Even as a kid I was intrigued by what seemed to be an obvious connection between dreams and madness. How could I be reasonably normal during the day and then hallucinate all night long? It lead me to develop the notion of Dreaming Out Loud. Why couldn’t the people who ran in circles and foamed at the mouth simply be stuck in a kind of dream state? I should say this was way before psychopharmacology became an established field of study and one might still find patients in straight jackets locked in padded rooms.
Years later, as a student, I learned about Vicarious Trial and Error (VTE) in animals. This is really quite fascinating to see. A rat on an elevated platform will remain stock-still staring first at one door and then the other while trying to decide way to jump. If he makes the correct choice, the door swings open and he finds a reward. Choosing the wrong door leads to a bump on the nose and a fall to the floor. The rats engaged in VTE truly appear to be thinking through the consequences of a jump to the left versus a jump to the right.
And that same kind of make believe in your head is one of the early explanations given for dreaming. It allowed the caveman to envision imaginary outcomes that might later help him to apply the experience he gained to dangerous, real-life situations. Dogs seem to dream in much the same way and it may be for much the same reason…learning what to do in your sleep when the same wide-awake event won’t allow a second chance. When you think about it in that way, the cockpit simulators pilots use to practice emergency situations can be seen as a kind of high-tech dream. I know when I was learning to fly there were many nights when I heard the stall warning in my head and pushed the stick forward just before I dreamed of touching down on the numbers. Something that, for all my dreams, I rarely managed when awake.
Something else I couldn’t quite get was the idea of a waking dream. You occasionally hear about the spouse who pops their mate in the nose during the night and then contends it was all part of a dream. How convenient I thought…until it happened to me. Then there’s the lucid dream, during which the dreamer knows it’s a dream and hypnopompic hallucinations, which account for all those space alien abductions and then there’s a myriad of dissociated conditions. Happily, a number of researchers in Germany, Finland and Italy are once again looking seriously at such hybrid states.
An evolutionary relationship between dreams and psychosis is a concept that, while it goes back a long way, fell into disfavor a few years ago. There are, it seems, fads in mental health just as in clothes and music. And yet this seems to be such a promising approach. Just on the surface one can easily see how it might be possible for a dream that provides a rehearsal for threat to be carried into a fully blown waking psychosis. Or how about only “partly blown” as in a paranoid state?
You can read more about what appears to be a very promising area of research at the World-Science site (http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090728_dream). Personally, I’m kind of surprised to find that my childish notion of Dreaming Out Loud seems, at last, to have made the main stream. Who would have thought it?
