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PSYCHIATRY Doctor's Orders: Dream a Little Dream for Me Dream-programming Demonstrates Link to Learning A team of HMS scientists has 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? What is their link to the unconscious? Subjects in Robert Stickgold's study played the computer game Tetris, which required them to assemble falling puzzle pieces. 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, HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He and his colleagues elicited the carbon-copy images using the computer game Tetris. They trained 27 subjects—12 novices, 10 experts, and 5 amnesics—to play the game, which involves assembling geometric puzzle pieces, over the course of three days. On the first day, the subjects had a two-hour morning and one-hour evening session and, on each of the following two days, hour-long morning and evening sessions. The researchers then monitored the subjects' dreams as they were drifting to sleep on the first two evenings. Final Score Seventeen of the subjects—more than 60 percent—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 dreams and learning. 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. "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 This notion—that dreaming is prompted by a need to learn—is supported by other findings. The researchers found that novices who reported seeing falling Tetris pieces did not perform as well in their initial two-hour Tetris training session as those who did not see the images. "It's as if the more work you have to do, the more likely you are to get the imagery," said Stickgold. Those who needed to do the least work were the experts in the study, each of whom had previously logged at least 50—and some as many as 500—hours of Tetris playing, mostly on Nintendo sets. Half of them reported dreams of Tetris pieces falling before their eyes, but the last two experts reported an intriguing twist. Rather than seeing the Tetris pieces in black and white as they appeared in the experimental protocol, they saw them as they appeared in their earlier Nintendo Tetris-playing days—in color and accompanied by music. This substitution of old images for new ones strikes at the most distinctive quality of dreams—their often astounding creativity. In dreaming, the brain does not merely replay memories but transforms them by associating them with old images and memories. "It's actually hunting around and finding other relevant information to connect to, which is the integrative process—which over time, I would argue, is a critical function of sleep," said Stickgold. In this regard, the findings could help bolster one of Freud's main propositions, that dreams have meaning—that they represent the brain's attempt to make sense of what happens by associating new events with those in the past. "But the experts' dreams have got none of the trappings, none of the freight that goes along with the concept of a Freudian dream," he said. "These are not about wish fulfillment, things they're not willing to face up to in their waking lives. This isn't about their mothers, God forbid. They're about this stupid computer game. The brain is using those same algorithms that Freud probably correctly saw—which is, take recent events and look for associated memories, strongly associated in this case, and replay them." Dreaming What's Forgotten Perhaps the most surprising findings of all came from the amnesics in the study. Co-author David Roddenberry found that when the five amnesics—who had no short-term memory due to hippocampal damage—were exposed to the computer game protocol, three of them experienced the same dreams as normal subjects. "I was just stunned when David called me and said they're getting the same dreams," Stickgold said. Though amnesics were known to dream, their dreams were thought to have little to do with the day's events, since those events are not remembered. Stickgold had assumed that this would be especially true of the early, or "hypnagogic," stages of dreaming explored in their studies. Compared to later stages of dreaming, such as those occurring during deep sleep or REM sleep, hypnagogic dreams were thought to be more tightly linked to conscious, or episodic, memory. "We thought if there's one part of sleep that depends on episodic memories, which amnesics lack, it's sleep onset," he said. The fact that some of the amnesics saw the falling Tetris pieces points to the powerful role played by the unconscious in dreams. In fact, Stickgold believes that the amnesic's unconscious Tetris memories may have affected not only their dreams but their waking behavior. Unlike the normal subjects in their study—who improved in their Tetris playing over the course of the three days—the amnesics showed marginal improvement. Most had to be taught the game all over again each day. But Roddenberry, an undergraduate at Harvard University, observed that at the start of a session, one of the amnesics placed her fingers on the exact three keys used in playing Tetris. "She did not quite know what she was doing and yet she did know what she was doing," said Stickgold. "In a way, this is Freud's unconscious—things activated in our brain that are, in fact, memories that guide our behavior but are not conscious." "What we're really looking at here is the age-old mind–body problem: the mind–brain connection," said Stickgold. "We think of our mind as being ours. But there are real ways in which the brain has a set of rules of its own. We're getting an idea of what the brain uses as its rules for picking out cortical memory traces to reactivate and bring into our conscious mind, and we're trying to see across wake–sleep cycles how that process happens." —Misia Landau