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Psychiatry
Doctor's Orders: Dream a Little Dream for Me
A team of HMS scientists have achieved what researchers since Freud's day thought nearly impossible: a way to control—at least in part—the content of a person's dreams. They are using their dream-provoking method to explore age-old questions such as: Where do dreams come from? What do they mean? What is their role in memory, learning, and creativity?
"I look at sleep in order to understand the waking mind," says Robert Stickgold. "You have to look at other states of consciousness to understand the one that we take for granted." —Graham Ramsay
For years, scientists have been stymied in their quest to understand these associations because dreams are unique events that cannot be replicated. Robert Stickgold and his colleagues report in the Oct. 13, Science that they were able to get 17 different people to see the same dream images as they drifted off to sleep.
"Here we have a case where with high reliability we can get people to have predictable dreams," said Stickgold, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.
He and his colleagues elicited the carbon-copy images by training 27 subjects—12 novices, 10 experts and 5 amnesics—to play the computer game Tetris over the course of three days. The game involves assembling geometric puzzle pieces. The researchers then monitored the subjects' dreams as they were drifting to sleep on the first two evenings.
Seventeen of the subjects—more than 60 percent of the total—reported dreaming at least once in the hour after they fell asleep. All reported the exact same dream images—falling Tetris pieces. Intriguingly, the majority of dream reports occurred on the second rather than the first night of training.
This lag between initial training and most intensive dreaming is interesting for the light it may shed on the link between learning and dreams. It appears that the need to learn may actually prod the brain to dream. "It's as if the brain needs more time or more play before it decides, 'Okay, this is something that I need to deal with at sleep onset,'" Stickgold said.
