The trick, then, is to bring in objective observers. That's what Cindi Rittenhouse, then at Harvard, did when she studied that most bizarre dream phenomenon, the metamorphosis of one person or object into another---so-called object transformations. She arranged, side-by-side, lists of dream objects and the things they turned into, then asked judges to match one side of the list with the other. Did the bag in one person's dream, for example, turn into a school bus, a beach, or a burlap sack?
The answer, not surprisingly, is the burlap sack. In fact, most of the transformations proved so predictable that a panel made correct matches 94 percent of the time. Transformations, in other words, aren't random, but reflect object associations that most of us would make.
But the same doesn't hold true of the location or plot changes that sometimes occur in mid-dream--"as if you were watching TV and someone changed the channel," notes Stickgold. In one study, dreams with plot shifts were randomly spliced together with others at their respective moments of scenery change. Another group of dreams was left intact. Asked to identify which dreams had been spliced, judges chose correctly half of the time--exactly the rate of chance.
It's uncertain why transformations are so predictable, yet plot shifts aren't. But a clue may lie in a series of experiments where Harvard researchers woke subjects from REM sleep and tested their ability to make associations between strongly related words--say, cat and dog--and weakly related ones.
The newly awakened subjects made strong associations easily, more so, even, than they did during normal waking hours. But weakly associated concepts were far less accessible than they were during their morning peak. Stickgold speculates that the predictable, constrained object transformations in dreams reflect these easily made strong associations, while the bizarre plot shifts may stem from our relative inability during REM to connect the dots between weakly associated concepts and images.
Yield of Dreams
So are dreams totally irrelevant to our waking selves? Can they tell us nothing about our lives, our thoughts and emotions? Dream fans need not abandon all hope.
"There's no question that what's going on in your life has a powerful effect on your dreams," says Stickgold. If you've been worried about losing your job, that's likely to turn up in some of your dreams.
But the reason has nothing to do with your subconscious trying to send you a message, he insists. It simply reflects the fact that the neurons responsible for those thoughts and worries have been primed by their recent activity, made more accessible. Their odds of being activated during the chaotic neural firing of REM rise.
Dreams, moreover, certainly reflect our personal history. "That's what your brain has to work with, your memories and associations," observes Stickgold. "So whatever it puts together, no matter how clumsily it does so, is still drawn from that well."
The problem comes when people attempt to impose elaborate symbolic interpretations on a dream— that a rose, for instance, represents nostalgia for your lost youth, or that anything cylindrical has phallic implications.
"This sort of stuff is clearly nonsensical," Stickgold says. His take-home message: Find all the meaning you want in your dreams—ubut nderstand that such meaning is constructed by our waking minds after the dream, not by some dreaming unconscious beforehand.
Perhaps it was frustration with such overwrought Freudian interpretation that led novelist Stephen King to offer his own theory on dreaming. Its philosophy isn't all that far removed from what Stickgold and Hobson propose. And whatever it lacks in delicacy, it more than makes up for in insight. "I think that a lot of times," King said, "dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence."
ILLUSTRATION
Illustrated by Timothy Cook
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