The Movies in Your Mind

I saw a fascinating show on Discovery Channel called Body in Numbers that gives shape and magnitude to the numbers involved in what makes the human body the wonder that it is. But I was tired and I was falling asleep while watching it. I woke up when the narrator mentioned the average number of dreams we have in a lifetime. I wrote the number on my phone or at least I thought I did. It turned out the following day that I just dreamt that I wrote it down. But that led me to do research.

It turns out that your average dreamtime totals two hours every night. This means that you would have spent a total of 5.83 years dreaming or would have had 51,100 dreams (if you have at least two dreams a night) by the time you are 70. You may not remember a single one of them but scientists who study “sleep” assure us that we go safely insane some part of the night (generally at nights) as we dream.

So if we do spend as much time dreaming as the same number of years we do in our elementary schooling, does it mean we should reflect at what they could mean? Should this astonishing number of dreams that we involuntarily buy tickets to experience, move us to see what it could reveal about ourselves or the world? I really do not know if we should. All I know is we do. I have read books on dream interpretations, people who specialize in interpreting dreams in terms of karma, past lives or predicting one’s future. I even have relatives who so confidently offer the meaning of dreams as if they were the directing them. I think it is fun to watch people do this. But in terms of being useful and adding to our understanding of the enterprise of dreaming, I find that it does not get me anywhere.

We are creatures who are naturally ravenous to find patterns in anything that could help us cope with the madness, both joyful and painful, that happens when we are awake that we will scavenge for the last redeemable scrap of detail that we could hold on to for meaning. So even if we would probably never know why we dream, we could try to find out how we dream and scientists who study dreaming necessarily have to study the precondition — “sleeping.”

When we sleep, we approach a stage where we dream usually at the fifth part of our sleep cycle which is the Rapid Eye Movement. The first four stages progresses into a slowing of brain waves to deep sleep (stage four). REM is that part where we somehow “awaken” but only within our minds with our limbs temporarily frozen, our breathing speeding up and our eyes move like LED lights flashing an “On Sale” sign. Scientists found that when they wake people up during this stage, this is where they are able to describe their weird dreams. By the way, studies of mammals have shown that they too approach REM and thus, maybe they also dream.

Scientists have found that dreaming is a way for your brain to make sense of the stupendous amount of information that fire like an army of meteor showers in your head. The part of your brain (cortex), whose main job is to make sense of things, whether you are awake or not, is simply and faithfully doing its job. It constantly tries to piece these bits into stories. Whether or not they would be relevant to your waking hours is up to the self who will later awaken and try to interpret it. And this is what a very interesting “dream” experiment tried to find out.

The study was done by Carey K. Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard University last March 2009 and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They found out that we interpret our dreams according to our own biases. In summary, they tested a total 149 subjects in the US, South Korea and India. They found that all of the subjects were convinced that dreams are a source of meaning about themselves and the world. But when it comes to interpreting dreams, resulting interpretations usually followed the belief and desires of the “dreamer-interpreter.” This meant that for instance, when one night, you dreamt of something intimate with your beloved and another dream time, with the beloved of your friend, you are more likely to assign meaning to the first one than the other one because the latter is disturbing. If you are religious, you might ascribe meaning to your dreams the way you would when you are when you are awake interpreting the corresponding sacred text of your religion. This is why the published study was entitled “Dreaming is Believing.” 

I intuitively seemed to have known this about dreaming humans when I once tried to get out of a situation where I did not want to travel with someone. I tried so many times to tell her that I wanted to travel by myself but she found so many reasons to justify imposing her company on me. On the day that we were supposed to travel, she told me that she dreamt of water on the train. Knowing that she breathes in more superstition than oxygen for her brain, I told her that dreaming about water on a train is definitely a bad omen. She confirmed that she also believed so and that she regretted to tell me that she could no longer go with me.

So far, this is what we know about dreams and how we interpret them — that it is the motion of the conscious and the unconscious self doing the hokey pokey, putting your self “in” to see your own dreams out. But am sure that is not what it is ALL about so we wait and dream some more.

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