Aug

7

All I Have To Do Is Dream.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 7, 2008 |

In a recent edition of Scientific American Mind, the article Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter makes what would seem to be an obvious statement:

It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised—an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep-deprived society.

 

The power and significance of dreams has been the realm of poets at least as far back as the epic of Gilgamesh, and with Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis it would seem that a scientific study of dreams should be pretty advanced by now. Researchers have known for a long time that sleep is necessary. Sleep deprivation can even be fatal. And schizophrenics often go long periods without sleep, acting as though they exist in a constant, waking dream. Actually, I’ve met schizophrenics, and they seemed like they were all living in a nightmare. And then there’s Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which children are indoctrinated by catchy phrases–like “A gramme is better than a damn”, telling them to pop a pill rather than get stressed–played under their pillows while they sleep. And yet real advances in understanding the power of sleep, and especially REM sleep (when dreams occur) are really very recent. As the article notes, a groundbreaking study occurred in 1994 when researchers found that

when volunteers got a night of sleep, they improved at a task that involved rapidly discriminating between objects they saw—but only when they had had normal amounts of REM sleep. When the subjects were deprived of REM sleep, the improvement disappeared.

While this research is certainly fascinating, it doesn’t even touch the larger issue of our society being sleep-deprived–and, admittedly, that isn’t the researchers’ job anyway. They’re offering their findings, but, for me anyway, the larger issue is, could this research lead to a societal change? I think our hectic lives and schedules–the very things which lead to us being sleep-deprived in the first place–are partly self-inflicted, but we’re also pushed in our work and social lives to do more and more. It’s crazy but there have been times when I’ve thought it would be wonderful to be an insomniac because I’ve thought I’d get more done. Yeah, I know, insomnia ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact the research has found that people improve in difficult tasks if they’re able to get more sleep. Your boss may not agree, but coming in to work a little later and leaving a little earlier, giving yourself time to sleep, may actually improve your work. Now researchers just need to start looking at the value of vacations.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Morgan on August 7, 2008 3:43 pm

    Awesome. Let’s hear it for sleep. I’m a terribly hyper person, both mentally and physically. But when it comes to sleeping I do it well. I think I may have been a cat in the past life, what with my preference for a cozy nook and soft pillows. And it’s a wonder I don’t wake up in knots, curling up as I do.
    If I don’t get my six to eight hours, I feel rather played out and exhausted the next morning. And somewhat cheated.
    The part of this post about schizophrenics living in a waking dream was quite interesting. I think dreams play an important function, too. I’m prone to prophetic dreams - nothing earthshaking - but often something will happen that I dreamed of before in exactly the same fashion. And some of my dreams are just bizarre, and great fun to interpret although they rarely make one wit of sense.

  2. Christopher Waldrop on August 7, 2008 4:07 pm

    I can’t say I’ve had prophetic dreams myself, but sometimes things that are happening around me get incorporated into my dreams. That’s what made me think schizophrenics were living in a kind of waking dream. It’s like parts of the world around them get incorporated and then reprocessed by their brains into something very bizarre, and often scary. Since they often don’t sleep without medication I’ve wondered if schizophrenia isn’t like an extreme form of sleepwalking.
    Oh yeah, and dreams are always fun to interpret–even the ones I’ve had during night terrors.

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