Fringe-ology (29 page)

If this theory sounds almost personal, reflecting Crick's own opinion that dreams are poop, maybe it was. The subject of dreaming is the ultimate Rorshach test. There are as many interpretations of why we dream as we can dream up. Some think, because we are rested by the early stages of sleep, evolution provided for us to remain at rest as a way to keep us out of trouble—our eyes not prepared for the rigors of staying alive at night.

Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA's Center for Sleep Research, thinks the brain repairs itself during sleep. The dream content is secondary—playtime for the kid while our parent-brains get some real, physiological work done.

Others posit that dreams allow us to practice real-world actions through “simulated threats.” In this formulation, dreams comprise a virtual reality machine, where we train for upcoming missions.

The underlying assumption of all these scientific theories is that specific dream content is meaningless. Even the threat simulation theory doesn't hold that we are preparing to be chased by zombies or giant spiders. We just need to rehearse, in case we are chased at all.

LaBerge, however, brings a line of thinking to this ongoing debate that seems particularly useful—in mystical, evolutionary, and practical senses. Working from his own research and that of others in the field, LaBerge subscribes to the theory that
why
we dream, from an evolutionary perspective, is interesting, but perhaps not so all-fired important.

Consider, please, we
did
evolve and we
are
here; so any use we can find for the dream is fair game. In this sense, as individuals we can direct our own evolution and get everything we can out of the human machine.

In Hawaii, workshop participants shared many stories of dreams, lucid and not, that helped them navigate some particularly difficult problem—or simply brought them joy. Gunter, from Germany, said he came to Hawaii to learn how to prolong his lucid dreams. “I get so blown away with the flying,” he said, in heavily accented English. “I wake up. I go so fast I cannot even take the time to look at the ground.”

Keelin told us that at age eleven, she had a non-lucid dream about her father, who died two years earlier, which illustrated for her that she could continue a relationship with him, if only in her dreams.

I'll share a similar, personal story: in the immediate aftermath of my mother's death, I resisted grieving. I marched through my days like a soldier, always finding some task to perform to keep my mind off what happened. The pain hit when something occurred that I ordinarily would have shared with her. Every time I had that automatic thought to call her, I had to face the realization all over again that she was gone. After a couple of months of this, I had a dream. I was sitting beside my mother, on a wheeled cart rolling slowly down a long, wide hallway. I was sitting up. But she was lying on her back. There was no one pushing the cart, yet still it moved, steadily forward. I looked down at my mother's face. When she died, she was seventy-one years old and frail. In this dream, she looked maybe forty years old and healthy. But she was lifeless. And soon, I realized, I was going to have to get off the cart and allow her to be wheeled down this passage by herself, into death. Immediately, I started to cry. This was a non-lucid dream. But I behaved exactly as I would have chosen. I collapsed my dream body over hers and held on tight. She was still warm to the touch, and suddenly, in the strange manner of dreams, I felt her—there is no other word for it—
loving
me. She was dead. But I felt all the passion and caring she ever held me with as a child, even though her whole body remained still.

Feeling all this love, emanating from her and into me, my dream tears came in a torrent, surging up so strongly, from such a depth, that I wondered if the pain of my grieving might actually kill me. But I submitted to it. And there in the dream, I couldn't really differentiate me from my tears. I merged with my sorrow. And I remained collapsed over her body, holding her, for several more seconds before I woke.

As I half-opened my eyes, all the grief and pain from the dream was there, waiting for me. The hairs on my arms stood up, as if I had just been through a long, passionate embrace. And I cried for a long, long, long time—while, I confess, cleaving tightly to my pillow.

It was one of the worst mornings of my life. And in the ensuing days, I felt spent. But I also realized how numb I had become. And in the wake of this dream, I started to feel. I started to really live again.

I suppose I could have dismissed the dream if I'd wanted to, but I have to ask,
Why on Earth would I have wanted to?

The dream has long served us, in ways both psychological and scientific. And it's time we acknowledge this.

Remember educational expert Edward de Bono, whom I referred to in chapter 4? He insists that logic is actually a less effective means of problem solving than lateral or creative thinking. This is the source of the cliché—Think outside the box. But this exhortation to escape paradigmatic thinking arises from the truth. And there are numerous examples of times the dream found answers our logical, waking minds couldn't: the chemist Friedrich Kekulé, who discovered the structure of the benzene molecule, dreamt of six snakes dancing in the air together, which finally coalesced into a ring, eating each other's tails in a giant circle. Dmitri Mendeleyev had a dream that helped him establish the periodic table most of us forget from chemistry. Dr. Otto Loewi had a dream that eventually led to his winning the Nobel Prize for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses.

Elias Howe was near bankruptcy, living in poverty, after years of trying to invent an automated, lock-stitch sewing machine. Then he dreamed of being captured by spear-carrying savages, who demanded he create—what else?—a working, automated lock-stitch sewing machine! Now!

The savages of his subconscious carried spears, which Howe noticed had something odd about them; inexplicably, each spear bore a hole, near the tip. When Howe awoke, he designed a new sewing needle. He moved the hole in from the middle of the shaft to a spot near the tip. Good-bye poverty. All hail the dream.

In each case, the dream offered these men solutions
outside
the strictures of thought they had placed on themselves. When they awoke, they ran with these novel ideas, while allowing logic back in as a partner, to create models that worked. From this perspective, people who deny the dream are so in love with their rational minds that they won't let the other guy—the other half of their brains—do its part.

Some readers, I'm sure, might want to reject all these anecdotes. And indeed, many accounts of insight found in the dream are hotly disputed. Psychologist Mark Blagrove argues none of these accounts could possibly be accurate because “the place for problem solving,” he writes, “is the waking, social, world.”

But fellow psychologist Deirdre Barrett put all this to a test, asking seventy-six college students to spend a week trying to have a dream about some particular problem. Half succeeded in dreaming of the topic they chose, and 70 percent of the successful dreamers reported the dream offered a solution.

I believe the resistance to LaBerge, to lucid dreaming, to Barrett's findings, occurs simply because the dream continues to bear the stigma of that Paranormal Taint, especially when the story involved is like that of archeologist Hermann Hilprecht. In 1893, Hilprecht dreamt an Assyrian priest told him how to interpret two troublesome stone fragments he'd recently found. The priest also told him a third piece would never be discovered. When Hilprecht awoke and looked at the fragments again, he confirmed the dream priest's interpretation was accurate. And no third fragment has ever been found.

Does this or any other dream represent actual communication between the dreamer and someone or something else? Well, it surely doesn't
have
to, so my advice: don't reject the power of the sleeping mind because some might use it to open the door, even a crack, to all the psychic hoo ha that doesn't currently fit into your worldview. Dreams have inspired literary and musical compositions. Some musicians claim to emerge in the morning with entire songs written in the dream space.

LaBerge has spent a long time in consideration of the dream's origin and its uses. And his primary insight starts with a deceptively simple premise: in LaBerge's view, the dreamer is not, as long thought, unconscious. Instead, the dreamer is experiencing the continuation of consciousness—in the absence of sensory input.

He talked about this insight in Hawaii, taking us a bit further down the same path as Andrew Newberg, in chapter 7: human beings do not encounter objective reality directly; we experience the mental model of reality constructed by our minds. In waking life, that mental model is primarily made up of sense-oriented stimuli: we are touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, and smelling machines that only become consciously aware of a little bit of the buffet we're sampling all day long. LaBerge's added insight is that in sleep, the brain
goes on
creating mental models of the world. But with literally nothing to see, touch, or taste, no external input to influence our thoughts, our minds are free to create mental models from our entire internal inventory of memories, associations, and ideas. This is why, in dreams, we encounter everything from chocolate rainbows to flesh-eating zombies.

The thing is, though, the boundary between dreaming and wakefulness is not so thick as we might think. In fact, whichever state we're in, waking or dreaming, the other overlaps.

In waking life, LaBerge explained, the overwhelming amount of input we receive forces the brain to take processing shortcuts in assessing the world around us. As a result, the brain must then fill in the gaps in perception using a mixture of past experience, expectation, and belief about what we're seeing. He illustrated this aspect of the human condition dramatically. He showed us a series of slides in which the brain either eliminates input—say, a black dot—or creates it—a checkerboard square, and we “see” what isn't there.

LaBerge even showed us a piece of writing in which one word was repeated, twice in a row, and asked us to tell him what we read. All thirty-two people in the room
missed
the repeated word the first time, and only after LaBerge asked us to read it a second time, more closely, did even a handful of us see LaBerge's obvious, intentional typo.

In short, our brains prevented us from consciously registering the input we didn't need or expect. “Sooooo,” LaBerge asked, eyebrows all screwy, “what is it you're seeing, when you're seeing what isn't so?”

We waited for his answer, like schoolchildren—adult schoolchildren in a class like an LSD trip. “What you're seeing is what you
always
see,” he said, “your mental model of the world”—a cocktail, that is, of perception and dream.

That's waking life. But when we sleep, we receive little to no sensory input at all. So what we see and hear is virtually
all
dream stuff—and the inventory of experience at our disposal is as vast as our imaginations. Just as dream intrudes in waking life, however, direct, real-time sensory input can find its way into the dream. That is why we sometimes hear a dream-phone ringing, only to wake a moment later and find our waking phone, really ringing.

Jim, a physicist at the workshop, reported one lucid dream in which his left arm was a rubber baseball bat. When he awoke, he found the same arm pinned under the rest of his body, cutting off his circulation. What happened was clear: his dreaming mind interpreted the sensory input coming from his numb arm, rummaged through Jim's storehouse of mental associations and memories, and emerged, like a child at play, with a rubber baseball bat.

This admixture of reality and dream comprises our entire lives. And LaBerge, as Newberg does with religion, seems to take an operational view of the whole affair. Because dreams
can
be put to good use, why not do exactly that?

LaBerge ultimately asked us to consider using lucid dreams, broadly speaking, in two ways: One, for fun. As Gunter said, in lucid dreams
we can get so blown away with the flying!
During the workshop, the assembled Oneironauts reported lucid dreams in which they flew, walked through walls, and had guilt-free sex with strangers. One woman reported bumping into Jack Nicholson, who wore S&M gear and flashed her a jaunty smile. Another chased down Ellen DeGeneres for free VIP tickets to, quite literally, the
Ellen
show of her dreams.

LaBerge encouraged us to explore these pursuits but typified them as recreational. The other, richer purpose for these dreams is to learn more about ourselves and live better lives.

Keelin, LaBerge's assistant, used her lucid dreaming to prepare for her first appearance as a public speaker. She dreamed of the room she would sit in and the people she knew would be there, then sat down in the dream space and gave her presentation. When she had to do the same thing in waking life, she had already done it once and her anxiety was gone.

Using the same concept of neuroplasticity we discussed in chapter 7, Keelin's experience suggests we can use lucid dreams to rehearse waking life actions—and know that these mental rehearsals will make a real difference. A baseball player or golfer might use lucid dreams to perfect his or her respective swings. A surgeon could use the occasion of a lucid dream to practice a particularly difficult procedure. LaBerge laments that, because lucid dreaming has not been embraced by the larger scientific community, these applications have not been seriously pursued. Still, there is good evidence that mental imaginings bear real-world effects: researchers have found that subjects who imagine performing a physical exercise, including the sweat and strain, enjoyed comparable benefits in strength and physical capacity as the people who
actually
exercised. The increases in strength or dexterity likely arise from rewiring the physical structure of our brain to better accomplish the imagined task.