Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
The way that the average person relates to their own dream-life reminds me of how a typical teenager might think: "Nobody else in the whole history of the world knows what I'm going through! I'm all alone in my experiences!" Of course, the teenager will eventually grow-up or otherwise realize that their experiences are in fact normal, and everyone goes through similar ordeals (more or less). We all get our first crushes, and our first romances, and our first heart-breaks. Life is more similar than different between most people because we have roughly the same biology and live on the same planet. Our local cultures and our individual path will be unique to some extent, but basically we all go through trials while growing up.
But with dreaming, especially in most modern countries, we do not learn of others' dreams and we do not share our own (if we even remember them), so we do not develop an appreciation for how generic dreaming actually is. Good thing that some researchers have made careers out of investigating the picture-stories of the sleeping mind. Below is a series of summaries; I have taken what I feel to be pertinent Peer-Reviewed Scientific Journal Articles and simmered them down to their essentials. So you don't have to. Links are included when you can access the full articles directly from Google. Some articles cannot be fetched without either being a student, a teacher, or paying, so those articles are not linked-to. |
Cyclic Variations in EEG During Sleep and their Relation to Eye Movements, Body Motility, and Dreaming
Dement and Kleitman were pioneers in dream research. This 1957 article described how 33 participants, recorded through EEG for 126 nights, displayed regular patterns of brain activity while sleeping. Eye movement, body movement, and EEG were all cyclical. Stages of sleep could be distinguished, such as "Stage 1" wherein eye movement was absent and a person could be awakened with a relatively low sound. Body movement was more dramatic during earlier stages of sleep and then came to halt at regular intervals. Dreams were recalled when awakening from a rapid eye movement phase of sleep, but not during the earlier, shallow sleep stages.
Although this is common knowledge now, it surprises me that we did not have an earlier appreciation for these regular sleep stages. Previous work, such as Freud's interpretation of dreams was based on anecdote, and many people now suspect that Freud made-up or otherwise forced his data to make sense with his ideas. With Dement and Kleitman's work we began to understand that sleep and dreaming have certain regularities shared by most people. |
Lucid Dreaming Verified by Volitional Communication During REM Sleep
Although Keith Hearn had conducted similar experiments for his dissertation a few years earlier, Stephen LaBerge was the first to publish in a peer-reviewed journal on how eye-signaling could be used to communicate to the "outside" world while in a lucid dream. Not only did this verify the reality of lucid dreaming (equipment indicates the subject is dreaming and sleeping and yet they can consciously signal through pre-determined eye movements via EOG sensors), but this created a paradigm which includes the ability to signal from within the dream when various activities are begun, ended, or are otherwise occurring.
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Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming
In 2009, Voss, Holzmann, Tuin, and Hobson reported on the EEG activity as measured over the brain of 6 proficient lucid dreamers. Comparisons were made between waking, REM Sleep (non-lucid), and lucid REM Sleep.
One of the most telling results of this study is depicted in the image to the right. It is generally accepted that EEG readings of the gamma frequency, 40Hz and higher, indicate the type of coherence that we subjectively experience as consciousness. Gamma wave activity indicates there is a binding of information in the brain/mind concurrently with other regions which also have a lot of gamma activity. In the picture from Voss's article, we see the relative gamma activity in the brain of the participants while awake (top) and while they are lucid or in a regular dream (middle and bottom, respectively). Awake and alert, most of the brain is plugged-in. While in a regular REM period of sleep, there is little gamma coherence, shown here as a cooled-down blue. But here's the not-so surprising twist: When lucid, the dreamer's cortex is gamma-strong in the frontal lobes - the higher-thought regions - and still cool in the primary visual cortex (the first processing section of incoming images from the eyes). |
The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming
Most theories of "why do we dream" attempt to explain how dreaming may be involved in memory processing. Or why dreaming may be a random patchwork of day residue, or wish fulfillment, or the weaving-in of unpleasant life-events into our personal history. Dreaming has been portrayed as creative, fantastic. But of course, dreams are rarely best described by any of this.
The easiest dreams to remember are the scary ones. Even if we wouldn't necessarily refer to every dream as a nightmare, most tend to be negatively oriented, containing more failures and misfortunes than successful maneuvers and fortuitous events. The earliest recalled dreams are typically of falling or being chased. The most recent dreams recalled usually have to do with something going wrong, missing deadlines or rides, technology not working right. Even the most personally meaningful dreams in a person's life are frequently of a threatening nature. In 2000, Antii Revonsuo's article The Reinterpretation of Dreams synthesized findings from multiple disciplines into a compelling reason for why dreaming was selected for, in an evolutionary sense. A discussion of this article and the studies it spawned deserves a separate page... |