3) "I was dreaming about visiting. I think it was some EEG laboratory or something like that where the mothers could leave their children and go shopping. I doubt whether they could, though; there wouldn't be enough room for all these people."
In the dreams of this night, Linda illustrated a fear of being abandoned and an uncertainty as to whether her efforts to reconnect would work--calling on the telephone, riding in a car, or being picked up. It was no wonder she awakened disgruntled the following morning, having failed to engage her issues metaphorically during the night.
What determines whether we will have a helpful or unhelpful sequence of dreams? It depends on two factors: whether there is in our emotional arsenal a solution to the kind of problem at hand, and whether we happen to be up to the task. Just as some days we are more productive than others, seemingly without rhyme or reason, so some of our dream experiences are more useful than others in solving life's quandaries.
Research has shown us that dreams are not just the machinations of the unconscious on random play. They have order, and they reflect important psychological aspects of our lives and personalities. When we examined the dream reports from a representative sample of people from Cincinnati, we found that there were similarities among the dreams of distinct groups--men and women, young and old, blacks and whites, married and single people, and between those of lower and middle social classes. If dreams were random, we would not have found any similarities.
We also have shown that dreams vary from person to person--they are individualized, like fingerprints--as well as from day to day, reinforcing the idea that the events of each day play out in the night's dreams.
These psychological regularities prove that the dream experience has order, and as we have seen in the laboratory, order paves the way for meaning. The nature of that meaning--how Linda interacted with Frank's wife, for example, and whether the outcome was favorable--can change our mood for better or worse from night to morning.
Changes in mood across the night turn out to be related to the people and activities that populate subjects' dreams. The production of a happy mood is particularly related to the types of people who appear in the intervening dreams.
In order to study the relationship between mood change and a night's dreams, we recruited 20 volunteers, both men and women, to sleep for 20 consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory. We had them rate their mood before and after going to sleep in terms of how friendly, aggressive, happy, clear-thinking, sleepy and anxious they felt. During the night, we awakened them at the end of each REM period and had them report their dreams. We found that their mood changed across the night along with changes in their dream content. And that as in Linda's case, the key to those mood changes was a matter of who starred in the dream and what scenes they acted out.
It is important to note that the specific individuals in the dream are unimportant. It is the roles they represent that carry the meaning. In Linda's dream, for example, Frank's wile was merely playing the role of wife, any wife. Rather than Jungian archetypes, the characters in our dreams--an older man, a female peer--are the vehicle for helping us deal with a central issue. They are actors in the theater of our unconscious, playing out the day's emotional dramas that have been left "to be continued."
Freud, a careful and astute observer of the manifestations of a variety of behavioral states, including sleep and depression, claimed that dreams are the guardians of sleep continuity. Since sleep can potentially be interrupted by emotional surges--from the day's unresolved issues bubbling up to the surface--the function of dreaming, Freud has suggested, is to contain or "diffuse" these emotional surges, which biological studies have confirmed exist.
We need sleep to be continuous if we are to improve our mood over the course of the night. In our experiments, we found a decrease in the capacity to contain the emotional surge among patients having nightmares. In other words, nightmares occur when dreams fail to blunt the body's emotional response, whereas successful dreaming controls and suppresses the feeling in dreams and protects the continuity of sleep.
REM-stage sleep, when the body undergoes changes in breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, presents the greatest risk for waking up. REM sleep is distributed during the night, with more in the second half, in such a way that as the likelihood of awakening increases, so increases the likelihood of the occurrence of REM sleep--and its protective dreams. Patients who report loss of dreaming after a brain injury experience poorer sleep than those who continue dreaming.
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