What’s in a dream? To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind. To Jung it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. To newer psychologists, dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations. To chiropractors, dreams simply mean that their patients are sleeping at night!
What if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all? Weird concept? Well, in a paper published in the October issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. Whoa! Physiological? Now, that’s right up a chiropractor’s philosophical alley!
Dr. Hobson believes that the brain is actually warming its circuits in anticipation of the sights and sounds and emotions of waking. “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking (except, perhaps when we’re “daydreaming”? -admin).
“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis.
The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists.
For more on this story, go to: nytimes.com