Intolerable Dreaming

What do you do if your dreams become intolerable? I don’t mean those dear desires and aspirations of waking life; I mean night dreams that you cannot escape, that seem to go on and on as your frustration (to take but one of my dominant dream emotions) mounts to extremes that seem demonic?

I spend a long time in bed, at least 10 hours, sometimes more. I can’t tell you why, but one factor is my evening consumption of Chardonnay, another is my frequent waking and difficulty getting back to sleep, but…another is my dreaming, which leaves me feeling wrung-out emotionally when the sun glints under the blinds.

I pondered my most recent dream. I could recall the “plot,” much of the setting, the emotions, the conflicts…my predominant psychological experience is that my dreams are long, hours long—although, since most dreams occur during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which lasts two hours, and there usually are five dreams, my psychological experience seems at odds with reality.

However that may be, as I contemplated telling you my most recent, endless, and intolerable dream, I realized I could not do it at less than novella length. Still, that may not matter so much. What is important are those features I experience as wearing. The bizarre: I was walking around the office in a very stylish tweed suit jacket, but with no pants). The “problem solving”: At my last job before retirement, my office, and privacy, became an issue that hastened my departure. In my dream, my entire place of employment has become a vast dark hall of level after level, all with desks packed together and that is all we talk about.

One piece of advice from dream researchers is to ignore the “plot” of your dream, as such, and to ask: What is the predominant emotion?

One piece of advice from dream researchers is to ignore the “plot” of your dream, as such, and to ask: What is the predominant emotion? That’s easy: frustration! The work day ends and I return to the cloak room where I have left my stuff: my pants, my fold-up three-seat piece of furniture that I use at bus stops, my briefcase, and my machete. Nothing is there. In searching for them, my shoes suddenly disappear. How will I get home without pants or shoes?

Let me move on. Later, in another locale, an hour or so after leaving work (nothing as fortunate as a bar), I have two big problems. I am living at “Yale University” (that had come up in a crossword puzzle earlier in the day), but it is in New York City, somehow, and no one knows where it might be. Second, I have an appointment in one hour for a job interview at Yale University (easily understood, in this context, to be in New Haven), with a President Ballacci, and, being in New York City, obviously I am not going to make it. I experience the dream, when I awaken, as intolerable. I would prefer not to sleep at all. I fear going to bed. I mean, what is this endless mental excretion?

Many people do not remember their dreams when they wake up—or only infrequently. Researchers say you are far more likely to remember your dream if you wake up during REM sleep, when the dream is occurring. People who wake up often during the night report remembering their dreams. That’s me. Recent research has tried to fine-tune this explanation.

The legendary name in dream interpretation, Sigmund Freud, is not taken seriously by most modern neuroscientists who are now the investigators of dreams (a field called “onierology”). Yet, some of his insights—that we find in dreams “daytime residues,” representations of what happened before we went to sleep—are undeniable. Or that some dreams are sexual wish-fulfillments (if only more of them were). But his explanation of dreams as expressions of our unconscious mind, specifically of repressed desires of the Id that we cannot admit into waking life, is not taken seriously as a general explanation.

The best overall “take” on dreams by modern science is that we honestly don’t know what function they have in our minds. Perhaps they are “epiphenomena”: We are accomplishing something of profound physiological importance in sleep (but aren’t sure what) and during that exercise we sort of sweat meaningless mental side products called dreams.

One scientist, Harvard psychiatrist Allen Hobson, the best-known modern researcher on dreams, initially bolstered that view, producing what he saw as evidence that the random firing of neurons, undirected by our consciousness during sleep, forced our minds to interpret what was going on. The result was the random assignment of “meaning” to uncontrolled neuron firing—and the mental manifestation of this in nighttime cinematic imagery is what we call dreaming.

I got to know Allen while I was editor of “Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science,” to which he contributed several articles, once inviting me to “collaborate” on one. He was a wonderful, searching, honest scientist. That honesty caused him to back off from the “random firing” interpretation of his research, although some of his reputation at that time rested on it. He discovered that during REM sleep, the limbic system, a primitive part of the brain responsible for emotions, was unusually active. The new hypothesis was that dreams are not random; they are somehow involved in processing our emotions.

Dreaming is not random or meaningless; it is a response to our emotional needs. Hartmann’s chief experimental evidence is from dreams of people who have suffered a trauma.

I find a recent interpretation of dreams suggestive. Ernest Hartmann, professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, and director the sleep disorders clinic at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Boston, begins by admitting that scientists do not even understand the purpose of sleep or of the REM period—and yet, these are easier to understand than dreaming.

Still, he rejects the hypothesis that dreaming has no biological function, that it is simply a mental epiphenomenon of sleep. “Oh?” he asks, and does thinking have no purpose? Is it simply an epiphenomenon of the waking brain?

His view, which he calls the “Contemporary Theory of Dreaming,” is that “activation patterns” are constant in our brains, making and unmaking connections. This activation we experience on the psychological level in the form of mental functioning. At one end of the continuum of this functioning, we have focused problem solving, as when we are doing arithmetic; along this continuum we have reverie and day dreaming. The least focused, least directed, most imagistic end of the continuum is dreaming.

And yet, it is not random or meaningless, as Hobson first speculated; it is a response to our emotional needs. His chief experimental evidence is from dreams of people who have suffered a trauma: escaping from a burning building, being raped. These people, he has found, continue to dream of traumatic events (experiencing the emotion) but in different forms (e.g., escaping from a tidal wave). They are replaying the emotion of being terrified, overwhelmed. This seems to conform to findings of Hobson that the powerful emotions of the limbic system are active when we are dreaming.

Hartmann says that as time passes the dreamer tends to “integrate” the traumatic experience with his wider experience, so the trauma becomes emotionally less threatening, more part of manageable experience. This process, although epitomized by dreaming after trauma, may account for other dreams. He writes: “Thus we consider a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events. [Emphasis added.]

“Stressful events.” Yeah, I can get on board, with that. I recognize in the experience of my dream emotions (such as frustration) a clear manifestation of what is happening in my life. I would suggest that a series of recurrent frustrations in my waking life (for example, with my financial arrangements, my attempts to get close to others, my sense of being exploited) are all played out at length in the dream I described earlier.

In addition, there are the inevitable “daytime residues” such as a new Facebook friend, Lance; picking up in my shed a machete fallen from its hook; Yale University from the crossword puzzle; and giving advice to my son about writing an article. All pop up in that dream.

But analyze as I may, my subjective reaction, getting up last Sunday morning, was what I expressed to my wife: “My dreams are becoming intolerable!”

And we are not talking, here, about nightmares, which are a subcategory of dreams defined by fear or anxiety intense enough to wake the dreamer with a racing heart. People tend to associate nightmares with children, and this has substance; they are more frequent in children, but adults do have them (more frequently women). My nightmares usually are about being at some height, the drop below a terrifying perspective…and I slip… I wake up with a cry, waking my wife, as well.

The problem with nightmares, even if you don’t mind a little terror, is that they stress the heart and result is deprivation of sleep, which is serious. Usually, though, they can be treated. But I am not talking here about nightmares; I am talking about “ordinary” dreams, an endless unwinding of plots no novelist could invent and that carry a burden of emotion I can do without, thanks.

Am I helpless, then, when I surrender to sleep? In a book published in 2002, the irrepressible Hobson said: No. In “The Dream Drug Store,” with typical flair, he argues that the ultimate “high” can be attained not by drugs but by directed dreaming. Taking advantage of the “daytime residue” phenomenon, well-established, he says that for years he has worked on programming his dreams.

Because thoughts and experiences from the day tend to manifest in dreams, intense thinking and imagery at bed time, immediately before sleep, can set the plot and imagery of our dreams.

Because thoughts and experiences from the day tend to manifest in dreams, he reasons that intense thinking and imagery at bed time, immediately before sleep, can set the plot and imagery of our dreams.

He cites example after example. Always wanted to have sex with that actress? Try thinking about her, imagining her, inviting your emotions about her, as you lie waiting for sleep. Allen reports that this programming resulted in the vivid dreaming of his choice, experiences of his heart’s desire.

Call it lazy, but I have not tried this. At least, not more than perfunctorily for a few minutes. Part of the reason may be that after an evening of Chardonnay, I sleep almost when my head hits the pillow. On other nights, when I am less “sedated,” I have not as yet resorted to the dream drug store. And by the way—no small point—the directed dreaming described  by Hobson is not primarily a hedonistic prescription; it is part of a recommended technique for dealing with nightmares, for example, if other measures do not work (e.g., changing anti-depressant medications or dealing with a possible case of sleep apnea).

Perhaps it is my age—I am seventy, but I do not crave exciting, sensual dreams of wish-fulfillment. I crave sleep without apparently endless, vivid, disturbing nightmares.

I crave sleep without intolerable dreaming.

And yet, at the end of the day (or night, I guess I should say), there is something irreplaceable about dreaming. As a novelist, dependent upon imagination for my work, I am astonished at the sheer protean inventiveness of dreams, which seem to yield dramatic, emotion-laden “scene” after scene, without end, as though the sleeping mind was a novelist in endless, effortless “flow.” This, of course, is a subject for another article, but I hope not to lose any sleep over it.

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.