You step from the jet door and land on a cloud of lime cotton candy. A sombrero-capped Albert Einstein, seated upon a throne of orange peels, debates you about Pacific versus Atlantic oysters, and then you climb through a porthole, alighting upon the red shag carpet of your childhood bedroom.
Crazy dream, you think, rubbing your eyes.
And then: What the heck was that all about?
For answers, you can turn to books, or surf the Internet, or call Lauri Loewenberg, a dream interpreter and syndicated columnist who starting Friday will interpret callers’ dreams on radio station KYGO 98.5 FM from 7 p.m. to midnight.
“People need to know what that strange dream last night is all about,” says Loewenberg, who lives in Nashville, Tenn. “That donkey in the kitchen may be giving them advice now about their deadbeat husband.”
Waking life is full of traffic struggles, slow walks in summer heat and television. And then there’s that big chunk of life spent on a bed, eyes closed, fleeing goblins or strolling through the mall naked or suddenly remembering, with a horrified gasp, that test you were supposed to take.
Mystery surrounds cognitive bridges between waking life and dreams. Commercial and academic connections, on the other hand, are clear.
In pop-culture dreamland, websites offer instant dream interpretation, participants at conferences dress up as characters in their dreams, and books examine how, for example, God communicates with people through dreams.
Leave pop culture’s lively – and sometimes flaky – dream world, and the terrain buttons up and slips on pumps or a tie. Here, people with Ph.D.s examine different aspects of dreaming, such as nightmares, sex, and even politics.
Something called “lucid dreaming” draws both camps, although it’s weighted more heavily on the pop-culture side. In lucid dreaming, people are aware of their dreaming while they’re doing the backstroke inside of a whale’s belly or flirting with Marilyn Monroe.
The two sides spar – “You’re dull!” shout the pop-culture hipsters, to which the eye-rolling scholars retort, “You’re dippy!” – but one thing they agree upon: the value of a dream journal.
“Just start paying more attention to your dreams,” says Deirdre Barrett, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School who researches dreams. “Keep a pad and paper beside the bed, and take notes about your dreams while you remember them.”
The woman who dreams repeatedly of exploding golf carts might figure out that she really has a problem with her spouse’s preoccupation with striking little white balls with graphite clubs.
The man who experiences nightly dreams of a pin-striped figure with a pig’s head might gain insight into his true feelings about his boss.
Journals, too, help the eggheads figure out what dreams are all about. Because dreams don’t have anything physical to measure – REM sleep no longer is the sole province of dreaming, says noted sleep physician James Pagel in Pueblo – many scholars depend in part on the reports of dreamers.
Are dreams irrational? Are they connected to our waking lives? Do they have a purpose?
These are the sorts of questions scholars have probed for centuries, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to scientists toiling in labs today.
And then there are the artists. Painters, actors, film directors, sculptors, writers – every creative field supports an inordinate number of people who dream wildly, and leverage these nighttime visions in their work.
Whether everybody dreams may be a subject for debate – Pagel says some of his patients have no memories of ever experiencing a dream.But one thing is sure: Some people pay a lot of attention to what’s happening in our heads after we curl up under the covers.
NIGHTMARES
Women suffer more nightmares than men, and nobody gets haunted by more wicked dreams than teenage girls, says James Pagel, a sleep researcher and Pueblo physician who runs several sleep laboratories and is a professor at the University of Colorado Medical School.
In fact, Pagel says, about 40 percent of teenage girls have nightmares at least twice a week. Among adults, about 5 percent say they are “having problems” with nightmares.
The classic nightmare, he says, places the dreamer in a situation “where there is no way out but awake.”
Pagel, whose wife works in the film industry, has also devoted a lot of research to the nightmares of film directors, actors and others.
“They have a huge number of nightmares,” he says. “We found that people who make their living with creativity, they have a very active dream life. These people use their dreams in almost everything they do.”
People without creative outlets, Pagel says, “had little dream recall, and rarely used their dreams.”
“It appears dreaming (including nightmares) may have a major function in the creative process,” he says.
While adult actors may embrace their nightmares, children wish they would go away. They get chased by monsters in their dreams. They wake up shrieking and crying.
They don’t have to put up with the fanged ghouls of slumber.
Pagel helps train kids to face their dreamtime monsters. He has kids draw the monsters in their dreams, and then decorate the pictures, “make them more pleasant, put flowers on them,” he says. The children hang the pictures beside their beds, and study them before going to sleep.
When the monsters appear in dreams, the memory of the silly creature inserts itself, and the nightmare is defused.
Says Pagel: “It works better than Prozac.”
POLITICS
Even in dreams, we’re red state-blue state, says Kelly Bulkeley, a dream researcher who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.
Since about 1992, he’s studied how self-described liberals and conservatives dream.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they go about it differently.
“There is a liberal personality type, or a conservative personality type, that plays out in dreaming, as well as waking,” says Bulkeley, who presented a paper summarizing his findings at the International Association for the Study of Dreams annual conference in California last month.
Conservatives sleep more soundly than liberals, and they have fewer dreams. In addition, the dreams of liberals are more “bizarre.”
What does this mean? It depends upon whom you ask.
The “blue state” interpretation, Bulkeley says, is that liberals “have a more sort of open-minded and imaginative approach to the world. Conservatives are less imaginative and open-minded, and their dreams are narrower, less varied and less intense.”
The red-state take?
“Conservatives are more anchored, more realistic in their approach to the world,” says Bulkeley. “Liberals could be seen as fanciful, their heads in the clouds, unrealistic, out of touch.”
“I’ve had people read the findings in these two different ways,” he says.
Bulkeley also found that before 2000 – during the reign of President Clinton – conservatives suffered from significantly more nightmares than liberals. Since the rise of President George W. Bush, however, the rate of nightmares among liberals has risen, while among conservatives the rate has dropped.
During his most recent study, conducted during the 2004 election, one liberal woman’s nightmare had her watching television news on election night, with the announcer declaring victory for Bush. He then pointed at the woman and said, “You’re at fault!”
Liberal women in general, he says, remember more of their dreams; have the poorest-quality sleeps; and report dreams about homosexuality at a higher rate than anybody else.
On the other end of the spectrum are conservative men: They have the toughest time remembering anything about their dreams; they enjoy the soundest sleeps; and dreams about homosexuality just don’t happen, they report.
All of this matters, Bulkeley says, because it helps buttress the idea that “dreaming reflects our engagement with the communal world.”
“A lot of researchers and people in the public think that’s still an open question,” he says. “Dreams are random, they are nonsense, they have no connection to anything. I don’t think so, and I think we have good evidence to support the contrary.”
LUCID DREAMING
What’s an oneironaut?
It’s you, if you are aware that you are dreaming while you sleep.
People who consciously engage in what is also known as “lucid dreaming” say they can control their dreams. Want to fly? If you’re in “lucid dreaming,” you can just set your mind to it and soar.
“I’ll go looking for my father and have an experience with him. I need to hug him or tell him that I miss him,” says Beverly Kedzierski Heart D’Urso, a Stanford University computer science Ph.D. who is one of the best-known lucid dreamers in the country.
Last month, D’Urso gave several talks about lucid dreaming at the dream convention in California. One of the more intriguing topics: The ethics of dream sex.
“You’re in a dream, you’re married, you find a friend of yours who also is married, and this person tries to seduce you. You know you wouldn’t go along with it in your waking state,” says D’Urso.
Would you go along with them in your dream?
That’s the scenario that participants will hash out during the conference.
D’Urso says she’s “done all sorts of things because I knew it was a dream, having sex with groups of people, all kinds of variety.”
She champions – for herself – lucid-dream sex, but others maintain that their dream and waking lives are inseparable, from a moral standpoint. If they won’t have sex with others in their waking lives, they say, they won’t do it in their lucid dreams.
There’s more to lucid dreaming than flying and sex.
Barrett at Harvard has studied dreaming in artists and scientists, and she has found they sometimes use their dreams to solve creative or scientific puzzles. For them and others, she says, lucid dreaming is a powerful tool.
One artist, she said, “would become lucid and then decide he would go to a gallery show of his own work.”
Two kinds of problems in particular are susceptible to resolution through lucid dreaming, she says.
One category is “anything that is solvable visually,” she says. “Not just art, but also engineers, people who are designing computer chips or optics for telescopes … Architects talk about walking through houses that were finished, where in waking life they are still trying to work out the details and design.”
Also, for people who remain stuck on a very unusual problem, lucid dreaming can help.
Most problems, she says, don’t need dreaming’s sometimes hallucinatory effects. But some problems require outside-the-box approaches, she says.
“People get very locked into the idea that there are just a few good conventional possibilities,” she says, “and dreams are good at throwing out other ways of dealing.”
Some people experience lucid dreams routinely – D’Urso estimated she’s had about 20,000 of them – but for most people, these alert-while-dreaming episodes are rare.
It’s possible, however, to “incubate” lucid dreams, says Barrett.
“As people are falling asleep, if they tell themselves they want to dream of a particular problem, even a simple verbal phrase,” that can help spark lucid dreaming at night, she says. “For an artist, it should be an image of a blank canvas, or the gallery they will be exhibiting in.”
“Right as you are falling asleep is a time when you are especially suggestive,” she says. “It’s a great time to give yourself semi-hypnotic suggestions.”
Much is written about lucid dreaming in the pop-culture slice of dreamworld, with the inevitable theme of using lucid dreaming to lose weight, boost energy, enhance sex, and so on. But relatively few scientists dedicate much time to lucid dreaming.
“There’s a lot of questions about lucid dreaming,” says Pagel.
Scientific attention or not, D’Urso says she’s been enjoying lucid dreaming since she was 7.
“Witches would chase me, they would fly over me and look menacing. I’d scream out, ‘Oh, spare me!”‘ says D’Urso of her adolescence. “When I was 7, I saw the witches and realized they only come in dreams. I looked at them and said, ‘OK, I’m only dreaming. What do you want?”‘
This confrontational approach that she learned in dreaming has informed her waking life today, she says. Lucid dreaming, she says, has taught her all about “lucid living.”
“If you have recurring scenes in your real life, they aren’t that different from recurring dreams in your sleep,” she says. “Maybe in your waking life you need to change your reactions. You need to have less fear.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
Interpreter: Some dreams come up again and again
She has been listening to people talk about their dreams for nearly 10 years, and she has heard lots of versions. Some, however, come up repeatedly, says dream interpreter Lauri Loewenberg:
“One of the most common dreams people worry about is, ‘I’ve been dreaming my husband is cheating on me, and he doesn’t care.’ I get that probably every single morning that I’m on the air, sometimes several times, on different stations. The reason this dream happens rarely points to an affair; it usually points to the spouse’s spending way too much time on something other than the spouse, too much time at work or too much time in front of the Xbox.”
“Another classic would be death. A lot of people dream of their own death or someone else dying. This freaks people out, they think they are seeing the future. But it isn’t about physical death, it’s about something in our lives coming to an end – the death of a relationship, a job, a behavior pattern.”
“Being chased, this one is really common. This is something people get night after night. When we’re being chased in our dreams, it’s a really good indication that there is something we are avoiding in waking life – a person, a responsibility. When we don’t deal with things and we let certain issues prolong themselves, our dreaming mind will say, ‘Look, you can’t run from these issues, you have to turn around and face it.’ When you do that, the dreams stop.”
– Douglas Brown
