Dream weavers

In Ursula LeGuin's amazing and disturbing novel The Lathe of Heaven, a very ordinary guy finds that he has a completely unordinary ability.

When he dreams, he wakes up and finds that whatever he dreamed has become reality.

George Orr, the protagonist, is terrified by this, as you might imagine.  It's not like he can control what he dreams; he isn't able to program himself to dream something pleasant in order to find he has it when he wakes.  No, it's more sinister than that.  Consider the bizarre, confusing, often frightening content of most of our dreams -- dreams that prompt you to say the next morning, "Where the hell did that come from?"

That is what makes up George's reality.

The worst part is that George is the only one who knows it's happening.  When his dream content alters reality, it alters everything -- including the memories -- of the people he knows.  When he wakes up and finds that the cityscape has changed and that some people he knew are gone, replaced with others he has never seen before, everyone else's memories changed as well.  George wakes to find he has a girlfriend, but she doesn't think it's sudden and weird; being George's girlfriend is what she remembers.

Only George sees that this is just the latest version of a constantly shifting reality.

So when he tries to explain to people what he can do, and (if possible) find a way to stop it, no one believes him.  No one... except a ruthless and ambitious psychiatrist who realizes that if he can figure out how to manipulate George's dreams, he can fashion a world to his own desires, using George as a tool to create the reality he wants.

LeGuin's terrifying vision of what happens when grasping amorality meets a naïve but useful skill is turning out not to be far from being realized.  George Orr's paranormal ability is the stuff of fiction, of course; but the capacity for influencing our dreams is not.

Nor, apparently, is the potential for using our dreams as a conduit for suggestions that might alter our behavior -- with or without our permission, possibly with or without our knowledge.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons stephentrepreneur, Hurtle Square dreams, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I found out recently from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia that there is a cohort of powerful corporations who have teamed up to see if there's a way to insert advertising content into our dreams.  Xbox, Coors, Microsoft, and Burger King, among others, have been experimenting on volunteers to see if they can introduce targeted advertising while we're asleep, and (especially) while we're at the neurologically hyperactive REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, in order to induce people to alter their behavior -- i.e., purchase the product in question -- once they wake up.  They've had some success; a test by Coors found that sixty percent of the volunteers were susceptible to having these kinds of product-based suggestions influence their dream content.

Forty sleep and dream researchers are now pushing back, and have drafted a document calling for regulation of what the corporate researchers are calling "dream incubation."  "It is easy to envision a world in which smart speakers—forty million Americans currently have them in their bedrooms—become instruments of passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission," the authors state.

My fear is that the profit motive will outweigh any reluctance people might have toward having their dreams infiltrated by corporate content.  If cellular service providers were willing to give users a discount on their monthly fees, provided they agreed to allow themselves to be exposed to ads during the nighttime hours, how many people would say, "Sure, okay, go for it"?  I know for myself, I'm often willing to tolerate ads on games and video streaming services rather than paying extra to go ad-free.  I'd like to think that I'm able to tune out the ads sufficiently that they're not influencing my behavior, but what would happen if I'm exposed to them for all eight to ten hours that I'm sleeping every night?

Not all scientists are concerned about the technique's efficacy, however.  "Of course you can play ads to someone as they are sleeping, but as far as having much effect, there is little evidence," said Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University.  "Dream incubation doesn’t seem very cost effective compared with traditional advertising campaigns."

Even if it doesn't have the manipulative capability the corporations are hoping, the idea still scares the hell out of me.  When every moment of our days and nights become just another opportunity for monetization, where will it all stop?  "I am not overly concerned, just as I am not concerned that people can be hypnotized against their will," said University of Montreal dream researcher Tore Nielsen.  "If it does indeed happen and no regulatory actions are taken to prevent it, then I think we will be well on our way to a Big Brother state … [and] whether or not our dreams can be modified would likely be the least of our worries."

Which is it exactly.  As I've pointed out before, my main concern is about the increasing control corporate interests have over everything.  And here in the United States, the problem is that the people who could potentially pass legislation to limit what the corporations can get away with are being funded largely by corporate donors, so they're not anxious to put the brakes on and see that flow of cash dry up suddenly.  It's a catch-22 that would require the government to police its own behavior for no other reason than simple morality and ethics.

And you can guess how successful that is likely to be, especially considering the United States's current ethically-challenged administration.

I'm hoping that at least someone is listening, though. I tend to agree with Nielsen; I don't think our dream content will be as easily manipulable, or as behavior-altering, as the corporations hope.  But what I'm more worried about is that once we refuse to delineate a hard line around our personal lives, and say to them, "Here, and no further," we've opened ourselves up to there being no part of our personal space that isn't considered a target for monetization.

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Dream songs

Last night I dreamed that our local mall had been converted into a giant used book store.  (Something I would entirely approve of.)  We were going to to go shopping ("we" being my wife, me, and our younger son, who lives in Houston but was apparently up for a visit) but we realized that a bunch of other family members were unexpectedly going to descend upon us, and for some reason we knew they were going to walk into our house without knocking, which our dogs would not appreciate, so we had to get home fast.  But while trying to get out of the mall we were hindered by a bunch of science-fiction cosplayers wearing silver body paint.

After that, it got kind of weird.

Dreams are a very peculiar thing, but they (and the REM sleep stage during which they occur) are ubiquitous in the brainier species of animals.  In fact, as I'm writing this, my puppy Jethro is curled up in his bed by my desk dreaming about something, because his paws are twitching and every once in a while he makes a very cute little "oof" noise.  But what would a puppy dream about?  Presumably the things that make up his waking life -- playing, chasing squirrels, swimming in our pond, eating his dinner.

You have to wonder if sometimes dogs, like humans, have weird dreams, and what they might make of them.

The function of dreaming is unknown, but what's certain is that it's necessary.  Suppress REM and dreaming, and the results are hallucinations and psychosis.  Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation will no doubt remember the chilling scene in the episode "Night Terrors," where something is preventing the crew from experiencing REM sleep, and Dr. Crusher is in the makeshift morgue where the victims of a massacre are being examined -- and when she turns around, all the dead bodies are sitting up, still shrouded in their sheets.  She closes her eyes -- exhibiting far more bravery than I would have -- and says, "This is not real," and when she opens them, they're all lying back down again.

*shudder*

In any case, what brings up this topic today is far cheerier; a fascinating piece of research out of the University of Buenos Aires that looked at dreams in an animal we usually don't associate with them -- birds.  A team led by Gabriel Mindlin looked at a species of bird called the Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), a brightly-colored and vocal flycatcher found in much of Central and South America.  

Mindlin is one of the foremost experts in the physiology of bird song.  Birds have a unique apparatus called the syrinx that allows them to make some of the most complex vocalizations of any group of animals; not only can some (such as many wrens and thrushes) produce two or more tones at the same time, birds like parrots, mynahs, lyrebirds, and starlings are brilliant mimics and can imitate a variety of other sounds, including human speech.  (A lyrebird in a park in Australia learned to convincingly imitate a chainsaw, a car alarm, various cellphone ringtones, and a camera shutter.)

What Mindlin and his team did was to implant electrodes in the obliquus ventralis muscle, the main muscle birds use to control pitch and volume in vocalization, and also outfit some Great Kiskadees with devices to monitor their brain waves.  When the birds went into REM sleep, the researchers found that the OV muscle was contracting in exactly the way it does when the birds vocalize while awake.

The birds were singing silently in their sleep!

Singing in birds generally serves two purposes; mate attraction and territorial defense.  (As one of my AP Biology students put it, "they sing when they're mad or horny.")  It's more complicated than that -- science generally is -- but as a broad-brush explanation, it'll do.  Many species have different songs and calls for different purposes, each associated with a specific pattern of contractions and relaxation of the muscles in the syrinx.  Mindlin and his team used software capable of taking the muscle movements the electrodes detected and decoding them, determining what song the bird would have been producing if it was awake.  What they found was that the song their test subjects were dream-singing was one associated with marking out territories. 

"I felt great empathy imagining that solitary bird recreating a territorial dispute in its dream," Mindlin said.  "We have more in common with other species that we usually recognize."

So birds dream, and the content of their dreams is apparently -- just like Jethro -- taken from their own umwelt, the slice of sensory experience they engage with while they're awake.  (I wrote in more detail about the umwelt a while back, if you're curious.)  

On the other hand, how this accounts for my dream of silver-body-painted cosplayers in a mall filled with old books, I have no idea.

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Dream a little dream of me

In one of my favorite novels, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin, the main character -- an unassuming man named George Orr -- figures out that when he dreams, his dream changes reality.  The problem is, since when the change occurs, it alters everyone else's memories of what had happened, the only one who realizes that anything has changed is him.

At first, of course, he doesn't believe it.  He must be remembering wrong.  Then, when he becomes convinced it's actually happening, he starts taking drugs to try to stop him from dreaming, but they don't work.  As a last resort, he tries to get help from a psychologist...

... but the psychologist realizes how powerful this ability could be, and starts guiding George into dreams that will shape the world into what he wants it to be.

It's a powerful cautionary tale about what happens when an unscrupulous person gains control over someone with a valuable talent.  Power corrupts, as the oft-quoted line from John Dalberg-Acton goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I couldn't help thinking about The Lathe of Heaven when I read about some new exploration of lucid dreaming taking place at REMSpace, a California startup, that will be featured in a paper in The International Journal of Dream Research soon (a preprint is available at the link provided).  A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming, and often have some degree of control over what happens.  Around twenty percent of people report regular lucid dreaming, but there is some research that suggests many of us can learn to lucid dream.

Dickens's Dream by Robert W. Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this point, I'll interject that despite a long history of very vivid dreams, I've never had a lucid dream.  I did have an almost-lucid dream, once; it was a weird and involved story about being a groomsman in a wedding in a big cathedral, and when the priest said the whole "does anyone have any objections?" thing, a gaudily-dressed old lady in the front row stood up and started shouting about what an asshole the groom was and how the bride could do way better.  And I'm standing there, feeling horrified and uncomfortable, and I thought, "This is bizarre!  How could this be happening?  Is this a dream?"  So I kind of looked around, then patted myself to reassure myself that I was solid, and thought, "Nope.  I guess this is real."

So the one time I actually considered the question of whether I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the researchers at REMSpace took a group of test subjects who all reported being able to lucid dream, and hooked them up to electromyography and electroencephalography sensors -- which, respectively, measure the electrical discharge from voluntary muscle contractions and neural firing in the brain -- and gave them the pre-sleep suggestion that they would dream about driving a car.  Using the output from the sensors, they created a virtual avatar of the person on a computer screen, and found that they were able to use tiny motions of their hands to steer it, and even avoid obstacles.

"Two-way interaction with a computer from dreams opens up a whole area of new technologies," said Michael Raduga, who led the experiment.  "Now, these developments are crude, but soon they will change the idea of human capabilities."

Maybe so, but it also puts the dreamer in the hands of the experimenter.  Now, I'm not saying Michael Raduga and his team are up to anything nefarious; and obviously I don't believe anyone's got the George-Orr-like ability to change reality to conform to what they dream.  But does anyone else have the feeling that "two-way interaction" into your dreams is potentially problematic?  I've heard a lot of people say things like, "hypnosis isn't dangerous, you can't be given a post-hypnotic suggestion that induces you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do," but if there's one thing my knowledge of neuroscience has taught me, it's that the human brain is highly suggestible.

So as interested as I am in lucid dreaming, I'm not ready to sign up to have my dreams interacted with by a computer controlled by someone else.  And I hope like hell that when Raduga and his group at REMSpace start "changing the idea of human capabilities," they are extremely careful.

Anyway, that's our interesting-but-a-little-scary research for today.  Me, I'm gonna stick with my ordinary old dreams, which are peculiar enough.  And given my failure at detecting a potentially lucid dream when I had the chance, I doubt I'd be all that good at it in any case.  I'd probably drive my virtual dream car right into a telephone pole.

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In your wildest dreams

So, last night, this weird thing happened.  I was skinnydipping in the Caribbean, swimming along trying to get to the other side, when I noticed some people on a boat following me.  They started yelling at me, not (surprisingly) to ask why I was out in the middle of the ocean, but to let me know that there was a hurricane coming and I'd better swim faster because otherwise I wouldn't reach Senegal (which is apparently on the "other side of the Caribbean") in time to avoid drowning in the storm.  They then motored off to get to safety themselves.  It never crossed my mind to wonder why, if the situation was so dire, they hadn't hauled me aboard.  Maybe it was because they were embarrassed by the fact I was naked and they didn't have an extra pair of swim trunks, although I don't remember being much bothered by the fact myself.  Or maybe it was because I'd apparently gotten out there myself, I could damn well get myself out of it, and they'd done their duty by at least letting me know that I was about to be in the middle of a cyclone.

I don't remember what happened after that.  I think it got a little weird.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up, and in the words that every bad fantasy writer has written at some point, "He realized it was only a dream."  Lying there in the dark, I started wondering why my errant brain had come up with something that odd, and came to the conclusion that it was an amalgam of various things over the last few days, like the NOAA bulletin I read saying we were likely to have an above-average year for dangerous hurricanes, and looking at some photos someone posted on Twitter from West Africa.  The skinnydipping part at least makes a modicum of sense because I love to swim but kind of hate swearing swim trunks.  Fortunately I have a pond that's in the privacy of my fenced back yard and only visible from the road if you look exactly in the right direction at exactly the right time, and my opinion is if someone's that determined to see my bare ass, they can have at it.  (Of course, given the way the weather's currently going in the Northeast, it'll probably be August before I'd be willing to swim without a fully-insulated dry-suit, much less naked.)

And for the record, this dream still wasn't as completely fucked up as my wife's dream a couple of nights ago about being tackled by an enormous kangaroo, or the one last night where she had rented an apartment in Washington D.C. but was dismayed to find that it had no door, and the only way you could get in was by climbing through the mail slot.

Apparently even King Solomon had some weird dreams, because I don't know what the hell this is about.  Luca Giordano, The Dream of Solomon (1694) [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this comes up because of a paper this week in Cell Reports about a study of two epileptic patients who had implants to monitor their brain activity.  These electrodes were supposed to act as neuromuscular interfaces, allowing the individuals to overcome motor paralysis and move their arms simply by thinking about it, but along the way the devices made sensitive readings of neural firing patterns.  And what the researchers found was that when the patients went into the REM (rapid eye-movement) phase of sleep, during which we dream, the brain was apparently replaying firing patterns for motor control that had been learned the previous day.

So the researchers had the patients play a mental game of "Simon" -- remember the popular electronic toy where you had to press buttons to repeat a pattern of sounds and colors?  Of course, given these individuals' disabilities, they couldn't play the actual game, so the scientists instructed the patients to think through and recall the pattern they'd just seen, picturing themselves pushing the buttons in the correct order.

Then the patients took a nap.  And during REM, the same pattern emerged as they'd seen during the mental game.

Apparently, they were playing Simon in their dreams.

My wife had an experience like this back when she was in graduate school, and engaged in the occupation that all serious grad students take part in, namely: playing video games instead of studying.  In her case, it was Tetris, and she finally realized she was spending way too much time playing it when she started having Tetris dreams.

But evidently this is something we all do, and gives us a lens into why we dream in the first place.  It's long been thought that dreaming has to do with memory consolidation -- reinforcing pathways that the brain has decided are important, moving critical memories into long-term storage, and pruning away information that is less essential.  Your brain makes the understandable (if sometimes erroneous) judgment that if you repeat an activity a bunch of times, it must have some survival value, and you replay it while you sleep so you can do it more fluidly when you're awake.

Even if all you're practicing is your ability to stack up bunches of colored blocks while vaguely Russian-sounding music plays in the background.

"This study is fascinating," said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who was not involved in the study, in an interview with CNN.  "Despite decades of research, it remains somewhat unclear how 'short-term' memories get filed away to become 'long-term' memories that can be recalled later.   Using a brain-computer interface is an exciting way to study memory since it can record brain cell activity patterns and then look for those exact patterns later...  This supports the notion that in order to optimize memory function and learning, people need to prioritize restful activities -- most importantly adequate sleep -- to keep our 'engines' running at peak performance."

Which is fascinating, but hardly news to chronic insomniacs like myself.  I know that after a night's poor sleep, everything -- memory, motor responses, mood, sensory awareness -- is affected negatively.  The restorative power of sleep is well-documented, and absolutely essential to health, both physical and mental.

What this study does, though, is to pinpoint one of the ways sleep helps us -- by reinforcing our memory of critical events from the previous days.  We already knew why dreams are so bizarre; during REM, the prefrontal cortex -- which among many other things, acts as a sort of "reality filter," allowing you to sift fact from fantasy -- is essentially offline.  Apparently the memory consolidation function works best when you can get the hypercritical "Okay, that is clearly not real" part of your brain out of the way.

But I still don't think it can explain why I was swimming toward Senegal, naked, during a hurricane.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Perchance to dream

New from the "They Made A Movie Out of This and It Didn't End Well," we have: some researchers at MIT who are trying to figure out how to hack into, and control, your dreams.

The world of dreams is so strange and vivid that the idea of selecting or controlling dream content has been the subject of fiction for a very long time.  Ursula LeGuin's brilliant novel The Lathe of Heaven is about the intersection between dreaming and reality -- and about a disturbed young man's discovery that the content of his dreams is altering everyone's reality.

The problem is, because everyone changes simultaneously, so do their memories -- meaning the only one who realizes what's going on is the young man himself.  And when he convinces his psychologist that he's telling the truth, the psychologist decides to use that ability for his own malign purposes.

Introducing a frightening ethical issue into the whole thing.

It's popped up over and over again.  Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with the necessity of dreams, and what might happen if we're deprived of REM sleep, in the episode "Night Terrors" -- which has the scene which in my opinion is the single scariest moment in the whole series, when Dr. Crusher is wandering through the makeshift morgue trying to figure out why an entire starship's crew died violent deaths at each other's hands, and she turns around -- and the corpses, still shrouded in their sheets, are all sitting up.

Not to be outdone, The X Files did an episode about controlling dreams -- and how that could be used to alter someone's personality and intentions -- in the episode "Amor Fati," wherein the evil Cigarette-Smoking Man has Fox Mulder so sunk in a realistic dream that Dana Scully has to enter the dream to rescue him by convincing him it's all an illusion.

Perhaps most famously, the movie Inception looks at the possibility of hacking into someone's dreams and placing a subconscious suggestion in the dreamer's mind -- without, of course, his own permission.  This is a lot closer to what the MIT scientists are doing (more on that in a moment), leading to ethical issues that are a bit more likely than the ones in Lathe to stare us in the face.

So this obsession with dreams has come up again and again in fiction, and no wonder.  The content of dreams is wild, and for most of us, uncontrollable.  There's the estimated one percent of us who regularly lucid dream -- they're aware during dreams that they're dreaming, and can learn to control the content -- but most of us, myself included, can't do that.

But now, some researchers at MIT are trying to change all of that.

In the MIT "Dream Lab," scientists have developed a device call Dormio -- it's a form-fitted glove that detects when you're slipping into sleep, and injects an audio cue to insert some image or another into your dream state.  In one trial, the word was "tiger" -- and an impressive number of the test subjects reported that their dreams involved tigers.

Of course, this is just the first step toward broadening our reach into the dream world.  "People don’t know that a third of their life is a third where they could change or structure or better themselves," said Dream Lab researcher Adam Horowitz.  "Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important."

Another Dream Lab researcher, Judith Amores, is trying a different route into the dreaming subconscious -- through the sense of smell.  Long known to have intimate ties into memory, the sense of smell might be a way to jump into the dream world without using an audio cue (which for light sleepers, might simply wake them up).  "The sense of smell is particularly interesting because it’s directly connected to the memory and the emotional parts of the brain — the amygdala and the hippocampus," Amores said.  "And that’s a very interesting gateway to access well-being."

All of it opens up a vast array of possibilities not only for research, but for psychological healing.  A dream-based approach to treating PTSD, for example, has very real potential.  Since one of the functions of REM sleep seems to be memory consolidation, there could also be applications to improving learning capacity and retention of information.  But beyond that, there's just the capacity for it to be pure fun.

"It’s such an exhilarating feeling to lucid dream," Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, said in an MIT blog post.  "You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

On one hand, I'm not sure we need something else that allows people to hide from reality.  On the other, if I had a device I could wear that allowed me to control my dreams, I'd do it every night.

Think of the fun you could have with self-controlled no-repercussions full-body-sensurround fantasies every night.  I think a lot of us might not want to wake up.

Which brings up a whole other set of problems.

In any case, the researchers in the Dream Lab and other similar projects are looking at this as a way to connect to unused potential, not as a way of controlling people, which is the right approach.  "This is less like, 'I’m going to map something so I control it,' and more like, 'I’m going to give you a looking glass, and you do with that what you will,'" Horowitz said.  "I have very little interest in creating tools that take people further from themselves.  That’s definitely not the hope."

Or, as Ruben Naiman of the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine put it, "The thing with hacking dreams is that it’s based on a presumption that the subconscious is unintelligent, that it doesn’t have a life.  The unconscious, it’s another kind of intelligence.  We can learn from it. We can be in dialogue with it rather than dominate it, rather than ‘tap in’ and try to steer it in directions we want."

So all of this is pretty exciting, and I still wouldn't hesitate to volunteer to try out whatever they come up with.  But if I put that glove on and end up getting the audio clue, "Corpses in a morgue sitting up," I am right the fuck outta there.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Perchance to dream

For the past three nights in a row, I've dreamed that I was being charged by a large, snarling dog.

Besides the repetitive nature of the dream -- I can't recall ever having recurring dreams before -- the weird part is that of all the animals to pick, dogs are the ones I'd be least afraid of.  I tend to be a dog magnet.  Even dogs that are kind of skittish recognize me as a kindred spirit.

To be absolutely honest, dogs generally like me better than people do.

Plus, you'd be hard-pressed to find two less threatening dogs than the ones I have.  I've never seen either one act aggressively toward anything but squirrels.  As an illustration, two nights ago, Guinness, our large, goofy American Staffordshire Terrier mix, was lying in my wife's spot when she decided to come to bed.  So I grabbed Guinness by all four paws and rotated him clockwise by 180 degrees.  His only response was to sigh heavily, and he ended up with my arm around him and his head resting on my shoulder, where he fell asleep again in a matter of minutes.

Fig. 1: What neither of my dogs looks even remotely like.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons; original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/statefarm/6993960366/]

So the content of the dream is as odd as its repetitive nature.  The first time I had the dream, I woke up at the moment the snarling dog was about to leap and sink its teeth into my throat, and shouted so loud it woke my wife up.  This, too, is something that hardly ever happens.  The second time, I dreamed I was using my left arm to ward off the dog's attack, and woke up to find I'd flung the blankets away from me.

I'm not at all sure why this is happening.  I started a new anti-anxiety med a few weeks ago, and all I can say is that if this is one of the side effects, it is not helpful.  The idea should not be to take something I'm not anxious about, and make me anxious about it.

This comes up not only because of my recent experiences, but because of a study that appeared last month in Nature called, "Peace of Mind and Anxiety in the Waking State are Related to the Affective Content of Dreams," by Pilleriin Sikka, Henri Pesonen, and Antti Revonsuo of the University of Turku (Finland).  The authors write:

Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams.  However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology.  We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of well-being...  Healthy participants completed a well-being questionnaire, followed by a three-week daily dream diary and ratings of dream affect.  Multilevel analyses showed that peace of mind was related to positive dream affect, whereas symptoms of anxiety were related to negative dream affect.  Moreover, waking measures were better related to affect expressed in dream reports rather than participants’ self-ratings of dream affect.  We propose that whereas anxiety may reflect affect dysregulation in waking and dreaming, peace of mind reflects enhanced affect regulation in both states of consciousness. 

So this is a little troubling, given the screaming and thrashing about I've been doing recently.

Fig. 2: What I apparently don't look remotely like when I'm sleeping.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Chad fitz, Sleeping man with beard, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In an interview with PsyPost, study co-author Pilleriin Sikka said, "There is evidence that REM sleep may help regulate emotions but we need more studies to find out whether dreams and the emotional experiences in dreams have any important role...  Our dream emotions are not just a totally random creation of our brains and minds, but they are related to our waking ill-being and well-being.  Those who are more anxious in their waking life also experience more negative emotions in their dreams, whereas those who have more peace of mind while awake have more positive dream emotions.  This also means that the content of dream reports may reflect a person’s mental health."

I wonder what Sikka would have to say about the contents of my wife's dreams.  Whereas I (up to this week, anyhow) have tended to have vague, unsettling dreams that don't stick in my memory long, Carol dreams whole feature-length movies.  The plots are complex and impossibly convoluted, with subplots and twists and changes of scene, and she remembers them for some time upon awakening.  (In fact, my current work-in-progress, a speculative fiction novel called The Harmonic Labyrinth, got its inspiration from one of my wife's dreams.)

Her problem is that dreaming this way doesn't exactly lead to feeling rested in the morning, but I suppose it's still preferable to ripping the covers off and throwing them on the floor in an attempt to avoid getting disemboweled by a raging dog.

So the Sikka et al. study at least shows us a correlation between the emotional tone of dreams and our waking emotional state.  However, it still doesn't explain the more detailed content, which is pretty bizarre sometimes.  I've always thought that those "Your Dreams Explained" books you see sometimes, that tell you stuff like if there's an eggplant in your dream it means you are going to change jobs soon, are complete horseshit.  Not only is there no scientific support whatsoever that there's any kind of one-to-one correspondence between what appears in your dream and its meaning for your life, it makes no sense that any meaning that does exist would be consistent from person to person.

So maybe seeing an eggplant in your dream means something entirely different for you than it would for me.

Anyhow, it's all an interesting step forward in understanding the psychology of sleep.  Me, I'm just hoping for a restful night tonight, not only for myself but for my wife, who is sick and tired of my yelling and pulling the covers off at two AM.

*************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a wonderful read -- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  Henrietta Lacks was the wife of a poor farmer who was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1951, and underwent an operation to remove the tumor.  The operation was unsuccessful, and Lacks died later that year.

Her tumor cells are still alive.

The doctor who removed the tumor realized their potential for cancer research, and patented them, calling them HeLa cells.  It is no exaggeration to say they've been used in every medical research lab in the world.  The book not only puts a face on the woman whose cells were taken and used without her permission, but considers difficult questions about patient privacy and rights -- and it makes for a fascinating, sometimes disturbing, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Living the dream

Last night I dreamed I was in my classroom.  It wasn't my real classroom, however -- it looked like a 19th century lecture hall.  Wooden desks, old cabinets containing jars with ground-glass stoppers, various pieces of equipment of uncertain purpose, some of which looked like (and may in fact have been) torture equipment.  My son lived in an apartment above my classroom, with his wife, which is especially curious because he's not married.  I was teaching a lesson on the reproductive systems of monkeys, but my students weren't listening.  Also, my son kept coming out on the balcony (of course there was a balcony) and interrupting my lecture to ask me questions about the rules of rugby.

After that, it got a little weird.

Neuroscientists have been trying to figure out the physiological function of dreams for years.  The contention is that they must be doing something important, because they're so ubiquitous.  Judging from my own dogs, even other species dream.  Sometimes they have exciting dreams, with muted little barks and twitching paws, often ending in a growl and a shake of the head, as if they're killing some poor defenseless prey; other times they have placid dreams, eliciting a sigh and a wagging tail, which ranks right up there amongst the cutest things I've ever seen.

But what purpose dreams serve has been elusive.  There's some contention that dreaming might help consolidate memory; that it may help to eliminate old synaptic connections that are no longer useful; and that it might function to reset neurotransmitter receptors, especially those connected with the neurotransmitter dopamine.  But last week, some neuropsychologists at Rutgers University have found evidence of yet another function of dreaming; making people less likely to overreact in scary situations.

Tom Merry, "Gladstone Dreams About Queen Victoria's Dinner" (1886) [image courtesy of the Wellcome Library Gallery and the Wikimedia Commons]

In "Baseline Levels of Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep May Protect Against Excessive Activity in Fear-Related Neural Circuitry," by Itamar Lerner, Shira M. Lupkin, Neha Sinha, Alan Tsai, and Mark A. Gluck, we learn that people who have been deprived of REM (rapid eye movement, the phase of sleep where dreaming occurs) are more likely to experience extreme anxiety and PTSD-like symptoms than people who have been REMing normally, as well as higher activity in the amygdala -- the part of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, and anger.

The authors write:

Sleep, and particularly rapid-eye movement sleep (REM), has been implicated in the modulation of neural activity following fear conditioning and extinction in both human and animal studies.  It has long been presumed that such effects play a role in the formation and persistence of Post-Traumatic-Stress-disorder, of which sleep impairments are a core feature.  However, to date, few studies have thoroughly examined the potential effects of sleep prior to conditioning on subsequent acquisition of fear learning in humans.  Further, these studies have been restricted to analyzing the effects of a single night of sleep—thus assuming a state-like relationship between the two.  In the current study, we employed long-term mobile sleep monitoring and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to explore whether trait-like variations in sleep patterns, measured in advance in both male and female participants, predict subsequent patterns of neural activity during fear learning.  Our results indicate that higher baseline levels of REM sleep predict reduced fear-related activity in, and connectivity between, the hippocampus, amygdala and ventromedial PFC during conditioning.  Additionally, Skin-Conductance-Responses (SCR) were weakly correlated to the activity in the amygdala.  Conversely, there was no direct correlation between REM sleep and SCR, indicating that REM may only modulate fear acquisition indirectly.  In a follow-up experiment, we show that these results are replicable, though to a lesser extent, when measuring sleep over a single night just prior to conditioning.  As such, baseline sleep parameters may be able to serve as biomarkers for resilience, or lack thereof, to trauma.

Which I find pretty fascinating.  I had sleep problems for years, finally (at least in part) resolved after a visit to a sleep lab and a prescription for a CPAP machine.  Turns out I have obstructive sleep apnea, apparently due to a narrow tracheal opening, and was waking up 23 times an hour.  I'm still not a really sound sleeper, but I feel like at least I'm not sleepwalking through life the way I was, pre-CPAP.  I also suffer from pretty severe social anxiety, and although I'm not convinced that the two are related, it is curious that the researchers found that a lack of REM ramps up anxiety.

However, even after fixing my apnea, my nights are still disturbed by bizarre dreams, for no particularly apparent reason.  I don't dream about things I'm anxious over, for the most part; my dreams are often weird and disjointed, with scenarios that make sense while I'm dreaming and seem ridiculous once I'm awake.  But what does it all mean?  I am extremely dubious about those "Your Dreams Interpreted" books that tell you that if you dream about a horse, it means you are secretly in love with your neighbor.  (I just made that up.  I have no idea what those books say about dreaming about horses, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to go find out.)  In any case, it's highly unlikely that even a symbolic interpretation of dream imagery would be consistent from person to person.

On a bigger scale, however, there is remarkable consistency in dream content from person to person.  We all have dreams of being chased, falling, flying, being in embarrassing situations, being in erotic situations.  But when you slice them more finely, the specifics of dreams vary greatly, even with people who are in the same circumstances, making it pretty unlikely that there's any kind of one-to-one correlation between dream imagery and events in real life.

So the study by Lerner et al. is fascinating, but doesn't really explain the content of dreams, nor why they can be so absolutely convincing when you're in them, and entirely absurd after you wake up.  But I better wrap this up.  I gotta go do some research in case Lucas wants to chat with me, because I might be able to hold my own when the topic is monkey junk, but I know bugger-all about rugby.

The waking dream

Yesterday's post, about the generally bizarre nature of dream content, prompted a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, the amazing writer A. J. Aalto, to send me a link to a study done a while back in Switzerland that showed that our dream content sometimes forms a continuum with our waking experience.

The author and lead researcher, Sophie Schwartz of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Geneva, did a clever study where volunteers were instructed to play the computer game Alpine Racer II, wherein the player stands on a movable platform that tracks his/her movements, while an avatar skis downhill on the computer screen.  To be successful in the game, the player has not only to exhibit balance, coordination, and motor skill, but to focus visually on the task and ignore any distractions.  Schwartz then had the players record their dream content, comparing it to people who had only watched the game, and control volunteers who had done an unrelated activity.

Schwartz writes:

After training on the Alpine Racer, 30% of spontaneous mentation collected at different times during pre-sleep wakefulness and light NREM sleep (up to 300 sec after sleep onset) contained imagery (of any modality, 24%) or thoughts (6%) related to the skiing game.  Wamsley et al. also found that imagery directly related to training on the game (unambiguous representations of the Alpine Racer or of skiing) declined across time.  This time-course was paralleled by a tendency for game-related incorporations to become more abstracted from the original experience.  These findings do not only provide empirical evidence for spontaneous memory replay during wakefulness and light NREM sleep (stages 1 and 2), but they show that reports of subjective experience offer valuable information about cognitive processes across changing brain states.

Schwartz acknowledges that the high rate of incorporation of skiing imagery into the players' dreams probably had to do with the degree of attention the game required:

High levels of incorporation of Alpine Racer are most plausibly related to the strong motivational and attentional involvement of the player during the game.  Consistent with this interpretation, a few participants who only observed those playing Alpine Racer also incorporated elements of the game into their sleep-onset mentation, at rates similar to the participants who were actively engaged in the game.  These effects and their time-course suggest that novelty may be a critical factor for the selection of material to be mentally replayed.  Moreover, many baseline night reports incorporated thought or imagery related to the game (compared to a control set of sleep-onset mentation reports), indicating that the mere anticipation of the task could trigger prospective memory processes that emerged at sleep onset.  It is tempting to speculate that hypnagogic imagery may contribute to the integration of recent experiences with long-term memories and future goals.

This is consistent with my wife's memories of being in graduate school and spending an inordinate amount of time avoiding doing her research by playing Tetris.  She realized she should probably stop when she started having dreams of brightly-colored blocks falling from the sky, and fortunately was able to curb her Tetris addiction before her adviser had to stage an intervention.

For myself, I can't say that I see a lot of incorporation of waking experience into my dreams.  Much of my dream content seems to fall squarely into the category of "What the fuck?", such as a recent dream wherein I was filling our bathtub with styrofoam peanuts, except they kept melting and running down the drain, which made even less sense when I looked up and realized that the bathtub wasn't in my house, it was in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

None of which, I can assure you without hesitation, was a continuation of anything I'd been doing that day.

I've also noticed a tendency in my more reality-based dreams to have more content with strong emotional charge than that with any connection to recent events.  I've been teaching for thirty years, and I still have frequent teaching-anxiety dreams -- that my students aren't listening or are misbehaving, that I get confused or off track during a lecture and can't remember what I'm supposed to be doing, even that I'm wandering around the halls in the school and can't find my classroom.  I also have dreams of losing loved ones or pets, dreams of witnessing violence, dreams of being trapped -- all of which have a powerful emotional content.

But I haven't noticed much tendency for my dream content to exhibit Schwartz's continuance from the waking state.  In fact, I can recall many times when I expected to dream about something -- when I've been involved all day in a project, or (especially) when I've watched a scary or emotionally powerful movie -- and it almost never happens.

So once more, we're back to dreams being mysterious, and any explanations we have regarding dream content being incomplete at best.  Which, of course, is part of their fascination.  I'll definitely be giving this topic more thought, once I've figured out what to do with all of these melted styrofoam peanuts.

Live your dream! Unless it's the one where you're naked on the bus.

Last night I had the strangest dream, but it wasn't about a girl in a black bikini (sorry if you're too young to get that reference).  One of my coworkers was going to be interviewed on public television by Yoko Ono.  I won't mention who the interviewee was, but trust me, if there was a list of people who were likely to be interviewed by Yoko Ono, this person would be near the bottom.  So anyway, I was being driven to this event by our school psychologist, but we were going to be late because he had the sudden overwhelming need to find a grocery store so he could buy a bag of potato chips.

I won't go any further into it, because at that point it started to get a little weird.

It is an open question why people dream, but virtually everyone does.  During the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, there are parts of the mind that are as active as they are during wakefulness.  This observation led brain scientists to call this stage "paradoxical sleep" -- paradoxical because while the body is usually very relaxed, the brain is firing like crazy.

Well, parts of it are.  While the visual and auditory centers are lighting up like a Christmas tree, your prefrontal cortex is snoozing in a deck chair.  The prefrontal cortex is your decision-making module and reality filter, and this at least partly explains why dreams seem so normal while you're in them but so bizarre when you wake up and your prefrontal cortex has a chance to reboot.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The content of dreams has been a subject of speculation for years, and all available evidence indicates that the little "Your Dreams Interpreted" books you can buy in the supermarket checkout lines are unadulterated horse waste.  Apparently there is some thought that much of our dream content is involved with processing long-term memories; but equally plausible theories suggest that dreaming is a way of resetting our dopamine and serotonin receptors, or a way of decommissioning old neural pathways (so-called "parasitic nodes").  Probably, it aids in all three.  Whatever it is, however, it's important -- all mammal species tested undergo REM sleep, some for as much as eight hours a night.

Anyone who's a dog owner probably knew that already, of course.  Both of my dogs dream, as evidenced by their behavior while they're asleep.  My coonhound, Lena, has squirrel-chasing dreams, which makes sense because while she's awake two of her three operational brain cells are devoted to constant monitoring of our backyard squirrel population.  She'll be lying there, completely sacked out, then suddenly she'll woof softly under her breath, and her paws will twitch as if she were running after her prey.  Every once in a while she apparently catches one, because she'll go, "Rrrrrrr," and shake her head as if tearing a squirrel apart.

Grendel, on the other hand, tends to have happy, sweet dreams.  He'll twitch and sigh... and then his tail starts wagging.  Which is a top contender for the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life.

As far as human dreams go, it's interesting that there is a fairly consistent set of content types in dreams, regardless of your culture or background.  Some of the more common ones are dreams of falling, being chased, fighting, seeing someone who has died, having sexual experiences, being in a public place while inappropriately dressed, and being unable to attend interviews by Yoko Ono because of searching for potato chips.

A few well-documented but less common dreamlike experiences include lucid dreams (being aware that you're dreaming while it's happening), hypnagogic experiences (dreams in light sleep rather than REM), and night terrors (terrifying dreams during deep sleep).  This last-mentioned is something that is found almost exclusively in children, and almost always ceases entirely by age twelve.  My younger son had night terrors, and the first time it happened was truly one of the scariest things I've ever experienced.  At 11:30 one night he started shrieking hysterically, over and over.  I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall like a fury, to find him sitting bolt upright in bed, trembling, eyes wide open, and drenched with sweat.  I ran to him and said, "What's wrong?"  He pointed to an empty corner of the room and said, "It's staring at me!"

I should mention at this point that I had just recently watched the movie The Sixth Sense.

When I finished peeing my pants, I was able to pull myself together enough to realize that he was having a night terror, and that there were in fact no spirits of dead people staring at him from the corner of his bedroom.  When I got him calmed down, he went back into a deep sleep -- and the next morning remembered nothing at all.

I, on the other hand, required several months of therapy to recover completely.

Whatever purpose dreams and other associated phenomena serve, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are "supernatural" in any sense.  Precognitive dreams, for instance, most likely occur because you dream every night, about a relatively restricted number of types of events, and just by the law of large numbers at some point you'll probably dream something that will end up resembling a future event.  There is no mystical significance to the content of our dreams -- it is formed of our own thoughts and memories, both pleasant and unpleasant; our fears and desires and wishes, our emotions and knowledge; so they are at their base a reflection of the bits and pieces of who we are.   It's no wonder that they are funny, scary, weird, complex, erotic, disturbing, exhilarating, and perplexing, because we are all of those things.

So, next time you're in the midst of a crazy dream, you can be comforted by the fact that you are having an experience that is shared by all of humanity, and most other mammals as well.  What you're dreaming is no more significant, but also no more peculiar, than what the rest of us are dreaming.  Just sit back and enjoy the show.  And give my regards to Yoko Ono.

Dream weavers

All my life, I've been plagued with vivid dreams.  I use the word "plagued" deliberately, because more often than not my dreams are disturbing, chaotic, and odd, leaving me unsettled upon waking.  I remember more than once thrashing about so violently during a dream that I've found myself in the morning on the floor in a heap of blankets; I've also had the residuum of unease from a bad dream stay with me through much of the following day.  And given that I've also spent most of my adult life fighting chronic insomnia, it's a wonder I get any sleep at all.

Of course, I've also had good dreams.  A series of flying dreams I had as a child were so realistic, and so cool, that for a while I was convinced that they were true; that I could go into my parents' front yard, angle my body to the wind, and be caught up and thrown into the air like a kite.  I've had dreams of running effortlessly, dreams of winning the lottery, and the inevitable (but admittedly pleasant) dreams of the non-PG-13-rated variety.

Through it all, though, I've never had a lucid dream.  Lucid dreams are dreams in which you are aware you're dreaming -- and apparently, with some people, dreams in which you are able to control what happens.  If such a thing were commonplace, who would need virtual reality or computer games, when every night you could create your own reality and then interact with it as if it were real?

The first step toward making such a thing possible for ordinary schmoes like myself, who dream frequently but never lucidly, may just have hit the market.  Called "Remee," the product looks like a sleep mask, but on the inside of the mask are six red LED lights.  Even with your eyelids closed, your eyes receive enough light to remain aware of your surroundings, and when the lights activate -- late in the sleep cycle, when you are most likely to be in REM (Rapid Eye Movement, the stage of sleep in which you dream) -- your brain becomes aware of them.  At that point (so the theory goes), your perception of the red lights becomes a signal, alerting you to the fact that you're dreaming.  From there, the lucid dream is initiated.

So, the lights act a little like the totem objects in Inception -- giving you an anchor, something that clues you in with regards to what is going on.  But unlike the totem objects, whose purpose was to check to see if you were dreaming so you could get out, if need be, here the purpose is to let you know that the fun is about to begin.

The inventors of Remee, Duncan Frazier and Steven McGuigan, told The Daily Mail (read the story here) that their tests have indicated that the lights are unlikely to cause seizures or any other ill effects.  If they fire during non-REM sleep, for example, the brain simply ignores them -- as it does if a faint light (say the distant headlights of a car) shine briefly into your bedroom window at night.

Remee masks are priced at $95 each, and are available here.  Frazier and McGuigan report that since Remee masks first came on the market, they've received over 7,000 orders.

Me, I find this intriguing, but I do wonder about what long-term (possibly psychological) effects such a thing might have, as we still don't have much of an idea what dreaming actually does.  That dreams are important seems obvious, given their ubiquity amongst mammal species -- both of my dogs clearly dream, apparently about chasing squirrels judging by how their feet move and the little muffled woofing noises they make.  Features that are widespread amongst many different, distantly-related species are called evolutionarily conserved features, and the usual interpretation is that they have been maintained through evolutionary history because they serve some sort of essential purpose.  As such, you have to question the wisdom of monkeying around with something like dreaming until we know more about it.

Be that as it may, if I had a Remee mask, I'd definitely try it.  Whatever harm it might do, I would guess, is unlikely to happen from occasional use.  And if you decide to get one, do let me know by posting here what your results are.  Given the unsettling nature of many of my nightly forays into the dream world, it might be nice to have a strategy for taking charge and having a little fun.