and legs, and nibbling at it. One scene, toward the end, shows her eating the lips and protruding tongue of the baby.

A fourth film was also shown. However, it was an unexciting piece of footage, an educational travelogue about the western United States, intended to provide the researchers with data about the dream response to neutral content.

Subjects watched one film per session, and then immediately went to bed. To gain as much information as possible about the train of thought between seeing the film and falling asleep, the researchers asked the men to speak aloud whatever ideas popped into their heads until sleep overcame them. To facilitate this, earphones fed white noise into the men’s ears, and halves of Ping-Pong balls, over which shone a diffuse red light, covered their eyes. The researchers reported that, thanks to this technique, the men were able to continue talking almost right up to the instant they fell asleep. In addition to being awakened at fixed intervals and asked to report their dreams, the men participated in postsleep interviews.

So did the presleep experiences influence the men’s dreams? Witkin and Lewis declared unambiguously that they did. “It is quite evident that elements from the exciting presleep stimuli we used often appeared in the subsequent dreams in transformed fashion,” they reported. The key phrase in this statement is “in transformed fashion.” In no case did elements from a film appear directly in a dream. People who watched the birth film didn’t dream of delivery room scenes. Nor did the men exposed to the subincision ritual dream of dancing Aborigines. Instead, elements from the films manifested themselves in the dreams in symbolic form. At least, that’s what the experimenters said happened. Whether you agree with this conclusion depends a great deal on the faith you place in Freudian psychoanalysis.

For instance, after viewing the birth film, one subject dreamed he was in a hot closet taking a piece of cake out of a brown paper bag. Witkin and Lewis viewed this as an obvious symbolic reference to the movie:

The female body seems symbolized as a hot closet (amended in the inquiry into a hot moist closet in danger of spontaneous combustion) in which there is a “common grocery type bag”—the vagina.

The birth film evoked in another subject a dream of “sort of a troop-carrier plane, people, parachutists, jumping out of the airplane.” Again, Witkin and Lewis provided a translation:

The delivery from the womb is represented by congruently structured and functioning mechanical objects: the airplane with its regularly opening door ejecting the parachutists. The periodic motion of the obstetrician’s hands pulling on the chain is represented in the periodic opening of the airplane door.

Similar interpretations were applied to dreams following the other movies. A dream of two cowboys, one holding a gun on the other, that occurred after the subincision film was thus a “classic symbolic representation of the penis as a gun.” The monkey film yielded a reverie about a blue green frog sitting in a pool of water. This initially stumped the researchers, until they learned, on deeper inquiry, that as a child the test subject used to torture frogs:

He would throw them across a brick-wall incinerator and kill them. . . . The “frog” in the hypnagogic interval was thus connected with memories of his own cruelty.

The neutral travelogue film, as the experimenters had predicted, did not yield any dreams containing readily identifiable Freudian imagery.

While the connection between these dream images and the presleep stimulus was apparent to the researchers, it was not so to the subjects themselves. The researchers reported that “our subjects were sometimes quite vehement in denying any connection between the presleep event and their dreams.” Evidently the subjects were not sufficiently indoctrinated into Freudianism. The subjects persisted in their “denial” (as the experimenters labeled it) even after shown how obvious the connections were. Witkin and Lewis tried to explain to one subject that the brown paper bag in his dream had to be a reference to the brown-iodine-stained vagina in the birth film:

Yet, even with the occurrence of the element “brown” in his imagery of the brown paper bag with cake in it in a hot closet . . . he was not able to see the connection between these dreams and the content of the film he had seen.

One can sense the rising frustration of the researchers, as though they wanted to shout out:
Why can’t you guys see the connection? How blind can you be?
However, since it was their experiment, Witkin and Lewis got to have the last word.

The dream study was not a career highlight for either Witkin or Lewis, and they only made modest claims about it, offering their results as evidence that their procedure could be used to study the ways in which “thoughts and feelings stirred in the waking state are represented in subsequent dreams.” Witkin is far better remembered for designing tilting rooms for the U.S. Air Force, which allowed him to investigate how people determine their orientation in topsy-turvy environments such as fighter jets. Lewis is best remembered for her studies of shame. Of the two of them, Lewis was the Freudian psychoanalyst—so you have to assume she exerted the major influence on the dream study.

Quite a few other researchers have studied the relationship between waking experiences and dreams. In a 1968 study, subjects wore red-filtered goggles continuously for five days, causing their dreams to take on a red hue. Even the British Cheese Board has contributed to this field. In 2005 it sponsored a “Cheese & Dreams” study, in an effort to disprove the
³²
old legend that cheese causes nightmares. For seven days two hundred volunteers ate twenty grams of cheese half an hour before going to bed. Varieties included Stilton, Cheddar, Brie, and Red Leicester. No one reported any nightmares, but many did have unusual dreams. One subject dreamed of finding celebrity chef Jamie Oliver cooking dinner in her kitchen. The Freudians would doubtless have something to say about that. Another dreamed of having a drunken conversation with a dog.

The authors of the cheese study suggested that different types of cheese may have varying effects on dreams. For instance, Cheddar seems to cause more dreams about celebrities, whereas Brie promotes nice, relaxing dreams. Which has to make you wonder, what kind of dreams might cutting the cheese as you lie in bed cause? Probably nightmares, at least for your sleeping partner.

You are dreaming. You see large rectangular blocks tumbling downward, rotating as they fall, landing on top of an ever-growing pile of blocks. Suddenly you’re shaken awake. You have no idea where you are or who this person wearing a white lab coat is. “What were you dreaming?” the stranger asks. You answer, “Little squares coming down on a screen and trying to put them in place.”

You, in this scenario, are a participant in an experiment conducted by Harvard researcher Robert Stickgold. In 2000
³³
Stickgold arranged for twenty-seven people to play the video game Tetris every morning and night for three days. Ten of these people were experienced Tetris players, twelve were novices, and five were amnesiacs suffering from “extensive, bilateral medial temporal lobe damage.” (Translation: They could barely remember events from one minute to the next.) Stickgold repeatedly awakened his subjects during their first hour of sleep and asked them to describe their thoughts. Almost two-thirds of the participants, including three of the five amnesiacs, reported dreams of falling Tetris cubes.

The surprise was that the amnesiacs would dream of Tetris. After all, their amnesia was so severe they couldn’t remember playing the game, the experimenter, or that they were participating in an experiment. One amnesiac, after playing her nightly game of Tetris, expressed shock when she returned from taking a shower and found the experimenter sitting in her room. In the intervening minutes she had forgotten who he was. So why had the amnesiacs’ sleeping minds held on to the Tetris memory?

Stickgold argues that his experiment reveals that our dreams do not draw on concrete memories, the kind that are stored in the hippocampus. If dreams did, the amnesiacs would not have dreamed of Tetris, since it was this area of their brains that was damaged. Instead, dreams tap into the vaguer, more abstract imagery stored deep within the cortex. Which explains why they often seem so illogical.

It has yet to be determined whether these results hold true for Pac-Man, Asteroids, Frogger, or Space Invaders.

London, March 1626. Sir Francis Bacon, the founder of modern science, is on his knees, burying a dead chicken in the snow. Carefully he packs the ice crystals around the carcass of the bird. It is slow work and he is poorly dressed. As he finishes up, he sneezes.

Bacon was not shivering out in the cold just for fun. He was doing it for the sake of science. At the age of sixty-five, he was conducting his first-ever experiment, attempting to find out whether snow could be used to preserve meat. Sadly, the elements got the upper hand, and thus it was also his last experiment. He caught pneumonia and died a few weeks later—felled by a frozen fowl.