Dream reports

Malcolm Bowers was no problem, of course. He was an athletic golden boy who had been a star quarterback in college, and was already fully trained as an internist. At Edgewood, he had become fascinated with the weird nighttime dreams reported by some subjects after they received a small dose of a nerve agent. I admired this alert observation and was not surprised when he went on later to become a psychiatrist, a professor at Yale, and a world-renowned expert on chemical changes in the brains of schizophrenic patients. 

As Mark Solms points out in his recent book, the dreams of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy are more intense than those of normals. They are more frequently intensely unpleasant or nightmarish, and this is presumably a function of higher levels of anxiety mediated by the hyperexcit-able amygdala of the epileptic patients. These hypotheses are testable in two ways. One is to confirm the anecdotal reports of patients by studying the subjects in sleep labs, as Jose Calvo and his group have done in Mexico City. Compared to age- and sex-matched controls, the epileptic subjects had measurably higher levels of anxiety in their dream reports. 

We can ask numerous questions that we don t have answers to yet about this information flow, not only general psychological ones as to how information passes from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind and what sort of transformations our unconscious processes work on information, but even more specific ones about whether psi information is processed in the same or a different way as sensory and memory information is in the unconscious mind. In the telepathic dream reported in Chapter 6, for example, there was a different feeling quality associated with this dream than with ordinary dreams. We also need to know what sort of conditions in the conscious mind can facilitate the flow of information from the unconscious, i.e., how do we draw out information from this normally inaccessible part of the mind What sorts of conscious conditions or actions minimize the distortion that seems to occur in the process Given that our direct, conscious use of psi is so poor, these are very important questions. 

After hearing Mrs. A s dream report, Mr. A immediately added the following details, which he had not bothered to mention in his initial report ... 

The reports that have been presented so far are all mine. They were recorded at home or on the road in my personal journal, which now runs to 116 volumes covering the last 25 years of my life and includes over 300 dream reports. Dream reports such as these have the great advantage of being easy and inexpensive to obtain, numerous, and, to me at least, undeniably authentic. Even though I have no recall of these dreams until I read the reports, I have the reports and I see in them the striking formal features that I have emphasized in this chapter. 

Thus, the same participants who give us dream reports also give us reports of their waking consciousness. This last advantage is crucial to our effort to extend our understanding of mental life back into the waking state, and to obtain comparable quantitative data from the minds of the same individuals when awake and asleep. 

As far as the data are concerned, Freud made no attempt to collect dream reports from people other than himself, and even those reports are few in number (about 40 are cited in the 700 pages of his Interpretation of Dreams) and fragmentary (his word counts, of less than 100, are many times less than most modern samples). In the 1890s, as today, it was an easy matter to collect an extensive, representative sample and to treat the data-set as a whole rather than using the piecemeal, axe-grinding, controversial technique that Freud used to discuss each one. 

Freud ignored two important predecessors. One was David Hartley, who ascribed the bizarre nature of dreams to too many associations he had a functional theory to go with his hypothesis, a hypothesis that was probably correct. Dreaming, for Hartley, served to loosen associations that were otherwise inclined to become obsessively fixed. And that would be madness, Hartley asserted. Certainly, dreaming is a hyperassociative state (i.e. a state in which many, many associations are made), as Freud could have quickly determined had he examined dream reports before rushing to interpret them. 

The following dream report is rich in bizarreness, but it also illustrates the insistent movement of the dreamer through dream space. Whether I am in the hotel, the temple, or on a Vermont hillside, I am always moving, looking, noticing, or talking. 

In every case, the dream report given by the patient on being awakened fits with the motor behaviour observed during the REM sleep dream. We know that these events occur in REM sleep from sleep lab evidence. 

The other caveat is that the human mind is designed to see dream causality even when it could not possibly be present. How do we know this By means of an experiment called dream splicing that was conceived by Robert Stickgold and carried out by our lab seminar group. We took 10 dream reports and cut them apart - with scissors - at the point of dramatic scene shifts in the plots. The resulting 20 dream fragments were then spliced . We reassembled them so that one half were assembled as reported and... 

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