In another study--on the relationship between mood change and the physiology of sleep--we ruled out the possibility that the mood change was the result of other Factors: the amount of sleep a person got during the night, the amount of REM sleep a person got during the night, or the mere passage of eight hours. We did this by depriving a group of individuals of sleep and seeing how their mood changed compared to those who had slept well. We found that, the following day, the sleep-deprived felt mentally foggy, more groggy and more aggressive--physiological conditions that sleep would have improved. Most importantly, they were also less happy, because they did not experience dreams, which would have regulated their mood. This mood alteration is one that anyone who has stayed up studying, working or partying knows well. (Interestingly, the group did feel more friendly, however, having spent the previous eight hours in a group, rather than alone.)
Although it has been a bone of contention among scientists, we believe our research shows that the change in the happy mood during the night is related to dream content and not just the fact of sleep.
Whether or not we are happy is not just a touchy-feely, quality-of-life issue. Employers have a tendency to say, "You may feel good but it's not going to produce more Nike sneakers or design a better building," but we believe it will. How we feel influences how well we function in waking life. Happiness affects performance.
Fortunately, most dream series are of the progressive type, repairing our mood from bedtime to morning. In our studies, such decreases in mood intensity occurred on about 60% of the 1,000 nights we studied. It's as if an emotional thermostat kicks in during the night to warm the mood that may have chilled during the day.
Our waking and dreaming lives have a great deal in common. With whom we spend the night and how well things work, awake or asleep, largely determine our happiness.
dreams of glory
Western culture has privatized our dreams, regarding them solely as products of our innermost life. But certain dreams take us well beyond ourselves, tearing down the gated communities of our psyche.
There are dreams and there are dreams. Most of us have had--or will have--at least one dream that stops us in our tracks, when the evanescent wisps of the night gather the force of a Kansas tornado barreling straight for Oz. Such dreams are more than emotional coffee grounds and crumpled up impulses toward sex and violence that the waking mind nightly ditches down some inner disposal. Such dreams tell us that we are not who we think we are. They reveal dimensions beyond the everyday. People the world over have described such experiences. But we in the West have had only a sketchy understanding of what I call Healing Dreams--ones which, if we heed them, can guide us toward greater wholeness and have the power to transform our lives.
It has been standing policy in psychology that dreams are not meant to be enacted on the social stage; they are treated as personal creations that speak to the dreamer alone. But Healing Dreams chafe at such boundaries. They convey in symbolic terms surprisingly accurate images of disease and healing. They are also well-informed about our intimate relationships. But what is more, they are shrewd observers of our wider social backdrop. They are remarkably attuned to the clamor of community, to the nuances of the body politic, even to the fate of the earth. A Healing Dream wants to wriggle free of our solitary nets and head into open water, toward communion with the greater conclave of souls.
This may be a little frightening. Dreams are often socially transgressive. They champion the rude, lewd and wholly unacceptable.
People who act out their dreams on the social stage can be dangerous, becoming prey to delusions, dragging others along with them. When Julius Caesar dreamed he was sleeping with his mother, his royal dream interpreter told him he would soon possess Rome, the mother city. Caesar duly marched southward to take the capital. Would he and the world have been better off if, rather than setting out on the road to conquest, he had brought his dream to a therapist to work through his Oedipus complex?
In dreamwork, psychologists wisely counsel that we "keep the lid on the pot"; "withdraw the projections" back into the inner world. Our tradition of "psychologizing" the dream rather than, as in some cultures, acting upon it, is no small cultural achievement. But has Western psychology been too eager to bottle up the dream in the consulting room, forbidding it a wider life? Healing Dreams often speak to collective issues. They crave the give-and-take between the inner and outer worlds.
They confront us with our own unmet social potential, calling upon us each to know ourselves as part of the whole.
In The Forgotten Language, the neo-Freudian analyst Erich Fromm writes that in dreams, "we are concerned exclusively with ourselves...in which 'I am' is the only system to which thoughts and feelings refer." Yet the privatization of the dream remains a peculiarly Western practice. Dreams in many cultures--the Plains Indians, for example--are a key component of social problem-solving, with vital public and even political implications.
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