EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

I've been reading When Brains Dream by Tony Zadra & Bob Stickgold. They're solid on the physiology of dreaming; commendably, they sample the long pre-Freudian history of dream research; and they're sensible about the joys and limits of lucidity. They've even read the classic ESP studies and admit there's a real case to be made, and are frank that the main reason the consensus is negative is that their colleagues won't read the data--dismiss it out of hand. In short: on technical matters, from elementary to arcane, they're consistently good. But...

Zadra & Stickgold also claim that so few dreams get remembered, and so few of those are understood, that dreams can't be trying to tell us something; their job must get done during sleep. Their own theory, called NEXTUP, claims the dreaming brain explores weak associations--so dreams really require no attention, interpretation or action.

You read right. If sleep-short, media-distracted Americans can't understand the few dreams they remember... their ineptitude proves all other cultures throughout history must be wrong to think our dreams are messages we should study--and act on. Does this ethnocentric claim stand up in practice? Here's their own sample dream and analysis--the only one in the book. You decide.

VIVISECTION

In Bob's first faculty position, at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, he had the unpleasant task of helping to teach the so-called dog lab. This long-since-abandoned lab was the medical students' introduction to death, albeit in the guise of a laboratory study of cardiovascular function. When students arrived, they were confronted with anesthetized dogs and a lab manual describing how to insert catheters into veins, measure intravenous blood pressure, inject drugs, and more. Near the end of the lab, they would cut through the skin and muscles of the dog's chest, use a buzz saw to go through the rib cage, and apply drugs directly onto the pumping heart.

Bob was too squeamish and couldn't bear watching the students cut through the ribs. He left this task for his colleagues to supervise. The first night that he taught the lab, he had a dream:

I was in the dog lab again, and we had just cut open the dog's chest. As I looked down, I suddenly realized that it wasn't a dog; it was my five-year-old daughter, Jessie. I stood there dumbfounded, not understanding how we could have made such a mistake. And as I watched, the edges of the incision drew back together and healed without a hint of a scar.

Waking from the dream, Bob told his wife about it, and she suggested that the dog lab had clearly aroused his fears of mortality. And where were these fears greatest? For his child Jessie, of course. But Bob disagreed. That's not what it felt like to him. To him, the dream seemed to ask the question, "If it's okay to do this to a dog, why isn't it okay to do it to Jessie?" Of course, both explanations were reasonable.

This is a classic example of what dreams like to do. At the time, Bob's brain took an emotional event from his day and replayed it with an entirely improbable and bizarre rescripting. Obviously, this dream wasn't designed to improve his ability to perform the surgery.

Instead, while his brain dreamed, it searched through his memory networks for weak and potentially useful associations: The dog and Jessie were both small and helpless; he felt responsible for them both; he didn't want either of them to die; he loved them both; or all of the above.

Finding multiple links to Jessie, his brain built her into the dream. But why? Not to answer a question, and not to solve a problem. Rather, to do just what NEXTUP evolved to do. The brain asked ''What if?" and watched its own emotional and cognitive response, observing how this response affected the dream narrative. The intensity of that response and the way it influenced the rest of the dream told the brain what it needed to know: this association, Jessie and the dog lab, was a valuable one. Something was uncovered about the fragility or sacredness of life that was important, something worth marking and strengthening and keeping available for the future.

Once these connections were strengthened, the brain's job was done. Whether Bob remembered the dream when he woke up or not didn't really matter.

EDITOR'S CRITIQUE

Bob's dream is not unique; let's compare. Back in 1880, Dr. Anna Kingsford had a near-identical nightmare of vivisected animals revealed as children. But she, lacking the wisdom of NEXTUP, saw a message; she became an activist against vivisection. Of course she'd fought like hell to be a doctor; only the second Englishwoman to win an M.D. Getting cut dead by male doctors and even called a bitch may help you see other bitches getting cut up as... your kin.

Was Kingsford naïve? I find Zadra & Stickgold more so. Freud was rightly accused of reducing a vast, diverse dreamscape into a handful of preset drives and meanings, but NEXTUP out-Freuds Freud, reducing ALL dreams to ONE meaning, or more precisely, anti-meaning: "Relax, your brain's just housekeeping, no need to think or feel or do anything..." That's not a theory; it's a tranquilizer.

"Whether Bob remembered the dream when he woke up or not didn't really matter." Oh? It mattered for Bob, clearly more traumatized than he knew. It mattered to the students forced to kill dogs for no medical reason. It sure as hell mattered to the dogs.

Take absolutely any dream and apply NEXTUP theory: you get the same easy, feel-good answer. "Relax, your brain's just playing what-if. No message, intent, or obligation to do a thing!" And the comfortable certainty dreams aren't messages guarantees you won't find any! You don't even look. NEXTUP is as self-fulfilling as a Freudian labeling disagreement as "resistance" that proves the Freudian's right.

A theory that blinds you like this is worse than no theory at all.

--Chris Wayan

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