Here’s some comments on the article A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain by Benedict Carey [can read or scan quickly at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10mind.html?_r=2&ref=science]. This article points out a new theory of dream interpretation which slightly discards psychological interpretations and replaces them with physiological ones. The article refers to dreaming as being more a brain warm-up before facing the day instead of the build-up and release of the previous day's processing.
There are a few points in the article that I was skeptical about. First of all, this article’s arguments were slightly too reductionistic as some of the researchers, such as Dr. Hobson, stated that the primary purpose of dreaming might be physiological. I find that this article tries to slowly set aside the psychological portion of dreaming since physiological answers are considered more credible.
I still find that the theory of REM sleep being a “warm-up before waking” sounds very plausible. However, I think we face a long debate of what came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken being the psychological processing of events during the past day and the egg, the physiological warming-up for the day to come.
I find it disappointing that dreams do have a biased and non-scientific past, but reducing them to spontaneous physiological activities doesn’t seem to have more scientific basis than assigning them to psychological symbols.
Also, I am wondering about the 80% of dream contents that the dreamer hasn’t encountered while awake. Reports of lucid dreamers on their recollection of people and places in their dreams only support weakly the idea that only 20% of dreams are “made” of concrete memories since even awake, we sometimes don’t perceive a person or place as familiar even if we encountered it before. Hence, dreams can very well use past stimuli that we weren’t consciously aware of but that was still registered into our memory.
Finally, I found the findings of the study of Goethe and Hobson fascinating. The fact that frontal areas would be involved in lucid dreaming and waking but not normal dreaming is good evidence of the sense of logic and self-awareness one has in lucid dreaming and waking but not in normal non-lucid-sleep that is characterized by delusions and psychotic-like state. Furthermore, wasn’t psychosis associated with deficiencies in frontal areas… Thus, could it be that lucid dreaming research will help us find a prognosis for psychotic patients? This will be in another post. In the meantime…
To finish this comment, it is amazing that lucid dreaming seems to be in between waking and dreaming even in terms of brain activity as EEG data suggests activation of both visual areas and frontal areas (to a lesser extent than waking).
Here’s a recent interesting review on the physiology of lucid dreaming:
__________________________________________________
Other links:
Design art made by ROBO Design and found on http://www.robodesign.ro/files/gallery/original/lucid-dreaming.jpg
