Dreams

[mmcirvin]

This comment by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little in a fascinating Making Light thread on bad sources led me to this paper by G. William Domhoff on "Senoi Dream Theory" which is a great read: it's about how romantic pseudo-anthropology mutated the shamanistic dream practices of a preindustrial culture in Malaysia into a supposedly miraculous therapy for all mental and social ills, and sparked a fad in the human potential movement.

I find the story interesting in part because it's just slightly before my time. I heard about the whole business of dream journals, dream control and so forth in the 1980s, shortly after most of the bogus Senoi associations had been dropped or deemphasized and it was all about lucid dreaming. I was fascinated by lucid dreaming because, as a teenager, I'd had several of what could probably be characterized as lucid dreaming experiences (that is, dreams in which you realize you're dreaming and possess a certain amount of rationality without waking up; the lore is that you can then control the dream). A couple of these had actually turned into cool flying dreams. Domhoff, though, doesn't seem to think that the kind of reliable control of the dream experience promised by some lucid-dreaming advocates is really consistently possible for most people. It certainly wasn't like that for me; it seemed like I could give the direction of the story a nudge, but it was very hit or miss. I also don't think there was anything particularly therapeutic about it; it was just a fun thing to play with. I still get flashes of lucidity occasionally, but it's usually immediately before waking up when I'm maybe already in more of a hypnopompic state than actually asleep.


Anyway, the paper is on a dream research website at UC Santa Cruz that is really fascinating in general. The authors claim, perhaps unsurprisingly, that most popular accounts of dream phenomena get a lot wrong. Some surprising things reported in that paper and others on the site:

• Most dreams are during REM sleep, but some aren't, and the eye movement itself (contrary to early research) has nothing to do with dream content.
• While most adults dream a lot, they say, there seem to be some who don't dream at all, and are not harmed by this--there's no evidence that lack of dreams or lack of REM sleep makes you crazy.
• The remarkably weird, seemingly symbolic dreams we like to remember and talk about are relatively rare; most dreams that we dream every night seem to have pretty mundane content, related directly to the dreamer's personal concerns in a way that requires little interpretation, but, rather, is thumpingly obvious. (I've known people who have observed this fact about their own dreams and concluded regretfully that they must be pretty dull people! They should be reassured.)

They also report a finding that was unexpected to the people who found it and was certainly surprising to me: as far as anyone can tell, really little kids hardly dream at all. When awakened during REM sleep, they report dreams far less often than adults do. The few dreams that kids under 5 do have are more likely to be bizarre and otherworldly, but they're also much less dramatically involved, basically simple images in which the dreamer is not a character. Domhoff seems to think that babies and toddlers may not dream at all, and that dreaming gradually arises along with other cognitive skills, not reaching a fully adult complexity until the teenage years.

Now, I have at least one vivid memory of a dream that I had when I was four years old (I can date it to 1972 because I know I had it on a particular family trip associated with our move to Virginia); it was a freaky nightmare about HoJo the Clown, mascot of the early 1970s Howard Johnson's kid's menu. But it was actually somewhat consistent with Domhoff's claims. While it was weird and frightening (not emotionally flat as claimed), I don't recall there being any sort of story or character interaction, just a succession of images with a few words. I think that most of the nightmares I had when I was really little were like that.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

The few dreams that I can recall that somewhat resemble what's described as lucid dreaming almost always happened right before waking up, much as you describe. (In fact, I had one this morning, but I no longer recall what it was about. I suspect the cat figured in it, but that wasn't too surprising as he'd been pestering me for the last half hour to get UP already and GET him his BREAKFAST, DAMMIT.)

One from when I was quite young involved lava and some sort of tentacled creature that I'm pretty sure had figured in an episode of He-Man. I had to come up with the right combination of words to escape, and when I did, I woke up. (The phrase itself was quite mundane.) It shouldn't be too surprising that I was starting to get into fantasy fiction at the time.

Much of what I encounter in what I affectionately refer to as ooga-booga land is...well, I'm skeptical to say the least, and a lot of what gets written and passed on about dreams strikes me as bullshit. I've also observed that dreams often tend to relate to something that is bothering the dreamer, and have sometimes advised people that if they're dreaming about it, maybe they should think about it and proceed to do something.

My favorite observation about dreams comes from a Sandman comic:

Rose: Hey, you know what Freud said? He said that when you're dreaming about flying, you're really dreaming about having sex.
Dream: Really? Then what are you dreaming about when you're dreaming about having sex?
Rose: Um...

Heh.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Most of my lucid dreams were like that. I also had a prosaic one when I was pretty young, before I had ever heard of what a lucid dream was--I figured out I was dreaming and just went around telling people they weren't real, and made some of them cry.

But I had one really great one when I was about 18, in which the classic monster-escape scenario* led to lucidity followed by a long, soaring flight sequence over verdant land and blue water. There was much more to it before and after that, but it definitely falls into the category of Boring Nonsense Details of Other People's Dreams.

*The monster talked and called itself a "semaphanticore", a word that is too good to waste, if only I could find a context.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

A manticore with coded flags on its tail instead of spikes, perhaps.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking some kind of cyberpunky virtual Matrix denizen.

on its

[notr.livejournal.com]

long nose, I think.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...though the shorter "semanticore" is a better pun, and obvious enough that it's already been used for some kind of web development product.

[twillis.livejournal.com]

All will be revealed:

http://www.amazon.com/Numerology-Dream-Book-Zolar/dp/B0006W4K0I/ref=sr_1_4/104-4129406-1342337?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187439044&sr=8-4

You see, the problem is that you haven't been applying enough Numerology Science to your dream analysis.