Eve is here. I sometimes have lucid dreams, but not as often as I would like. Usually I have a conversation with myself saying “this must be a dream” and start flying to prove it’s a dream, then argue with myself as to why I can’t do it while awake. You may also rewind your dreams to revisit or review your favorite sections.
Written by Emily Cattaneo, a New England author and journalist whose work has appeared in Slate, NPR, The Baffler, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Originally published in Undark
Imagine a dream in which you are locked in a room with five ferocious tigers. No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape. You feel scared as the tiger shrieks and thrashes around.
Now imagine repurposing this dream. Imagine it from the perspective of a tiger. Here we see that the animals are panicking simply because they want to escape. When you open the door and invite them freely, they lie down meekly. Suddenly, the dreams were not scary and confusing, but peaceful and calm.
Book review — Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind, by Michelle Carr (Henry Holt and Co., 272 pages).
Freud may have had a field day with this dream, but with the fall of psychoanalysis over the last century, medical professionals no longer value our nocturnal wanderings as an indicator of physical or mental health. That’s what dream scientist Michelle Kerr is trying to change. Kerr, director of the Dream Engineering Laboratory at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine in Montreal, has spent 20 years collecting data on people like tiger dreamers. She has spent countless nights in the lab observing people’s sleep, investigating why we dream, why we have bad dreams, and how studying and even manipulating dreams can improve our mental and physical health.
In Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind, Carr makes a passionate case for why the answers to these questions are important, especially for those suffering from trauma and suicidal thoughts. What emerges here is a passionate case for why dreams and nightmares are not simply “random electrophysiological noises generated by the brain during sleep,” as scientists have long believed, but rather nightly exercises to “fix the shape of autobiography.” In other words, Kerr argues that our dreamscapes are important pillars of who we are.
She spends the first half of the story establishing a detailed and important framework for what exactly dreams are and why we dream. We spend about a third of our lives sleeping, and our minds go on an “amazing” journey, she writes. We unconsciously synthesize memories, sensations, existing knowledge, and expectations to create our dreamscapes, and up to 75 percent of people experience recurring dreams throughout their lives.
In this section, Carr reveals some interesting ideas about dreams. She argues that dreams do not simply result from processes in the brain, but also from physical experiences. For example, are you dreaming of a pesky anxiety that your teeth will fall out? Dr. Kerr hypothesizes that its roots may lie in nighttime tooth grinding. Equally interesting: daydreams and nighttime dreams are probably not binary, as scientists have long believed. Recent EEG studies have shown very similar neural processes during these two activities, leading Dr. Kerr to hypothesize that “dreaming is like an enhanced form of mind wandering, and both derive from the same neural substrates.”
But Carr’s purpose is not just to enlighten us about recent scientific revelations about the dreaming process. Rather, she wants to convince us that dreams are important to health, wellness, and the human experience. Dreams serve a variety of important functions. A study by sleep researchers at Harvard University asked subjects to navigate a virtual maze before and after a daytime nap, allowing them to rehearse their waking lives. Students who dreamed about mazes during their naps were 10 times better at navigating them than those who didn’t. This suggests that their dreams helped them accomplish their tasks more effectively, Professor Kerr said.
Certain stages of sleep act as “system resets,” Kerr writes. Throughout the night, dreams allow the brain to process everything that happened that day, assimilating it into the dreamer’s personal story and sense of self, recording important lessons learned, and dulling intense emotions associated with embarrassing, frightening, or traumatic experiences. Carr theorizes that our brains cannot perform these functions unconsciously. We must experience the emotions that accompany dreams in order to learn. As Carr says, “Dreams function just as emotions function in waking life.”
So if dreaming is a way for humans to synthesize, learn, and reset during sleep, “why are some of us forced to relive the full force of our deepest fears, sadness, and anger over and over again in the form of recurring nightmares?” Researchers believe that the brains of people who suffer from nightmares attempt to deconstruct trauma and synthesize it in the same way as the normal dreaming process, but the dream content is so painful and graphic that the process is derailed. This has serious implications for mental health. Professor Kerr cites researchers who have shown in repeated studies that nightmares are a better predictor of suicide risk than anxiety, depression and insomnia.
Carr makes no secret of his dissatisfaction with the medical establishment’s attitude towards dreams and nightmares, writing: “The fact that this aspect of a person’s life is currently not utilized in the diagnosis or treatment of most mental health conditions is a stark reminder of how far medicine has to go.”
But on the bright side, researchers like Carr, who understand the importance of dreams and nightmares, are developing truly innovative treatments for both nightmares and their underlying causes. Some of Kerr’s methods are easy to try at home. She teaches patients like Tiger Dreamer to confront their nightmares while they are awake, writing and rehearsing new versions until their sleeping minds trick them.
Some of Kerr’s methods are more novel, like lucid dreaming, where patients learn how to control their dreams. She excitedly recalls her first research into lucid dreaming. The sleeping patient then moved her eyes three times in response to a series of beeps, indicating that she knew she was dreaming and responding to the researchers’ communications.
Other technologies, like dream engineering, seem like pure science fiction. Dream engineers use stimuli such as clicks, puffs of pressurized air, or specific smells with the aim of manipulating the sleeping mind. Carr likens this process to “how a film’s ambient elements, lighting, music, pacing, and action guide the meaning of the film.”
For example, researchers could ideally create a Pavlovian connection in the dreamer’s mind by spraying a patient with a soothing perfume while encouraging them to recall a positive memory, then spraying the patient again with the perfume once they fall asleep. This Pavlovian relationship can also work in the opposite direction, through what Carr calls “targeted forgetting.” She cites an Israeli study in which researchers sprayed a group of sleeping smokers with the smell of rotten eggs and cigarette smoke. Smokers were less likely to smoke in the days following the study.
I wish “Nightmare Obscura” had more characters and personal stories. I found myself wishing each chapter began with an anecdote about the rough road to recovery of a person who suffers from nightmares. But Carr’s book is worth reading not just for its interesting facts about dreams and glimpses into the Inception-like future of dream engineering, but also because of Carr’s central themes.
Research has shown that controlling nightmares through the techniques described in Carr’s book can be a powerful tool for treating PTSD. And early research shows there may be some promise in treating nightmares and alleviating other symptoms in people with borderline personality disorder. Professor Kerr argues that while there is not much evidence that they can be used to treat mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they should certainly be tried.
She makes a strong case that dreams and nightmares are overlooked indicators of mental health, and urges medical institutions to understand what sleep researchers have known for decades. Dreams are “an essential, unique, and beneficial component of sleep, physical health, and mental health throughout the lifespan.”
This will be fascinating reading for anyone who has ever been interested in dreams, and a must-have for anyone plagued by nightmares who may find relief in Carr’s method.
