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Key points
- We may spend as much as a third of our lives dreaming.
- Erotic dreams are not necessarily evidence of a wish to be unfaithful or of repressed desire.
- Advertisers have found ways to infiltrate the dreams of consumers.
Review of This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, by Rahul Jandial (Penguin Life).
Researchers have found that dreaming occurs at all stages of sleep, not just REM sleep. Therefore, according to Rahul Jandial, we may spend as much as a third of our lives dreaming.
In This Is Why You Dream, Jandial (a brain surgeon, neuroscientist, and author of Life on a Knife’s Edge, among other books) draws on cutting-edge research to provide an extraordinarily engaging and informative analysis of a mysterious phenomenon.
Dreaming, Jandial points out, occurs when the body is locked down and our executive network, which is responsible for logic, order, and reality testing, is switched off. With disbelief suspended, our imaginary network “spins memories, characters, knowledge, and emotion into coherent narratives,” dramatically different from anything the “waking brain” can produce.
Dreams, Jandial claims, are “often implausible and at other times profoundly moving” thought experiments. A human version of “stochastic resonance”—the injection of random noise to data to train computers to “think” outside the box—dreams are a stronger form of mind wandering, which take up almost half of our waking life, stimulate flexibility, creativity, and insights about ourselves and others.
The ability to dream, Jandial reveals, develops during childhood. At about age five, as they develop visual-spatial skills and a sense of themselves as unique and independent individuals, children appear as characters in their dreams. Their nightmares, which diminish at about age 10, feature monsters who threaten their newly acquired sense of self.
Nightmares and Erotic Dreams
For adolescents and adults, occasional nightmares are normal and harmless. Changes in frequency and intensity, especially if they involve replays of traumatic events, however, are cause for concern. Techniques using daytime plots, mental pictures, and rehearsals to rewrite nightmares, Jandial indicates, have disarmed them. And researchers have recently identified a molecule called neurotensin, which determines whether a memory is imprinted in the amygdala as negative or positive, a discovery that may lead to more effective treatment of people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Like nightmares, erotic dreams are part of human nature. Men and women almost always cheat on their sexual partners in nightmares and are more inclined to bisexuality than in their waking lives. Stimulating the same intense physical pleasure as actual sex (because the brain sees no difference between them), as well as powerful emotions, including jealousy, joy, love, and sadness, these “explorations” are not necessarily evidence of a wish to be unfaithful or of repressed desire.
The Sleep-Entry Moment and Lucid Dreaming
Jandial cites studies demonstrating that “sleep entry,” the moment separating sleeping from waking, with its unique relationship between the executive network and the imaginary network, can be “a cocktail for creativity” and problem-solving, especially when a “targeted dream incubation device” gives sound cues at the optimal moment.
Jandial also devotes two chapters to “lucid dreaming,” an experience, once deemed impossible, of dreaming while knowing you are in a dream, and even controlling the action within the dream. In 1975, Jandial reveals, a volunteer in a sleep lab moved his eyes back and forth, left-right, left-right, when he became aware that he was dreaming, as he had been instructed to do. Peer-reviewed and then replicated, the experiment became the gold standard for lucid dream research. Combined with targeted incubation, lucid dreaming, during which individuals have even responded to yes-no questions and solved simple math problems, also has potential as a therapeutic tool.
Dream Infiltration by Advertisers
But there is a downside. Advertisers have already found ways to infiltrate the dreams of consumers. A few years ago, for example, a beer company invited people to participate in “potentially the largest sleep experiment ever” and share their results; 1.4 billion impressions were posted, and the company reported an 8 percent increase in sales. In a survey conducted by the American Marketing Association in 2021, 77 percent of 400 companies indicated they intended to deploy dream advertising within the next four years.
Advertisers, Jandial adds, may soon use smartphones, which have invaded our bedrooms, to offer shopping cues to dreamers. And, he asks, what’s to prevent governments “from engaging the sleeping minds of their subjects with propaganda?”
Little wonder, then, that scientists, ethicists, and public officials are discussing “neural rights” in international organizations like UNESCO. Chile has become the first country to heed the advice of Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscientist—“This is not science fiction. Let’s act before it’s too late”—by protecting brain activity and information in its constitution.
We are only beginning to understand the contributions sleeping brains can make to human health and happiness, Jandial concludes, and we must do whatever is necessary to “protect the sanctity of our dreams.”
