The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health
Autor Karen van Kampenen Limba Engleză Hardback – 26 mar 2026
Do you have common recurring dreams of missing an exam, even though it has been years since you were in college? Do certain people keep showing up in your dreams? How can you stop your dreaming brain from fixating on the same preoccupations and concerns? We spend every night of our lives dreaming, yet we remain unaware of the power and possibilities of accessing the inner sanctum of our minds.
In The Brain Never Sleeps, Karen van Kampen guides us on a journey through dreamland, sharing how we can reclaim this other realm of thought and experience to improve our well-being. Our dreams are as real to us as our waking experiences. They have the power to influence what we think, feel and do. With our dreaming brain operating in a different mode, disconnected from the demands and distractions of daily life, we brainstorm new ideas, face our fears and uncover insights into ourselves. Van Kampen, whose father opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in North America, acts as a unique and informed guide, combining first-person narrative with highly accessible science journalism.
Van Kampen investigates neuroscience and psychology to reveal the connection between our waking and dreaming lives while also exploring what happens when people get stuck in between—the mixed brain state of parasomnias including sleepwalking and night terrors. Through the fascinating stories of dream scientists, we learn how dreams boost learning, spark creativity and process emotions. Van Kampen conducts her own dream experiments with expert researchers as her guides. The Brain Never Sleeps propels us into the next frontier of dream engineering where we can guide our dreams with the hope of improving our well-being. Her toolkit at the end of the book offers simple ways to use dreams to improve our waking and dreaming lives.
The Brain Never Sleeps is a personal and enlightening journey that will change how we understand and value our nocturnal wanderings.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781668077979
ISBN-10: 1668077973
Pagini: 288
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Simon&Schuster
Colecția Simon & Schuster
ISBN-10: 1668077973
Pagini: 288
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Simon&Schuster
Colecția Simon & Schuster
Notă biografică
Karen van Kampen is an author and award-winning journalist who specializes in health and science. Her fascination with dreams began at the age of nine when she became her father’s first sleep lab “assistant,” helping him practice electrode hook-up and testing. She is the author of The Golden Cell: The Quest for the Next Great Medical Breakthrough, and her writing has appeared in many publications including The Globe and Mail, National Post, Calgary Herald, and Reader’s Digest. She enjoys teaching creative nonfiction writing at the University of Toronto.
Extras
Chapter One: The Freud EffectChapter One THE FREUD EFFECT
WHEN I LIVED IN LONDON some years ago, I used to pass a blackened bronze statue on my daily walk to Finchley Road, a busy, dismal, yet useful thoroughfare teeming with shops and amenities in northwest London. On overcast days, the statue was dull and mute. When it poured, rained, or drizzled, in typical London fashion, heavy raindrops accumulated on the tip of the figure’s nose, plopping into a puddle in his lap. On those magical sunny days when the ceiling of clouds was lifted from the city, revealing a big blue sky, the statue shone. But I was oblivious to all of this. I’d just had a baby, and I bumped my stroller along the cobblestone streets of my new neighbourhood, navigating my way through the dense and disorienting fog of sleeplessness.
One day my husband joined me on my trek to the shops. We took the shortcut to Waitrose, meandering along narrow backstreets, past the local wine store, pharmacy, and café. Rounding the corner toward Finchley Road, Dimitri stopped and looked up. Staring down at us was the statue of a balding, bearded man with raised, inquisitive eyebrows, clad in a distinguished three-piece suit. He sat with his hands perched on his hips, leaning forward toward the road, casting a watchful gaze on the passing crowd.
“Hey, it’s Freud,” said Dimitri.
Staring down at me was the father of psychoanalysis, the Austrian neurologist who popularized dream interpretation and the man forever known to proclaim that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of our repressed wishes. I stood there, wide-eyed, as if waking up to this new sight. With my line of vision raised from the stroller, I noticed a sign pointing to the Freud Museum around the next corner. For almost half a year, I’d been living only a few blocks away from the house where Freud had spent his last days.
How, you might wonder, could I have been so unaware? For starters, I was a new mother living thousands of miles away from family and friends. When Alexander was eight weeks old, Dimitri and I packed up our worldly belongings, which at the time consisted mostly of Ikea furniture and bright, loud baby toys, along with boxes of research for this book, which began many years ago. We moved from Toronto to north London’s Belsize Park, a leafy neighbourhood with a charming village vibe, teeming with buggies, dogs, and local shops along winding cobblestone streets. I soon found that I was living a cruel irony. My dad is a sleep doctor who opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada when I was a kid. Let’s just say that we talked about the importance of sleep. A lot. My newborn son decided that he didn’t like to sleep at night. And then there was the kicker: I was writing a book on dreams. I’m sure Freud would’ve had something to say about this.
The world around me was dreamlike, seeming both unknown and familiar. I’d visited London over the years, so there was a familiarity to the city. I had memories of long walks through Hyde Park, going treasure hunting among the stalls of Camden Market, and cheering on street performers doing magic tricks, acrobatics, and singing opera from the cobblestones of Covent Garden. Yet I was so sleep-deprived that I was seeing things through a different lens. I was operating in another mode, much like a dream, which shaped how I experienced the world around me. I remembered only snippets of a day’s worth of memories. No wonder I’d gone months without noticing Freud staring down at me.
But I didn’t need a statue to feel Freud’s presence. He was one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. He remains engrained in our culture and collective psyche. While Freud was not the first to study dreams, his work propelled dream research into the next century. To this day, the mere mention of his name can spark heated debate. Some would say that dream research is still weighed down by psychoanalytic baggage. And while some of Freud’s ideas are outdated and have been debunked by scientists, several of his theories laid the groundwork for research that continues to this day. It’s been more than 125 years since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and this great, controversial figure continues to be quoted by students, scientists, and avid dreamers. Even grade-schoolers know who Freud is. He laid down the royal road to the enigmatic unconscious mind. So I decided that I’d better pay a visit to Freud’s last home and refuge, the epicenter of dream analysis.
TWENTY MARESFIELD GARDENS IS a stately, red brick house with three floors of white framed windows, impeccably trimmed hedges, and a blossoming almond tree that Freud used to admire. The gloriously sunny spring day I was there many years ago, Bobby, the museum’s elderly guard dog, dozed underneath its canopy of white flowers, ignoring me as I walked along the stone path and through the front door. Inside, the foyer was spacious and elegant, with a spiral staircase and polished wooden floors. To my right I found a narrow doorway leading to a dark, still room that smelled of old books, having lost the scent of Freud’s beloved cigars.
This was Freud’s study where he wrote and saw patients between 1938 and 1939 during the last year of his life. In the late thirties, as the Nazis overtook Austria, Freud knew he was in grave danger. He was among the Jewish writers whose books were burned by the Germans. So he took refuge in London, living his final year in exile. Comparing his family’s living conditions in Vienna to London, Freud wrote in his diary that they went from “poverty to white bread.”1
His study was spacious and grand, about five times the size of my own writing space. It spanned the length of the house and had tall windows on either end, overlooking the front and back yards. Dark bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes reached the high ceiling. A four-step wooden ladder stood in front of the shelves, its edges rounded and worn from Freud’s dress shoes climbing in search of hard-to-reach books.
If the burgundy velvet drapes were open, I could have peered into the lush back garden where Freud liked to relax on a swinging lounge, shaded by its canopy. He would take his papers into the backyard and read with his feet up, pausing to chat with visitors. Near the back window, I found his famous analyst’s couch, draped in a once-colourful rug, its royal blue, plum, and cream patterns now faded and worn. I imagined his patients with their heads propped against two now-flattened pillows, giving detailed accounts of their dreams during therapy sessions. Freud would listen from his forest-green velvet tub chair at the head of the couch, out of his patients’ sight, encouraging them to let their minds wander.
In the late 1800s, Freud unveiled psychoanalysis, a psychotherapy technique that explores the conscious and unconscious mind in order to uncover and analyze people’s fantasies and fears. To unveil what was tearing at people’s psyches, Freud devised the method of free association, asking them to relay whatever was on their minds, regardless of how silly or inconsequential these thoughts may have seemed. Yet he found that there were limits to what the conscious mind revealed. Freud believed that dreams harbour our fundamental instincts, including sexuality, aggression, and self-love. Some of our instincts are too painful, embarrassing, or damning for our fragile conscious to bear, so they are held captive by our unconscious. Freud used dream interpretation to analyze and free our instincts and wishes, including those we repress.
While Freud studied the dreams of patients, colleagues, and friends, his regular subject was himself. He’d been fascinated by dreams since he was a boy, and had always been an avid dreamer, observing and recording his nightly fictions in a journal. With The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wanted to show how his dream interpretation methods could be used to unearth the layered meanings of dreams.
According to Freud, there are two types of dream content to analyze. There is the manifest content, which is what we recall when we wake up. This includes what Freud described as “day residue,” references or fragments of events from the previous day. The manifest content isn’t supposed to make sense on its own. Freud believed that the real meaning of a dream could be found in its latent content, the subterranean layer of a dream that lies beneath its surface. This includes our disguised wishes and instincts. Reflecting on our personal associations, experiences, and emotions, we can interpret the latent content of our dreams and discover hidden meanings.
Freud is famous for seeing the erotic in life’s seemingly ordinary objects. “The majority of dream-symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with erotic interest,” wrote Freud in a 1911 addition to On Dreams, a condensed version of The Interpretation of Dreams. “Sharp weapons, long and stiff objects, such as tree-trunks and sticks, stand for the male genitals; while cupboards, boxes, carriages or ovens may represent the uterus.” Yet Freud didn’t believe that all of our wishes are sexually charged. He felt that we are motivated by other instincts, including aggression and narcissism.
Freud devised the idea that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of a wish by analyzing one of his own dreams known as Irma’s Injection. In the dream, Freud was at a large gathering where he saw his patient Irma. They chatted about her health, and he announced rather bluntly that if she was still in pain, it was her fault. Irma told Freud that he had no idea of her physical suffering. He was startled by her pale and puffy complexion. On closer examination, he discovered that she had an infection, and realized it was from an injection that had been administered by one of Freud’s physician friends who used an unclean syringe.
Freud reflected on his dream. “I am refusing to be blamed for all the pain she still has,” he wrote. “If it is Irma’s own fault it cannot be mine. Is the intention of the dream to be sought for in this direction?”2 Freud wondered if he wished to be innocent of his patient’s ill health. This spiraled into Freud’s concerns over the health of his wife, his competency as a physician, and the memory of his daughter’s illness. The dream’s layers of meaning were like the thin, transparent skin of an onion that Freud peeled back to expose one hidden truth after another.
One night while living in London, I dreamt that I was sitting on the edge of my bed, unable to quiet my shaking hands as I called the police to report my husband missing. Dimitri had been gone for days and Alexander wouldn’t stop crying. I gathered our family and friends to search the city, but we couldn’t find him anywhere. When my son’s hungry cries woke me up, I looked over to find Dimitri, sleeping soundly beside me. He had worked late for several weeks, getting home long after I’d gone to bed. So it made sense that he went missing in my dream. I wasn’t afraid that he would actually disappear. I just wished that he could be around more.
About the same time, I dreamt of my teeth slowly falling out, one by one, and in this recurrent dream within a dream, my sleeping self woke up choking on bits of enamel. I’ve discovered that teeth dreams are common. One study found that 39 percent of subjects had dreamt of teeth while 16.2 percent of subjects had recurrent dreams about their teeth rotting, breaking, or falling out.3 Is there a psychological reason for my teeth dreams? I think it’s more likely because I grind my teeth when I’m stressed. In fact, a recent study found that teeth dreams are related to dental irritation.4 So if we’ve got tension in our jaw, we might incorporate this sensation into our dreams.
Where does our mind find the content for our dreams? According to Freud, there are two main sources: memories from our past, which include emotions and experiences from our childhood, as well as “day residue” of past events, particularly from the previous day. Shortly after getting engaged to Martha, Freud wrote to her about his dreams, which he described as unruly. Freud noticed that he dreamt of themes that he touched on briefly in his waking life before moving on. Scientists have since advanced the concept of day residue and shown that we carry waking preoccupations and concerns into our dreams, shining a spotlight on what’s important to us.
To mine our dreams for meaning, Freud believed that we must use mental tools like condensation and displacement. Condensation occurs when a variety of thoughts, emotions, or associations conjures one dream image or element. This creates many meanings from one image. Displacement happens when the emotions attached to a certain event or person are transferred, or displaced, to something completely unrelated that may be less threatening or a more acceptable target for those emotions—anger, for example. Let’s say someone had an argument with their partner that left them unsettled. Maybe in their dream, they cracked their knee against a large dresser and screamed at the piece of furniture, taking their anger out on the inanimate object.
STANDING IN THE SHADOWS of his dimly lit study, I imagined Freud pondering his dream theories at his desk, which was set back from the window so the sun wouldn’t shine directly onto his work. Freud was right-handed, and this positioning ensured the light would stream across his left shoulder. The desk looked small in the middle of the large room that reflected the atmosphere of his study in Vienna. Freud described his new house as spacious, comfortable, and light, despite its drafty sash windows that let in bone-chilling London air. But it wasn’t home until he was able to reclaim his precious antiquities collection. When he escaped the Nazis, Freud was forced to leave his treasured objects in Vienna. After many agonizing months, the Germans released his things. When they arrived at Maresfield Gardens, he wrote in his diary that he was finally “free of the Nazis.”5
Freud collected more than two thousand statues, busts, reliefs, and prints from Rome, Egypt, and Greece. He was fascinated by ancient civilizations and the things that people worshipped and feared, the spirits and gods that appeared in their dreams and occupied their waking thoughts. Just as he studied dreams that the conscious mind had repressed, he studied objects that people had found after they had been buried and lost for years. And with every new artifact, he dug up another mystery of humanity. Freud said to one of his patients that the psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer upon layer of a patient’s psyche to discover the most valuable treasures.
As I studied the crowded row of statuettes on his desk, I imagined the multitude of gazes staring back at him while he worked. It’s been said that Freud’s state of mind was reflected in the objects on his desk. A Guide to the Freud Museum describes them as his tools of thought and the kitchen utensils of his imagination. As I stared at his beloved antiquities collection, I imagined peering into Freud’s inner self. This is the thread that runs through his collection. The thread is Freud’s unconscious, which is revealed in three dimensions.6
The object that took centre stage was a bronze Roman statuette of Athena, which had been smuggled out of Vienna by his friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of French Emperor Napoleon. The goddess of wisdom and war had a breastplate adorned with Medusa’s head. Her arm was raised, ready to throw her spear, which was missing from her hand. Among the row of figures was the famous sphinx from fifth century BC. It was half-lion, half-woman, with an animal’s large paws and strong body coupled with pointy breasts and a soft, feminine face. It’s thought that the statue was the inspiration for Freud’s Oedipus Complex, his psychoanalytic theory based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly married his mother and killed his father.
Freud was grief stricken after his father died in 1896. Retreating inwards, he was hit by this “truth”: that we love and adore our parent of the opposite sex while hating our parent of the same sex. Freud said to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, “I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.”7 According to Freud, we must resolve this inner struggle that surfaces during childhood if we are to become well-adjusted adults.
Writing his iconic dream book was personally meaningful to Freud as he shared his dreams and intimate details of his personal life. Many scientists scoffed at his psychological theory of dreaming, dismissing his book that was written for the masses. Freud didn’t turn to psychoanalysis because he dismissed brain science. He was trained as a neurologist by some of the best brain scientists of the time, which is often missing from his story. There were things that the brain simply couldn’t explain. It’s hard to believe that one of the most influential and quoted books sold only 351 copies in its first six years of publication.8
Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, signaling the beginning of a new and exciting century of dream research. Yet there were many groundbreaking discoveries that foreshadowed some of Freud’s prominent dream theories. In the mid-1800s, several researchers conducted experiments, often using their own dreams as evidence. These trailblazers advanced dream research, questioning the possibilities and boundaries of the dreaming mind. While some of their discoveries led to dream theories that are still recognized today, these curious scientists and passionate dreamers are often overshadowed by Freud. Here are some of their stories.
IN 1861, ALFRED MAURY, a librarian, professor of history at Collège de France, and scholar of dreams, published Le Sommeil et les Rêves (Sleep and Dreams), which chronicled his own dreams and observations of the universal dreaming experience. For many years, Maury recorded his dreams in meticulous detail to try and unravel the mysteries of the dreaming mind and how it creates our nightly musings. To analyze his dreams when they were still fresh in his mind, Maury had someone wake him throughout the night. “Awoken with a start, the memory of the dream from which I have been torn away is still present in my mind, in its pristine freshness…. I consign these observations to a notebook, in the same way as a doctor keeps case notes.”9
Maury noted how our dreaming mind combines recent and distant memories to create a cohesive narrative. In one dream, he travelled up and down the streets of New York City with a friend. When he awoke, Maury had a clear picture of the city in his mind. In particular, he envisioned a square within New York. He had seen a print of New York in the window of a shop. So he returned to the shop to find the image of New York. Yet the panoramic view prevented him from identifying the square from his dream. Racking his brain, he remembered a drawing of a square in Mexico City. Later, Maury happened upon the image of the drawing in a book. Maury realized that he had combined the remembered image from Mexico City with his imaginings of New York, a place he had never visited.
Through years of self-observation, Maury determined that dreams are a combination of the recognizable and the bizarre. He believed that moments from our lifetime catalogues of thoughts, experiences, and knowledge find their way into our dreams, including lost memories that can resurface from our childhood. Yet at the same time, he identified the fantastical nature of dreams as we mix recognizable memories with imaginary scenarios, creating original combinations. He believed in the automatic workings of the dreaming mind to create unique associations among our waking experiences.
Maury’s famous “guillotine dream” illustrates how our mind combines real and imagined knowledge and experiences to create a cohesive story. It occurred one night when Maury was sick and his mother was taking care of him. In his dream, Maury was transported back to the Reign of Terror, a brutally violent period in France during the late 1700s in which thousands of people were executed by the guillotine. Maury dreamt that he was condemned to death and ushered onto the scaffold, where his head was placed under the guillotine blade. A large crowd of people watched the blade fall. Maury experienced the sensation of his head being severed from his body. He bolted awake to discover that the headboard had fallen and hit the back of his neck where a guillotine blade would have struck.10
Freud had his own analysis of Maury’s guillotine dream that he described in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud believed that Maury’s dream was neither random nor by coincidence. Maury was a boy haunted by the French Revolution, and his guillotine dream revealed clues about his psychological state.11 At the same time, it raised the question of how such a rich, detailed narrative could be dreamt in the time between Maury being hit by his headboard and being woken by the painful sensation. This led to a long-held belief that dreams are an almost instantaneous experience.
In the 1850s, Maury experimented with his own dreams to explore how external stimuli can shape our dream stories. While Maury slept, his assistant dripped water onto his forehead, tickled his nose and mouth with a feather, and placed a bottle of cologne under his nose. In one instance, the assistant hit tweezers against a pair of scissors, creating a soft ringing. That night, Maury dreamt of alarm bells ringing to indicate a revolution breaking out, which may have been connected to his memory of the 1848 Paris Revolution. When a hot iron was placed near Maury, he dreamt that people broke into his house and put his feet over the fire, demanding he tell them where he kept his money.12
At the time, a distinguished French scientist and professor from the Collège du France was conducting his own personal study of dreams. Growing up in Paris, Marie-Jean-Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys began recording his dreams at the age of thirteen. One day, he decided to take the memories of a vivid dream and create a sketch to accompany the description. “Soon I had a special album, where the representation of each scene and figure was accompanied by a clarification,” he wrote at the beginning of Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger: Observations Pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Guide Them: Practical Observations). The groundbreaking book, which was initially published anonymously, provides a self-analysis of Saint-Denys’s dream stories as well as the common experience of dreaming. Saint-Denys had a wealth of dream stories to analyze. Over five years and 1,946 nights, he created a dream diary with vivid descriptions and coloured illustrations. By creating this diary, he discovered that the act of contemplating and recording his dreams increased his dream recall.
In Les Rêves, Saint-Denys described the imprint of our waking lives on our dreams, including our experiences as well as our concerns. Dreams create visual narratives out of the “objects which occupy our thoughts.”13 Many of our dream images stem from long forgotten memories or reminiscences that are reshaped by our imagination. He used the example of a deceased person coming alive in a dream. Our catalogue of memories, remembered and forgotten, are what he called cliché-memories, with cliché being a photographic plate. Just as a photographer collects drawers of negatives of images that may become unrecognizable or possibly even forgotten over time, with so many other images being seen, we too may forget our lifetime collections of memories that “may be hidden in the unfathomable depths of the brain where the cliché-memories are infinitely storing every moment of our lives, and mostly without our knowledge.”14
Images of two ideas may appear in a dream at the same time, superimposing one image onto the other. Saint-Denys compared this to inserting two glass plates into a lantern. The images combine, either side by side or one on top of the other, and appear simultaneously as one image. If the two images are of people, this may result in a combined figure with two faces and four legs. One night, Saint-Denys dreamt of the grand sphinx on display at the gate of the Tuileries in Paris. The sphinx was from Sebastopol (Sevastopol), located on the southwest coast of the Crimea where an eleven-month siege took place to occupy the port during the Crimean War. The image of this sphinx evoked an image of Saint-Denys’s friend who died in the Crimean War. At the same time, Saint-Denys imagined other sphinxes from ruins in Egypt. This conjured an image of Saint-Denys visiting the Egyptian ruins with his friend who had passed away several years earlier.15 This superimposition of images is akin to Freud’s method of condensation in which an idea or object within a dream represents several concepts or associations.
According to Saint-Denys, another way dream images combine is by transferring the qualities of one object to another in a process he called abstraction. In Les Rêves, he described an emaciated horse and the strings of a horse-drawn carriage that showed up in one of his dreams. This carriage might have reminded Saint-Denys of a wagon belonging to a farmer he had seen earlier. The emaciated quality of the horse may be transferred to the farmer, creating a dream image of a weak, feeble farmer.16 Saint-Denys’s idea of abstraction is akin to Freud’s theory of displacement in which emotions or characteristics of one person are displaced and transferred into another.
Like Maury, Saint-Denys was curious if external stimuli could appear in our dreams. He conducted dream experiments to explore how sensory experiences can be connected to thoughts, and how memories of these thoughts can influence our dreams. Testing out the power of smell to create dream-worthy memories, Saint-Denys purchased a vial of perfume that was sold to him as one of the most lovely and pleasing scents. With the vial closed tight, he travelled to Vivarais, where he stayed for two weeks with the family of a friend. While he was there, Saint-Denys used the perfume constantly, even dousing his handkerchief in the fragrant scent “despite the objections and jokes which this research caused in my immediate environment.”17
Ready to be returned home, the vial was sealed tightly, and it remained untouched in a drawer for a couple of months. Then Saint-Denys gave the vial to a servant, asking him to shake a few drops onto his pillow one night without warning Saint-Denys when this would happen. For ten days, he didn’t dream of his trip to Vivarais in the southeast of France along the river Rhône. Then one night, he dreamt of a place that he’d once lived for a year. Images of mountains and large chestnut trees appeared in his dream. It was Aubenas in the Rhône Valley in Southern France. Saint-Denys awoke to find that his servant had sprinkled the perfume onto his pillow. He had inhaled the scent while he dreamt. Then Saint-Denys experimented with two scents on his pillow. The one that he used in Vivarais and another that he’d doused his handkerchief with when he worked in a painter’s studio. The experiment was repeated several times. It resulted in Saint-Denys dreaming of being in a mountain setting as he watched a painter recreate a beautiful scene on canvas.18
Saint-Denys’s most impressive feat in shaping his dreams was to control them from within, which is known as lucid dreaming. The first step in becoming lucid is to gain awareness of the dream state. Dreamers can then work on gaining control over their actions as well as the dreamscape through which they navigate. Saint-Denys called this an awareness of his “true situation.” He was a skilled lucid dreamer who shared detailed accounts of his exciting adventures in dreamland.
One night when he realized that he was dreaming, Saint-Denys found himself at the top of a building. He noticed an open window and the pavement far below. “I plunged myself into the deep, curious and anxious at the same time.”19 When Saint-Denys awoke, he recalled a later scene in which people gathered around a dead man in a square in front of a cathedral. The man had jumped from the church tower, and Saint-Denys had watched the dead man be carried away on a stretcher. “This is the technique by which my memory and imagination had bypassed the trap set by me,” he wrote in Les Rêves. “With this familiarity I was in a dream quite often capable to repeat throwing myself off a high building or jumping into an abyss or deep well.”20
In the late 1800s, a researcher at a women’s liberal arts college was conducting dream experiments that would lead to one of today’s most prominent concepts on dreaming. In 1890, Mary Whiton Calkins devised a novel dream experiment to explore the content of everyday dreams. For eight weeks, twenty-eight-year-old Calkins and her mentor, professor Edmund Sanford, recorded their dreams during the night. “For this purpose, paper, pencil, candle and matches were placed close at hand,” wrote Calkins in “Statistics of Dreams,” a research paper that recounted her experiment.
They collected dreams at different times, showing that sleep in the middle of the night is not in fact dreamless sleep. For the first few weeks, an alarm was used throughout the night. Yet it was soon discovered that waking to the shrill sound caused such excitement, it affected dream recall. Waiting until morning, though, ran the risk of forgetting the dream. One night, she woke to record her dream in the dark before she “sank off to sleep with the peaceful consciousness of a scientific duty well done.” In the morning, she discovered that “an unsharpened pencil had been used, and the experimenter was left with a blank sheet of paper and no remotest memory of the dream, so carefully recalled after dreaming.”21 Reflecting on the dreams that escape our memory, she concluded that we dream much more than we might think.
Analyzing the collection of 375 dreams, Calkins discovered a close connection between our dreams and our waking lives, with only 11 percent of dreams lacking a connection between these states of consciousness.22 Calkins’ discovery of the “congruity and continuity” between our waking and dreaming lives lay the groundwork for psychologist Calvin Hall’s Continuity Hypothesis, a 1970s model of dreaming that continues to be studied. Hall discovered that we don’t simply dream about things that have happened during the day. We express our thoughts, preoccupations, and concerns in our dreams. The more we dream about someone or something, the more intense our concern is likely to be.
At the time, Calkins wasn’t convinced of the importance of her findings. In her 1930 autobiography, which was published thirty years after Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, she characterized her conclusions on the dream-wake connection as “almost ludicrously opposed to the nowadays widely accepted Freudian conception of the dream; in fact, my study as a whole must be rather contemptuously set down by any good Freudian as superficially concerned with the mere ‘manifest content’ of the dream.”23
Calkins made several other astute observations about the characteristics of a dream. She noted that the dreams occurred in the present. Even when the dreamer recalled their childhood home, they remained their actual age. Calkins observed that our most vivid dreams happen later in the night, which we now know is a characteristic of early morning REM dreams. Emotions expressed in dreams depend on the dreamer. What might be uncomfortable for some people may be enjoyable or pleasant for others. Calkins identified complex mental processes during dreaming, including imagination and real thought. She identified the normal and mundane aspects of dreaming. Calkins considered “the very prosaic and ordinary nature of most of the dreams recorded” to be the key finding of the experiment.24
Outside the laboratory at Wellesley College, Calkins continued to push boundaries. She taught philosophy at Boston College while she conducted her dream experiment. In order to teach a new course in the philosophy of the mind, Calkins needed to learn about psychology. As a favour to Wellesley College as well as to Calkins’s father, a known Presbyterian minister, the president of Harvard University allowed Calkins to audit a psychology course. At the time, only men could attend Harvard.
Calkins was given a warm welcome by the men of the psychology department, including students and lab assistants. “I shall not let this opportunity pass by to record my gratitude for the friendly, comradely, and refreshingly matter-of-fact welcome,” recalled Calkins in her autobiography.25 During her time at Harvard, Calkins completed the requirements for a PhD in psychology. An unofficial defense for her dissertation was arranged by psychology faculty. Despite six professors recommending Calkins be awarded a doctorate, Harvard denied her a PhD because she was a woman. Yet Calkins felt “My debt, both academic and personal… must be acknowledged but can never be repaid.”26 A few years later, Radcliffe College, Harvard’s sister college, offered Calkins a PhD. She refused the degree. During her forty years at Wellesley College, Calkins had an impressive career in research and teaching. She wrote several books, more than one hundred papers, and in 1905 was the first woman to become president of the American Psychological Association.
These early researchers shared a fascination with dreams, which guided their investigation of this mysterious other realm of existence. Throughout history, scholars, passionate dreamers, even royalty and rulers of ancient civilizations have studied the complex and confounding facets of dreams, from a fundamental understanding of what a dream is to its meaning, function, and possible use. In 2070 BC, the Egyptian Pharaoh Merikare’s “dream book” described a dream as a looking glass into the future.27 The ancient Egyptian language was a combination of words and symbols. The word for “dream” was resut, which translates as “awakening,” and was paired with an open eye. Dreams were seen as a kind of purgatory between the living and the dead that could be visited by those on earth and those in the afterlife. Egyptians wrote “letters to the dead,” asking favours from deceased family members and friends, and placed these in their tombs. In one letter, a sick man pleaded with his wife to meet him in a dream and ease his agony.28
There were the message dreams from 2000 BC in ancient Mesopotamia when everyone from kings to commoners saw their nightly stories as sources of guidance. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first recorded story written on clay tablets, King Gilgamesh, a tyrannical ruler famous for exerting his power on the battlefield and over his people, dreamt of a falling star that pinned him to the earth, rendering him defenseless. In the second century AD in Rome, the dream interpreter Artemidorus concluded that dreams could be reflections of our waking fears and desires or predictors of the future.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle saw a dream as a visual “presentation” of objects from our waking lives that we continue to think about during sleep. These images conjure new thoughts and emotions in our dreams. In Ancient China, dreams were revered as precious insights into the human psyche. During the fourth century BC, astrology was used to unearth the meaning of dreams.
For centuries, dreams have been understood as spiritual teachings. The Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead envisions death as ethereal and dreamlike. If people can understand what it is to dream, their soul can rise above death as they pass away. The Bible describes dreams as celestial revelations. In Indigenous cultures around the world, dreams have always been sacred and of great value, sources of personal insight and a connection with our inner being.
Early dream researchers like Maury, Saint-Denys, and Calkins were confined to a psychological exploration of dreams. They relied on subjective reports that were filtered through the memory and perspective of the dreamer. With the advent of the EEG, the study of dreams took a radical turn. Dreaming could be examined as a physiological phenomenon. Then one night, an aspiring scientist from Brooklyn, New York, witnessed the sharp, staccato EEG lines of his son’s dreaming brain, unravelling one of the great mysteries of the night.
WHEN I LIVED IN LONDON some years ago, I used to pass a blackened bronze statue on my daily walk to Finchley Road, a busy, dismal, yet useful thoroughfare teeming with shops and amenities in northwest London. On overcast days, the statue was dull and mute. When it poured, rained, or drizzled, in typical London fashion, heavy raindrops accumulated on the tip of the figure’s nose, plopping into a puddle in his lap. On those magical sunny days when the ceiling of clouds was lifted from the city, revealing a big blue sky, the statue shone. But I was oblivious to all of this. I’d just had a baby, and I bumped my stroller along the cobblestone streets of my new neighbourhood, navigating my way through the dense and disorienting fog of sleeplessness.
One day my husband joined me on my trek to the shops. We took the shortcut to Waitrose, meandering along narrow backstreets, past the local wine store, pharmacy, and café. Rounding the corner toward Finchley Road, Dimitri stopped and looked up. Staring down at us was the statue of a balding, bearded man with raised, inquisitive eyebrows, clad in a distinguished three-piece suit. He sat with his hands perched on his hips, leaning forward toward the road, casting a watchful gaze on the passing crowd.
“Hey, it’s Freud,” said Dimitri.
Staring down at me was the father of psychoanalysis, the Austrian neurologist who popularized dream interpretation and the man forever known to proclaim that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of our repressed wishes. I stood there, wide-eyed, as if waking up to this new sight. With my line of vision raised from the stroller, I noticed a sign pointing to the Freud Museum around the next corner. For almost half a year, I’d been living only a few blocks away from the house where Freud had spent his last days.
How, you might wonder, could I have been so unaware? For starters, I was a new mother living thousands of miles away from family and friends. When Alexander was eight weeks old, Dimitri and I packed up our worldly belongings, which at the time consisted mostly of Ikea furniture and bright, loud baby toys, along with boxes of research for this book, which began many years ago. We moved from Toronto to north London’s Belsize Park, a leafy neighbourhood with a charming village vibe, teeming with buggies, dogs, and local shops along winding cobblestone streets. I soon found that I was living a cruel irony. My dad is a sleep doctor who opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada when I was a kid. Let’s just say that we talked about the importance of sleep. A lot. My newborn son decided that he didn’t like to sleep at night. And then there was the kicker: I was writing a book on dreams. I’m sure Freud would’ve had something to say about this.
The world around me was dreamlike, seeming both unknown and familiar. I’d visited London over the years, so there was a familiarity to the city. I had memories of long walks through Hyde Park, going treasure hunting among the stalls of Camden Market, and cheering on street performers doing magic tricks, acrobatics, and singing opera from the cobblestones of Covent Garden. Yet I was so sleep-deprived that I was seeing things through a different lens. I was operating in another mode, much like a dream, which shaped how I experienced the world around me. I remembered only snippets of a day’s worth of memories. No wonder I’d gone months without noticing Freud staring down at me.
But I didn’t need a statue to feel Freud’s presence. He was one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. He remains engrained in our culture and collective psyche. While Freud was not the first to study dreams, his work propelled dream research into the next century. To this day, the mere mention of his name can spark heated debate. Some would say that dream research is still weighed down by psychoanalytic baggage. And while some of Freud’s ideas are outdated and have been debunked by scientists, several of his theories laid the groundwork for research that continues to this day. It’s been more than 125 years since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and this great, controversial figure continues to be quoted by students, scientists, and avid dreamers. Even grade-schoolers know who Freud is. He laid down the royal road to the enigmatic unconscious mind. So I decided that I’d better pay a visit to Freud’s last home and refuge, the epicenter of dream analysis.
The House of Dreams
TWENTY MARESFIELD GARDENS IS a stately, red brick house with three floors of white framed windows, impeccably trimmed hedges, and a blossoming almond tree that Freud used to admire. The gloriously sunny spring day I was there many years ago, Bobby, the museum’s elderly guard dog, dozed underneath its canopy of white flowers, ignoring me as I walked along the stone path and through the front door. Inside, the foyer was spacious and elegant, with a spiral staircase and polished wooden floors. To my right I found a narrow doorway leading to a dark, still room that smelled of old books, having lost the scent of Freud’s beloved cigars.
This was Freud’s study where he wrote and saw patients between 1938 and 1939 during the last year of his life. In the late thirties, as the Nazis overtook Austria, Freud knew he was in grave danger. He was among the Jewish writers whose books were burned by the Germans. So he took refuge in London, living his final year in exile. Comparing his family’s living conditions in Vienna to London, Freud wrote in his diary that they went from “poverty to white bread.”1
His study was spacious and grand, about five times the size of my own writing space. It spanned the length of the house and had tall windows on either end, overlooking the front and back yards. Dark bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes reached the high ceiling. A four-step wooden ladder stood in front of the shelves, its edges rounded and worn from Freud’s dress shoes climbing in search of hard-to-reach books.
If the burgundy velvet drapes were open, I could have peered into the lush back garden where Freud liked to relax on a swinging lounge, shaded by its canopy. He would take his papers into the backyard and read with his feet up, pausing to chat with visitors. Near the back window, I found his famous analyst’s couch, draped in a once-colourful rug, its royal blue, plum, and cream patterns now faded and worn. I imagined his patients with their heads propped against two now-flattened pillows, giving detailed accounts of their dreams during therapy sessions. Freud would listen from his forest-green velvet tub chair at the head of the couch, out of his patients’ sight, encouraging them to let their minds wander.
In the late 1800s, Freud unveiled psychoanalysis, a psychotherapy technique that explores the conscious and unconscious mind in order to uncover and analyze people’s fantasies and fears. To unveil what was tearing at people’s psyches, Freud devised the method of free association, asking them to relay whatever was on their minds, regardless of how silly or inconsequential these thoughts may have seemed. Yet he found that there were limits to what the conscious mind revealed. Freud believed that dreams harbour our fundamental instincts, including sexuality, aggression, and self-love. Some of our instincts are too painful, embarrassing, or damning for our fragile conscious to bear, so they are held captive by our unconscious. Freud used dream interpretation to analyze and free our instincts and wishes, including those we repress.
While Freud studied the dreams of patients, colleagues, and friends, his regular subject was himself. He’d been fascinated by dreams since he was a boy, and had always been an avid dreamer, observing and recording his nightly fictions in a journal. With The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wanted to show how his dream interpretation methods could be used to unearth the layered meanings of dreams.
According to Freud, there are two types of dream content to analyze. There is the manifest content, which is what we recall when we wake up. This includes what Freud described as “day residue,” references or fragments of events from the previous day. The manifest content isn’t supposed to make sense on its own. Freud believed that the real meaning of a dream could be found in its latent content, the subterranean layer of a dream that lies beneath its surface. This includes our disguised wishes and instincts. Reflecting on our personal associations, experiences, and emotions, we can interpret the latent content of our dreams and discover hidden meanings.
Freud is famous for seeing the erotic in life’s seemingly ordinary objects. “The majority of dream-symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with erotic interest,” wrote Freud in a 1911 addition to On Dreams, a condensed version of The Interpretation of Dreams. “Sharp weapons, long and stiff objects, such as tree-trunks and sticks, stand for the male genitals; while cupboards, boxes, carriages or ovens may represent the uterus.” Yet Freud didn’t believe that all of our wishes are sexually charged. He felt that we are motivated by other instincts, including aggression and narcissism.
Freud devised the idea that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of a wish by analyzing one of his own dreams known as Irma’s Injection. In the dream, Freud was at a large gathering where he saw his patient Irma. They chatted about her health, and he announced rather bluntly that if she was still in pain, it was her fault. Irma told Freud that he had no idea of her physical suffering. He was startled by her pale and puffy complexion. On closer examination, he discovered that she had an infection, and realized it was from an injection that had been administered by one of Freud’s physician friends who used an unclean syringe.
Freud reflected on his dream. “I am refusing to be blamed for all the pain she still has,” he wrote. “If it is Irma’s own fault it cannot be mine. Is the intention of the dream to be sought for in this direction?”2 Freud wondered if he wished to be innocent of his patient’s ill health. This spiraled into Freud’s concerns over the health of his wife, his competency as a physician, and the memory of his daughter’s illness. The dream’s layers of meaning were like the thin, transparent skin of an onion that Freud peeled back to expose one hidden truth after another.
One night while living in London, I dreamt that I was sitting on the edge of my bed, unable to quiet my shaking hands as I called the police to report my husband missing. Dimitri had been gone for days and Alexander wouldn’t stop crying. I gathered our family and friends to search the city, but we couldn’t find him anywhere. When my son’s hungry cries woke me up, I looked over to find Dimitri, sleeping soundly beside me. He had worked late for several weeks, getting home long after I’d gone to bed. So it made sense that he went missing in my dream. I wasn’t afraid that he would actually disappear. I just wished that he could be around more.
About the same time, I dreamt of my teeth slowly falling out, one by one, and in this recurrent dream within a dream, my sleeping self woke up choking on bits of enamel. I’ve discovered that teeth dreams are common. One study found that 39 percent of subjects had dreamt of teeth while 16.2 percent of subjects had recurrent dreams about their teeth rotting, breaking, or falling out.3 Is there a psychological reason for my teeth dreams? I think it’s more likely because I grind my teeth when I’m stressed. In fact, a recent study found that teeth dreams are related to dental irritation.4 So if we’ve got tension in our jaw, we might incorporate this sensation into our dreams.
Where does our mind find the content for our dreams? According to Freud, there are two main sources: memories from our past, which include emotions and experiences from our childhood, as well as “day residue” of past events, particularly from the previous day. Shortly after getting engaged to Martha, Freud wrote to her about his dreams, which he described as unruly. Freud noticed that he dreamt of themes that he touched on briefly in his waking life before moving on. Scientists have since advanced the concept of day residue and shown that we carry waking preoccupations and concerns into our dreams, shining a spotlight on what’s important to us.
To mine our dreams for meaning, Freud believed that we must use mental tools like condensation and displacement. Condensation occurs when a variety of thoughts, emotions, or associations conjures one dream image or element. This creates many meanings from one image. Displacement happens when the emotions attached to a certain event or person are transferred, or displaced, to something completely unrelated that may be less threatening or a more acceptable target for those emotions—anger, for example. Let’s say someone had an argument with their partner that left them unsettled. Maybe in their dream, they cracked their knee against a large dresser and screamed at the piece of furniture, taking their anger out on the inanimate object.
Artifacts of the Night
STANDING IN THE SHADOWS of his dimly lit study, I imagined Freud pondering his dream theories at his desk, which was set back from the window so the sun wouldn’t shine directly onto his work. Freud was right-handed, and this positioning ensured the light would stream across his left shoulder. The desk looked small in the middle of the large room that reflected the atmosphere of his study in Vienna. Freud described his new house as spacious, comfortable, and light, despite its drafty sash windows that let in bone-chilling London air. But it wasn’t home until he was able to reclaim his precious antiquities collection. When he escaped the Nazis, Freud was forced to leave his treasured objects in Vienna. After many agonizing months, the Germans released his things. When they arrived at Maresfield Gardens, he wrote in his diary that he was finally “free of the Nazis.”5
Freud collected more than two thousand statues, busts, reliefs, and prints from Rome, Egypt, and Greece. He was fascinated by ancient civilizations and the things that people worshipped and feared, the spirits and gods that appeared in their dreams and occupied their waking thoughts. Just as he studied dreams that the conscious mind had repressed, he studied objects that people had found after they had been buried and lost for years. And with every new artifact, he dug up another mystery of humanity. Freud said to one of his patients that the psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer upon layer of a patient’s psyche to discover the most valuable treasures.
As I studied the crowded row of statuettes on his desk, I imagined the multitude of gazes staring back at him while he worked. It’s been said that Freud’s state of mind was reflected in the objects on his desk. A Guide to the Freud Museum describes them as his tools of thought and the kitchen utensils of his imagination. As I stared at his beloved antiquities collection, I imagined peering into Freud’s inner self. This is the thread that runs through his collection. The thread is Freud’s unconscious, which is revealed in three dimensions.6
The object that took centre stage was a bronze Roman statuette of Athena, which had been smuggled out of Vienna by his friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of French Emperor Napoleon. The goddess of wisdom and war had a breastplate adorned with Medusa’s head. Her arm was raised, ready to throw her spear, which was missing from her hand. Among the row of figures was the famous sphinx from fifth century BC. It was half-lion, half-woman, with an animal’s large paws and strong body coupled with pointy breasts and a soft, feminine face. It’s thought that the statue was the inspiration for Freud’s Oedipus Complex, his psychoanalytic theory based on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly married his mother and killed his father.
Freud was grief stricken after his father died in 1896. Retreating inwards, he was hit by this “truth”: that we love and adore our parent of the opposite sex while hating our parent of the same sex. Freud said to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, “I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.”7 According to Freud, we must resolve this inner struggle that surfaces during childhood if we are to become well-adjusted adults.
Writing his iconic dream book was personally meaningful to Freud as he shared his dreams and intimate details of his personal life. Many scientists scoffed at his psychological theory of dreaming, dismissing his book that was written for the masses. Freud didn’t turn to psychoanalysis because he dismissed brain science. He was trained as a neurologist by some of the best brain scientists of the time, which is often missing from his story. There were things that the brain simply couldn’t explain. It’s hard to believe that one of the most influential and quoted books sold only 351 copies in its first six years of publication.8
Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, signaling the beginning of a new and exciting century of dream research. Yet there were many groundbreaking discoveries that foreshadowed some of Freud’s prominent dream theories. In the mid-1800s, several researchers conducted experiments, often using their own dreams as evidence. These trailblazers advanced dream research, questioning the possibilities and boundaries of the dreaming mind. While some of their discoveries led to dream theories that are still recognized today, these curious scientists and passionate dreamers are often overshadowed by Freud. Here are some of their stories.
Field Notes from Dreamland
IN 1861, ALFRED MAURY, a librarian, professor of history at Collège de France, and scholar of dreams, published Le Sommeil et les Rêves (Sleep and Dreams), which chronicled his own dreams and observations of the universal dreaming experience. For many years, Maury recorded his dreams in meticulous detail to try and unravel the mysteries of the dreaming mind and how it creates our nightly musings. To analyze his dreams when they were still fresh in his mind, Maury had someone wake him throughout the night. “Awoken with a start, the memory of the dream from which I have been torn away is still present in my mind, in its pristine freshness…. I consign these observations to a notebook, in the same way as a doctor keeps case notes.”9
Maury noted how our dreaming mind combines recent and distant memories to create a cohesive narrative. In one dream, he travelled up and down the streets of New York City with a friend. When he awoke, Maury had a clear picture of the city in his mind. In particular, he envisioned a square within New York. He had seen a print of New York in the window of a shop. So he returned to the shop to find the image of New York. Yet the panoramic view prevented him from identifying the square from his dream. Racking his brain, he remembered a drawing of a square in Mexico City. Later, Maury happened upon the image of the drawing in a book. Maury realized that he had combined the remembered image from Mexico City with his imaginings of New York, a place he had never visited.
Through years of self-observation, Maury determined that dreams are a combination of the recognizable and the bizarre. He believed that moments from our lifetime catalogues of thoughts, experiences, and knowledge find their way into our dreams, including lost memories that can resurface from our childhood. Yet at the same time, he identified the fantastical nature of dreams as we mix recognizable memories with imaginary scenarios, creating original combinations. He believed in the automatic workings of the dreaming mind to create unique associations among our waking experiences.
Maury’s famous “guillotine dream” illustrates how our mind combines real and imagined knowledge and experiences to create a cohesive story. It occurred one night when Maury was sick and his mother was taking care of him. In his dream, Maury was transported back to the Reign of Terror, a brutally violent period in France during the late 1700s in which thousands of people were executed by the guillotine. Maury dreamt that he was condemned to death and ushered onto the scaffold, where his head was placed under the guillotine blade. A large crowd of people watched the blade fall. Maury experienced the sensation of his head being severed from his body. He bolted awake to discover that the headboard had fallen and hit the back of his neck where a guillotine blade would have struck.10
Freud had his own analysis of Maury’s guillotine dream that he described in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud believed that Maury’s dream was neither random nor by coincidence. Maury was a boy haunted by the French Revolution, and his guillotine dream revealed clues about his psychological state.11 At the same time, it raised the question of how such a rich, detailed narrative could be dreamt in the time between Maury being hit by his headboard and being woken by the painful sensation. This led to a long-held belief that dreams are an almost instantaneous experience.
In the 1850s, Maury experimented with his own dreams to explore how external stimuli can shape our dream stories. While Maury slept, his assistant dripped water onto his forehead, tickled his nose and mouth with a feather, and placed a bottle of cologne under his nose. In one instance, the assistant hit tweezers against a pair of scissors, creating a soft ringing. That night, Maury dreamt of alarm bells ringing to indicate a revolution breaking out, which may have been connected to his memory of the 1848 Paris Revolution. When a hot iron was placed near Maury, he dreamt that people broke into his house and put his feet over the fire, demanding he tell them where he kept his money.12
At the time, a distinguished French scientist and professor from the Collège du France was conducting his own personal study of dreams. Growing up in Paris, Marie-Jean-Léon d’Hervey de Saint-Denys began recording his dreams at the age of thirteen. One day, he decided to take the memories of a vivid dream and create a sketch to accompany the description. “Soon I had a special album, where the representation of each scene and figure was accompanied by a clarification,” he wrote at the beginning of Les Rêves et les Moyens de les Diriger: Observations Pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Guide Them: Practical Observations). The groundbreaking book, which was initially published anonymously, provides a self-analysis of Saint-Denys’s dream stories as well as the common experience of dreaming. Saint-Denys had a wealth of dream stories to analyze. Over five years and 1,946 nights, he created a dream diary with vivid descriptions and coloured illustrations. By creating this diary, he discovered that the act of contemplating and recording his dreams increased his dream recall.
In Les Rêves, Saint-Denys described the imprint of our waking lives on our dreams, including our experiences as well as our concerns. Dreams create visual narratives out of the “objects which occupy our thoughts.”13 Many of our dream images stem from long forgotten memories or reminiscences that are reshaped by our imagination. He used the example of a deceased person coming alive in a dream. Our catalogue of memories, remembered and forgotten, are what he called cliché-memories, with cliché being a photographic plate. Just as a photographer collects drawers of negatives of images that may become unrecognizable or possibly even forgotten over time, with so many other images being seen, we too may forget our lifetime collections of memories that “may be hidden in the unfathomable depths of the brain where the cliché-memories are infinitely storing every moment of our lives, and mostly without our knowledge.”14
Images of two ideas may appear in a dream at the same time, superimposing one image onto the other. Saint-Denys compared this to inserting two glass plates into a lantern. The images combine, either side by side or one on top of the other, and appear simultaneously as one image. If the two images are of people, this may result in a combined figure with two faces and four legs. One night, Saint-Denys dreamt of the grand sphinx on display at the gate of the Tuileries in Paris. The sphinx was from Sebastopol (Sevastopol), located on the southwest coast of the Crimea where an eleven-month siege took place to occupy the port during the Crimean War. The image of this sphinx evoked an image of Saint-Denys’s friend who died in the Crimean War. At the same time, Saint-Denys imagined other sphinxes from ruins in Egypt. This conjured an image of Saint-Denys visiting the Egyptian ruins with his friend who had passed away several years earlier.15 This superimposition of images is akin to Freud’s method of condensation in which an idea or object within a dream represents several concepts or associations.
According to Saint-Denys, another way dream images combine is by transferring the qualities of one object to another in a process he called abstraction. In Les Rêves, he described an emaciated horse and the strings of a horse-drawn carriage that showed up in one of his dreams. This carriage might have reminded Saint-Denys of a wagon belonging to a farmer he had seen earlier. The emaciated quality of the horse may be transferred to the farmer, creating a dream image of a weak, feeble farmer.16 Saint-Denys’s idea of abstraction is akin to Freud’s theory of displacement in which emotions or characteristics of one person are displaced and transferred into another.
Like Maury, Saint-Denys was curious if external stimuli could appear in our dreams. He conducted dream experiments to explore how sensory experiences can be connected to thoughts, and how memories of these thoughts can influence our dreams. Testing out the power of smell to create dream-worthy memories, Saint-Denys purchased a vial of perfume that was sold to him as one of the most lovely and pleasing scents. With the vial closed tight, he travelled to Vivarais, where he stayed for two weeks with the family of a friend. While he was there, Saint-Denys used the perfume constantly, even dousing his handkerchief in the fragrant scent “despite the objections and jokes which this research caused in my immediate environment.”17
Ready to be returned home, the vial was sealed tightly, and it remained untouched in a drawer for a couple of months. Then Saint-Denys gave the vial to a servant, asking him to shake a few drops onto his pillow one night without warning Saint-Denys when this would happen. For ten days, he didn’t dream of his trip to Vivarais in the southeast of France along the river Rhône. Then one night, he dreamt of a place that he’d once lived for a year. Images of mountains and large chestnut trees appeared in his dream. It was Aubenas in the Rhône Valley in Southern France. Saint-Denys awoke to find that his servant had sprinkled the perfume onto his pillow. He had inhaled the scent while he dreamt. Then Saint-Denys experimented with two scents on his pillow. The one that he used in Vivarais and another that he’d doused his handkerchief with when he worked in a painter’s studio. The experiment was repeated several times. It resulted in Saint-Denys dreaming of being in a mountain setting as he watched a painter recreate a beautiful scene on canvas.18
Saint-Denys’s most impressive feat in shaping his dreams was to control them from within, which is known as lucid dreaming. The first step in becoming lucid is to gain awareness of the dream state. Dreamers can then work on gaining control over their actions as well as the dreamscape through which they navigate. Saint-Denys called this an awareness of his “true situation.” He was a skilled lucid dreamer who shared detailed accounts of his exciting adventures in dreamland.
One night when he realized that he was dreaming, Saint-Denys found himself at the top of a building. He noticed an open window and the pavement far below. “I plunged myself into the deep, curious and anxious at the same time.”19 When Saint-Denys awoke, he recalled a later scene in which people gathered around a dead man in a square in front of a cathedral. The man had jumped from the church tower, and Saint-Denys had watched the dead man be carried away on a stretcher. “This is the technique by which my memory and imagination had bypassed the trap set by me,” he wrote in Les Rêves. “With this familiarity I was in a dream quite often capable to repeat throwing myself off a high building or jumping into an abyss or deep well.”20
In the late 1800s, a researcher at a women’s liberal arts college was conducting dream experiments that would lead to one of today’s most prominent concepts on dreaming. In 1890, Mary Whiton Calkins devised a novel dream experiment to explore the content of everyday dreams. For eight weeks, twenty-eight-year-old Calkins and her mentor, professor Edmund Sanford, recorded their dreams during the night. “For this purpose, paper, pencil, candle and matches were placed close at hand,” wrote Calkins in “Statistics of Dreams,” a research paper that recounted her experiment.
They collected dreams at different times, showing that sleep in the middle of the night is not in fact dreamless sleep. For the first few weeks, an alarm was used throughout the night. Yet it was soon discovered that waking to the shrill sound caused such excitement, it affected dream recall. Waiting until morning, though, ran the risk of forgetting the dream. One night, she woke to record her dream in the dark before she “sank off to sleep with the peaceful consciousness of a scientific duty well done.” In the morning, she discovered that “an unsharpened pencil had been used, and the experimenter was left with a blank sheet of paper and no remotest memory of the dream, so carefully recalled after dreaming.”21 Reflecting on the dreams that escape our memory, she concluded that we dream much more than we might think.
Analyzing the collection of 375 dreams, Calkins discovered a close connection between our dreams and our waking lives, with only 11 percent of dreams lacking a connection between these states of consciousness.22 Calkins’ discovery of the “congruity and continuity” between our waking and dreaming lives lay the groundwork for psychologist Calvin Hall’s Continuity Hypothesis, a 1970s model of dreaming that continues to be studied. Hall discovered that we don’t simply dream about things that have happened during the day. We express our thoughts, preoccupations, and concerns in our dreams. The more we dream about someone or something, the more intense our concern is likely to be.
At the time, Calkins wasn’t convinced of the importance of her findings. In her 1930 autobiography, which was published thirty years after Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, she characterized her conclusions on the dream-wake connection as “almost ludicrously opposed to the nowadays widely accepted Freudian conception of the dream; in fact, my study as a whole must be rather contemptuously set down by any good Freudian as superficially concerned with the mere ‘manifest content’ of the dream.”23
Calkins made several other astute observations about the characteristics of a dream. She noted that the dreams occurred in the present. Even when the dreamer recalled their childhood home, they remained their actual age. Calkins observed that our most vivid dreams happen later in the night, which we now know is a characteristic of early morning REM dreams. Emotions expressed in dreams depend on the dreamer. What might be uncomfortable for some people may be enjoyable or pleasant for others. Calkins identified complex mental processes during dreaming, including imagination and real thought. She identified the normal and mundane aspects of dreaming. Calkins considered “the very prosaic and ordinary nature of most of the dreams recorded” to be the key finding of the experiment.24
Outside the laboratory at Wellesley College, Calkins continued to push boundaries. She taught philosophy at Boston College while she conducted her dream experiment. In order to teach a new course in the philosophy of the mind, Calkins needed to learn about psychology. As a favour to Wellesley College as well as to Calkins’s father, a known Presbyterian minister, the president of Harvard University allowed Calkins to audit a psychology course. At the time, only men could attend Harvard.
Calkins was given a warm welcome by the men of the psychology department, including students and lab assistants. “I shall not let this opportunity pass by to record my gratitude for the friendly, comradely, and refreshingly matter-of-fact welcome,” recalled Calkins in her autobiography.25 During her time at Harvard, Calkins completed the requirements for a PhD in psychology. An unofficial defense for her dissertation was arranged by psychology faculty. Despite six professors recommending Calkins be awarded a doctorate, Harvard denied her a PhD because she was a woman. Yet Calkins felt “My debt, both academic and personal… must be acknowledged but can never be repaid.”26 A few years later, Radcliffe College, Harvard’s sister college, offered Calkins a PhD. She refused the degree. During her forty years at Wellesley College, Calkins had an impressive career in research and teaching. She wrote several books, more than one hundred papers, and in 1905 was the first woman to become president of the American Psychological Association.
These early researchers shared a fascination with dreams, which guided their investigation of this mysterious other realm of existence. Throughout history, scholars, passionate dreamers, even royalty and rulers of ancient civilizations have studied the complex and confounding facets of dreams, from a fundamental understanding of what a dream is to its meaning, function, and possible use. In 2070 BC, the Egyptian Pharaoh Merikare’s “dream book” described a dream as a looking glass into the future.27 The ancient Egyptian language was a combination of words and symbols. The word for “dream” was resut, which translates as “awakening,” and was paired with an open eye. Dreams were seen as a kind of purgatory between the living and the dead that could be visited by those on earth and those in the afterlife. Egyptians wrote “letters to the dead,” asking favours from deceased family members and friends, and placed these in their tombs. In one letter, a sick man pleaded with his wife to meet him in a dream and ease his agony.28
There were the message dreams from 2000 BC in ancient Mesopotamia when everyone from kings to commoners saw their nightly stories as sources of guidance. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first recorded story written on clay tablets, King Gilgamesh, a tyrannical ruler famous for exerting his power on the battlefield and over his people, dreamt of a falling star that pinned him to the earth, rendering him defenseless. In the second century AD in Rome, the dream interpreter Artemidorus concluded that dreams could be reflections of our waking fears and desires or predictors of the future.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle saw a dream as a visual “presentation” of objects from our waking lives that we continue to think about during sleep. These images conjure new thoughts and emotions in our dreams. In Ancient China, dreams were revered as precious insights into the human psyche. During the fourth century BC, astrology was used to unearth the meaning of dreams.
For centuries, dreams have been understood as spiritual teachings. The Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead envisions death as ethereal and dreamlike. If people can understand what it is to dream, their soul can rise above death as they pass away. The Bible describes dreams as celestial revelations. In Indigenous cultures around the world, dreams have always been sacred and of great value, sources of personal insight and a connection with our inner being.
Early dream researchers like Maury, Saint-Denys, and Calkins were confined to a psychological exploration of dreams. They relied on subjective reports that were filtered through the memory and perspective of the dreamer. With the advent of the EEG, the study of dreams took a radical turn. Dreaming could be examined as a physiological phenomenon. Then one night, an aspiring scientist from Brooklyn, New York, witnessed the sharp, staccato EEG lines of his son’s dreaming brain, unravelling one of the great mysteries of the night.
Recenzii
“In this delightful and well-researched book, Karen van Kampen brings a child's sense of wonder and a journalist's keen eye to the modern study of dreams. With a flair for storytelling and an instinct for telling detail, she leads readers from the basics of sleep science and dream interpretation to the spiritual mysteries of ‘big dreams’ and the ethically fraught frontiers of dream-enhancing technologies. You couldn't ask for a better state-of-the-art review of the most important and intriguing findings of current dream research.”
— KELLY BULKELEY, PhD and author of Big Dreams
“If you’ve always puzzled over your dreams (and who hasn’t?) then read this book. From Freud and Jung (and even before) to the latest insights gathered from the sleep lab, you will definitely get a new perspective on those wild dead-of-night adventures. They seem to make little sense; if you agree, and that leads you to believe your dreams are meaningless, this book might just change your mind.”
— JAY INGRAM, author of The Science of Pets and The Future of Us
“The Brain Never Sleeps invites you into the mysterious world of dreams — where science meets imagination and the mind opens a window into its inner life. Drawing on vivid stories and the latest research, van Kampen reveals how our nightly visions help us process emotions, strengthen memory, and spark creativity. A must-read for anyone fascinated by the art and science of dreams.”
— ANTONIO ZADRA, co-author of When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of our Dreaming Minds
“Most of us make no special effort to remember our dreams, much less understand what they mean. But to others, dreams can be a potent source of reflection and inspiration. Science writer Karen van Kampen’s thorough exploration of dreams, their origins, and their functional significance, will help curious readers make more of the visions, emotions, and questions brought up by their own sleepy experiences.”
— DAN RISKIN, PhD, Science Journalist and TV Host, and author of Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You
“A beautifully written and clear description of all aspects of research into dreaming. From the brain, to dream content, types of dreams, dream analysis, disorders of sleep and dreaming, and the technology now being used to alter our dreams. Theories of why we dream, debates, experiments, and the history of dream research are explained well, and with captivating and enlightening interviews with the major dream researchers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
— MARK BLAGROVE, PhD, co-author of The Science and Art of Dreaming
— KELLY BULKELEY, PhD and author of Big Dreams
“If you’ve always puzzled over your dreams (and who hasn’t?) then read this book. From Freud and Jung (and even before) to the latest insights gathered from the sleep lab, you will definitely get a new perspective on those wild dead-of-night adventures. They seem to make little sense; if you agree, and that leads you to believe your dreams are meaningless, this book might just change your mind.”
— JAY INGRAM, author of The Science of Pets and The Future of Us
“The Brain Never Sleeps invites you into the mysterious world of dreams — where science meets imagination and the mind opens a window into its inner life. Drawing on vivid stories and the latest research, van Kampen reveals how our nightly visions help us process emotions, strengthen memory, and spark creativity. A must-read for anyone fascinated by the art and science of dreams.”
— ANTONIO ZADRA, co-author of When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of our Dreaming Minds
“Most of us make no special effort to remember our dreams, much less understand what they mean. But to others, dreams can be a potent source of reflection and inspiration. Science writer Karen van Kampen’s thorough exploration of dreams, their origins, and their functional significance, will help curious readers make more of the visions, emotions, and questions brought up by their own sleepy experiences.”
— DAN RISKIN, PhD, Science Journalist and TV Host, and author of Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You
“A beautifully written and clear description of all aspects of research into dreaming. From the brain, to dream content, types of dreams, dream analysis, disorders of sleep and dreaming, and the technology now being used to alter our dreams. Theories of why we dream, debates, experiments, and the history of dream research are explained well, and with captivating and enlightening interviews with the major dream researchers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
— MARK BLAGROVE, PhD, co-author of The Science and Art of Dreaming