There’s still so much we don’t know about dreams. What shapes them? What is their true purpose? Wanting to understand such questions, I headed to the Arizona desert for the 35th annual International Dream Conference in Phoenix, last month, only to find myself having lunch with a psychoanalyst scheduled to give a talk on using dreams to predict the future. I was lucky not to choke on my burrito.
The International Association for the Study of Dreams, which runs the conference, is “multidisciplinary”: it embraces both scientific and other modes of enquiry into dreaming. I was there to hear presentations from researchers such as Katja Valli, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Turku, Finland, who has proposed an evolutionary explanation for dreaming, and Mark Blagrove, a psychologist from the University of Swansea, UK, who is researching how waking events are incorporated into dreams. But I was also interested to learn what people outside the scientific fold are contributing to our understanding of dreams.
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Call me naive, but it was a shame to find an “us versus them” attitude among the non-scientists. “There are multiple ways of opening doors and sometimes hard science is the wrong key,” Fariba Bogzaran, of the California Institute of Integral Studies, told the meeting.
You could argue that parapsychology – the study of telepathy and so on – is harmless fun, a mystical hobby in the vein of astrology. But conference sessions explored the use of dreaming for diagnosing breast and prostate cancer. When pseudoscience veers into the health realm, it risks misleading people with serious diseases, and unnecessarily worrying those who do not have cancer but may have dreamed that they do.
“We want to believe. Many told me of dreams in which they had foreseen the future”
Attendees also spoke of their belief that dead people can be contacted through dreams. I worry it isn’t helpful to believe that the consciousness of a deceased loved one still exists somewhere. When I mentioned my concerns to some scientific researchers at the conference, they looked uncomfortable. Some of the talks are a bit out there, they said. But I should be sure to catch Stanley Krippner’s keynote.
This turned out to be a retrospective of experiments investigating extrasensory perception (ESP) in dreams. Krippner was involved in famous (and never replicated) experiments at the Dream Laboratory of the Maimonides Medical Centre in New York in the 1960s and 70s. These involved a person trying to send information about a photograph no one else has seen. At night, subjects try to dream up the image. Extrasensory perception, said Krippner, “sneaks in if there is rapport between the sender and the receiver”. After an hour of his talk, I literally had my head in my hands.
The next day at lunch, I poured all this out to psychologist Kelly Bulkeley. He invoked The X-Files: “We want to believe,” he said. Throughout the conference, many told me of dreams in which they had foreseen the future. No matter that with so many people dreaming each night, this is quite likely to happen by chance.
Maybe it was the desert heat, or perhaps I was sick of not joining in with the fun. In the end, I signed up to a dream telepathy contest. I was supposed to dream of a Christmas scene and I would have loved to have been able to test my scientific resolve – had I dreamed of the right image, would I be able to resist believing it was ESP? But it was not to be: I dreamed of a jazz club instead.
Perhaps the weirdest aspect of the conference was its juxtaposition of extremely fringe ideas with proper science. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School described his work demonstrating the incorporation of learning and the processing of emotions in dreams. He posed what he believes to be the big dilemma at the heart of dream science: does conscious thought – in wakefulness or dreams – affect brain activity, and if so, how?
His talk was an oasis amid so much mumbo jumbo. But psychotherapist Rubin Naiman was not impressed, because Stickgold had the temerity to assume that consciousness arises from the brain. But where else does it come from? “Exactly,” Naiman replied. “There are unknown planes and sources of conscious knowledge.”
Our fascination with dreams goes back millennia, with many ancient cultures believing they carried messages from spirits or spoke to us of the future. How sad that thousands of years later, we are still bogged down in such mysticism, when we could instead be probing what truly generates dreams, and what they tell us about consciousness and how our brains work.
This article appears in print under the headline “Nightmares from the fringe”
Read more: 5 ways to boost your dreams and improve your health;ĚýThe dreams you forget are the most important for learning;ĚýWe dream loads more than we thought – and forget most of it
