Dreams are a theater of the emotions, where we playout the day's dramas that were left "to be continued."
Research has shown us that dreams are not just the machinations of the unconscious on random play.
We all go to bed with the problems of the day still on our minds. Unfortunately, a day is not like a play, which gets resolved by the time the final curtain falls. But dreams, with their colorful characters and settings, can play out that final scene while we sleep, processing the emotions we encounter in our waking lives.
Forty years of research on dreams suggests that they are not just the random firings of our brains. Neither are they highly symbolic visions that should chart the course of our lives. But dreams do, in fact, have meaning. And our research shows that the nature of that meaning helps determine our mood the next day. That, in turn, determines how we function and what we can accomplish. Quite simply, the dreams we have at night set the stage for our actions the following day, priming us .to either rise and shine and conquer the world, or crawl back under the covers and duck the challenges that lie ahead.
For 13 nights, we monitored the dreams of Linda, 24, a volunteer, in our sleep laboratory. Whenever she was in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—with her eyes darting from side to side, her brain waves speeded up, and her pulse, breathing and blood pressure fluctuating—she was awakened and asked to report any dreams she had experienced. One night, she reported the following series of dreams.
1) "This little girl was asleep. She was being real cute, prolonging things for money or to stay in the hospital longer."
2) "I passed Frank's wife in the car. She saw me come ....She pulled away. I got kind of mad. I decided it didn't make any difference."
3) "I was playing tennis. I hit it back real hard. We won the game."
4) "A patient didn't need the doctor after all. She started out thinking she needed a doctor but she didn't. She had a big bandage on her stomach."
5) "Doctor was not able to treat the patient. He was not properly licensed. Patient is planning to use surgery against the doctor."
Although she had hit the sack feeling sleepy, a bit foggy, a little unhappy, and annoyed (she had mistakenly assumed the experiment was for one night and that she would be paid), Linda slept for her usual seven-and-a-half-hours and awakened refreshed, alert, happier and no longer irritable, ready to engage the day.
Was the change in Linda's mood a consequence of what went on during her sleep? My colleagues and I otter a resounding yes. Our work has led us to develop the Selective Mood Regulatory Theory of Dreams and Sleep. It holds that for Linda, as well as for everyone else, feeling better upon waking is a result of both getting uninterrupted sleep for an adequate length of time and of experiencing a series of otherwise unremembered dreams that engage disturbing feelings. (In our testing, the periodic awakenings were brief enough and the subjects young enough that sleep was not effectively interrupted.)
Linda's dreams were of a progressive nature. In them, she went from a clingy little girl to an assertive woman in charge of her life. It started with a dependent longing to be cared for by the doctor (father figure). This desire stirred the fear of being rejected by a married woman (mother figure). The tension between the desire to be cared for and the fear of rejection was resolved in the third dream, in which she had a victory with a partner of her own. In the fourth dream, she tried to reject the desire to be cared for, but the need for care still existed (the bandage). In the last dream, she asserted a more vigorous rejection of the doctor, serving to deny her need and the doctor's ability to meet that need.
We all have multiple dreams across the night, but not all of them succeed at untying our emotional knots. After examining a large number of dream series, my colleagues and I have discovered two modes of dream processing, two ways of responding to our unresolved problems. One mode, which we call a progressive sequence, resolves emotional problems by working through them step by step, and by comparing them to previous challenges that at some point or another we met successfully. The other, called a repetitive sequence, fails to resolve emotional problems but simply repeats them metaphorically over and over during the night's dreaming without charting any progress. With a repetitive sequence of dreams, we can awaken in a worse mood than when we went to bed.
If Linda had been more on edge, or if her problem had not been well-handled in the past, she might have experienced a repetitive sequence, the dream equivalent of just continuing to worry about a problem and not resolving it. On another night in the laboratory, she did have one such dream sequence:
1) "Somebody was lost. It was a dog and they were trying to find out where it lived. A little kid or somebody couldn't tell where he lives. It wasn't my dog though. I wasn't lost. The person who was lost was fumbling around leading everybody else around because he didn't know what he was doing. Somehow, we had phone numbers and we were trying to find the right one. It was supposed to be the little boy who was lost."
2) "They filled up the car. There wasn't enough room, unless I went back with the people we went back with before. I could go back with someone else. The place we were going was an orphanage someplace, some house, a place like that."
Tags:
brain,
brain waves,
brains,
communicators,
cues,
disagreements,
dreams,
e mail,
electronic communications,
facial expressions,
first impression,
forty years,
gestures,
impasse,
janice,
law professor,
law students,
little girl,
machinations,
mood,
nadler,
negotiators,
northwestern university,
old telephone,
personal relationships,
playing tennis,
pleasantries,
rapid eye movement,
sleep,
tone of voice,
unconscious,
uphill battle,
visions,
volunteer
