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.

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[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.