This book is may be heavy, but it’s really approachable for an academic text.

That’s an accomplishment for a book that essentially takes on the weighty task of summing up the topic of dreams in cross-culture perspective, including the evolutionary impact of the dreaming mind on our species, history, religion and art. Laughlin does this remarkably well, and he tells some great personal stories along the way.

There’s really only a few people in the world who have the personal experience and the scholarly prowess to single-handedly write an anthropology of dreams. In fact, no one has attempted this feat in a generation or longer.

Personal and Academic

Chogye Trichen Rinpoche (1920–2007)

Laughlin, a professor emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, has decades of fieldwork experience with dreaming cultures, including locales such as Nepal and Uganda, and, on his home continent, he is an expert in Navajo shamanism.

His interest in dreaming grew over the years as he also worked intensely with several dream yoga systems, including Tibetan Buddhism under the direction of Chogye Trichen Rinpoche. So for Laughlin, dreaming is no academic matter, but a personal avenue for growth and exploration into the deep structures of the mind.

This personal perspective is woven into all chapters of Communing with the Gods (published by Daily Grail Press), and it serves to bring the intense ideas and sophisticated discussions back to earth. This method of storytelling is not only fascinating, but it actually exposes one of the book’s core concepts: that dreaming is an experience of the conscious mind, first, and a cultural construct second.

To say it another way, dreaming is living. And when we discuss our dreams, it’s critical to give this primary respect to our gritty, personal, embodied moments of life that happen to take place in the dreaming state of consciousness.

From this grounded approach, Laughlin gives a history of dreams in anthropology, and then spends the bulk of the book reviewing the current anthropological theories of dreams as they intersect with actual dreamers in actual cultures.

Integrating the science of dreaming

As many have noted before, there is no current “big theory” in the anthropology of dreaming; researchers tend to follow their own interests and illuminate only part of the mystery and the promise of dreaming. Laughlin’s wide knowledge base really comes in handy at this junction, as he is able to respect many lines of inquiry into dreaming, without prizing one over another.

In this way, the overarching psychological truths of Carl Jung are on par with the very personal work with lucid dreamer George Gillespie, and the neurological work of sleep scientists is contextualized with the findings of ethnographers.

This alone is very helpful… but Laughlin goes further, as he presents this information in a way that builds his central argument, which is the presentation of his own theory of dreaming, which he calls the neuroanthropological theory of dreaming.

 The Neuroanthropological theory of Dreaming

Laughlin trained as a neuroscientist, and then became an adept ethnographer. These two strands of knowledge combine with his embodied experience to form his theory of how dreaming is processed in the brain and how the experience of dreaming is applied across cultures.

Laughlin seems to be a pragmatist at heart

In Laughlin’s view, and I wholeheartedly agree, no theory of dreaming that doesn’t include the mechanisms of the brain AND the evolution of the human animal AND the weird and wonderful application of dreaming as a social medium AND the full spectrum of self-awareness in dreams can be complete.

His approach is pragmatic, and draws heavily from evolutionary biology. Avoiding the morass of defining consciousness as a linguistic construct, Laughlin still points out that dream sharing is as much a result of language as it is the ability to remember our interior experiences in the first place (thank you higher brain). They probably came together, reinforcing the value of the dreaming mind due to its apparent knack for predicting the future, problem-solving, and exposing social tensions.

This biological grounding is why people have similar dreams throughout history and across cultures too. Laughlin says,

Visits with deceased ancestors, flying and OBEs, mandala-like geometric forms, shape-shifting beings, journeys to spiritual places, violent struggles, snakes and other totemic animals, witches, ghosts, spirits that cause and heal sickness, encounters with teachers or gurus, anima and animus figures, marriage, death, and so forth inhabit the dreaming of peoples all over the planet. Yet in every case, the motif will tend to be colored by cultural conditioning. Who is marrying whom…the place to which one is flying…what nastiness the witch is bent on doing… all these things vary depending upon the conditioning and information available in the culture.” (p. 461).

The development of lucid dreaming

This should come with no surprise if you read my blog regularly, but what I love about Laughlin’s book is his inclusion of the full spectrum of dreaming, including the relatively rare ability to lucid dream, or dream with self-awareness.

He really puts it perspective: some cultures invest in the ability to lucid dream, and some don’t. Those that do have a system of beliefs that allows them to train their minds to think clearly and with intentionality in the dreamspace. The mind training is about learning rituals that involve the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in dreams.

In those that don’t (such as most of Western culture), dreams tend to be viewed as random, meaningless events that happen to us.

Laughlin takes our culture to task here: “In a sense, the ‘normal’ dreaming we Westerners take for granted is actually quite primitive compared to lucid dreaming. I mean this literally—dreaming bereft of PFC mediation is a kind of throwback to the dreaming of hominins prior to the evolution of language.” (p. 461).

The application of lucid dreaming across cultures, of course, is largely shamanistic. Dream shaman are those who can direct their awareness in the dream state, fly to destinations to retrieve information, direct healing as well as sorcery, and transform the dreambody into animal and plant forms.

That doesn’t mean every lucid dreamer is a shaman, of course, a point I’ve made before.

But this historic and cross-cultural lens reveals that lucid dreamers are often swimming in shamanic waters without a clue of the power of the dreaming mind.

In conclusion

Communing with the gods is pretty dense, so it’s probably not the most appropriate text for dream beginners or those unfamiliar with some academic language. But if you are interested in the anthropology of dreaming, this belongs on your book shelf.  Laughlin has done a great service to the field of dream studies. In my mind, it’s an instant classic, the distillation of decades of careful scholarship and intensely personal experiences.

At night, the veil is thin. The spirits are marching. Cold air blankets their arrival. Through the mists, a figure emerges. He is a stranger, cloaked in dark spun wool, his face obscured. He stands next to your bed and you strain for recognition.

The light shifts, shadows warble, and then you see his face.

No it can’t be.

It is your face.

The encounter with the spirit double, or the doppelgänger, has been recorded for thousands of years.

Today, with our spiritual literacy reduced to memories of fairytales and Disney films, the doppelgänger encounter is often fearful and terrifying. It’s usually mistaken for a ghost or malevolent spirit. But because we are shamed for seeing spirits in the 21st century, most do not share their stories, furthering their cognitive dissonance and isolation.

Facing off with a willful entity when you are alert and awake is not necessarily a ghost encounter. These visions have biological origins. Most doppelgänger encounters occur at the bookends of sleep, either just after falling asleep or when waking up out of a dose.

The vision occurs in stage 1 sleep, and is known as a hypnagogic hallucination. Making matters even creepier, some people have hypnagogic hallucinations for minutes after waking up, even after getting out of bed and walking around the house.

This stuff happens.

But I like the term hypnagogic vision better, because “hallucination” carries some heavy baggage that what you’re seeing is random, unreal and unimportant.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

The doppelgänger encounter occurs in times of stress, at life’s crossroads, and especially during times of emotional upheaval. They often carry messages and portents that the conscious mind does not want to hear. They can be insistent, angry, or stone cold in demeanor.

Sometimes they know information that we simply did not have access to. This unsettling truth is unexplainable by the current paradigm of science.

Do they have access to the other side, to our Higher Self, or is some other “psi” phenomenon at work, such as telepathy or clairvoyance? 

It’s really a matter of personal belief and I don’t have an agenda to press on the matter.

In any case, we are hard-wired to interact with these entities. Seeing spirits is part of our genetic make up,  an aspect of neurotheology, which accounts for the human universal experience of seeing spirits as well as other cross-culturally documented extraordinary experiences.

This doubling of self is also the core of interpersonal psychology:  a social trait shared by all the upper primates in which we recognize that other people have consciousness and free will. We invoke group dynamics namely by projecting our personal self onto the others around us and interacting in a dialogue of give and take.

The doppelgänger —and in fact many dream figure relationships—is an artifact of the same process, in which the self splits itself into two or more ego mirrors.

As the recently passed James Hillman said, “The gods are real.”

The Celtic tradition of the Double
It’s autumn in the Northern hemisphere, the season of the final harvest. In Celtic traditions, we just passed through Samhain, from which our Halloween myths are largely based.  For these people, the doppelganger was well known in all its forms.

In Medieval Europe, where Germanic and Celtic traditions blended together, three souls were recognized for each person.

The hamr is the animal soul, which dies with the body, and can also be sent out as a physical double. This is the province of sorcerers and shaman.

Second, they recognized the Hugr, or spirit, roughly corresponding to our Latin based tradition of the animus and spiritus.

Lastly, the fylgja is the spirit double, often seen as a female protector.

The fylgja leaves the body at will, and was associated with sleep and trance states. Today’s accounts of autoscopy and out-of-body experience parallel these early accounts of facing one’s own double.

However, in the Celtic tradition, the fylgja can fly great distances, and be employed to gather information, paralleling what is now called remote viewing by contemporary consciousness researchers. 

French medieval literature professor Claude Leconuteux suggests that the spirit double has many disguises. These real life experiences can be found in many fairytales and epic tales that feature encounters with werewolves, fairies, witches and little people.

The Doppleganger Today
Modern encounters of the double can also involve aliens, zombies, and vampires. Without a tradition to ground us, many are terrorized by their own doubles as they project fear and loathing onto the hallowed encounter.

But something interesting happens when you realize that in order to communicate with you, the creature must contain some part of yourself.

Granted, a part of your self that may see farther and into realms the conscious mind does not understand well in the waking rational world.

The following doppelgänger encounter is drawn from my upcoming mastermind guide Lucid Immersion. As dreamer Lee Adams explains, his doppelgänger occurred from a sleep paralysis-initiated lucid dream.
——————————
“I had been having a high occurrence of sleep paralysis along with hypnagogic experiences. I had a discussion with my Buddhist teacher about the experiences and how I often overcome the sometimes-terrifying visions with a fear tactic (running at them, scaring them off). He suggested that I just be with what ever it is, and learn from it rather than scare it off.

So the next night I tried what he said. I experienced sleep paralysis and soon had a type of OBE:

I walked outside my room and walked into the hallway. I felt the sense that something was coming, that horrible feeling of the bad what ever it is (energy) is on its way. Sure enough, down the hall I saw what looked to be a zombie, stumbling his way in my direction.

I had a rush of fear sweep over me but soon calmed myself down as I remembered what my teacher had told me. I walked up to the zombie and told him to stop. I said, sit with me. He sat down.

As he and I sat down I noticed that he looked a lot like me, but just had a sad face on him. I asked him what was wrong. He said he was disappointed. I asked what he was disappointed about, and he said he didn’t know, he was just disappointed.

I thought to myself, “this must be myself, and my disappointment in life that created this type of being.” I looked down the hall as I started to feel that normal terror feeling once again. Sure enough another zombie was walked in our direction. I told the new zombie to sit with us. He sat down.

As he sat down I noticed that there were cables that came out of the zombies. I took the cables and swapped them between each other. They seemed to morph into each other as though something was fixed. As they did this I woke up.

Adams has this to say about his experience: “With a little guts and a little understanding we can learn a lot about our fears. Accepting them often is better than always trying to change them.”
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To clarify, I’m not suggesting that all encounters with ghosts, ancestors and snaggily-toothed demons are “merely” fearful projections of the ego. It’s more slippery than that, and less certain.

All I can say for sure is that a piece of us is always present during encounters with the mysterious “Other,” be it doppelgänger sighting, hag attack, angel visitation, or exchanging pleasantries at the bus stop with a neighbor.

Understanding this interpersonal reality can level the playing field, and make communication with the Other more fruitful.

Which is why respect, gratitude, and compassion is the soulful way to be with one another, in dreams, visions and in waking life. Especially when the face turned towards you is gnashing its teeth.

To receive notification about the upcoming publication of my Lucid Immersion Blueprint: a holistic guide to conscious dreaming, subscribe to my blog here.

First image credits: Doppelganger by AbbyLadyBug

This is the second article in a series that starts with the question: Is lucid dreaming safe? One of most frequent arguments against lucid dreaming is the notion that lucidity disturbs the process—and the function—of dreaming.

It’s a strange critique, because the function of dreaming remains unknown. But for many clinical practitioners, dreams are thought to perform psychological duties that are best left untouched by the “tainting” force of self-awareness.  The dream is a beautiful wilderness, destroyed by the civilizing effects of the waking ego. Can lucidity destroy our inner nature?

The Roots of Distrust
The clinical dis-ease of lucid dreaming may in part be rooted in dream theories of the fathers of psychology: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud only mentions lucid dreaming in a tiny note in his later editions of Interpretation of Dreams. Freud never experienced lucid dreaming, and did not have a chance to read the works of his lucid dreaming contemporaries Frederic Van Eeden and Hervey de Saint Denys.

Freud never had a lucid dream

Freud was skeptical. He thought it a “secondary revision” of memory. Furthermore, he thought that if it was possible, it would only censor the dream’s message, a process he called the dreamwork.

Carl Jung also never directly commented on self-awareness during the dream. For Jung, dreams reflect a lifelong maturation of the personality called individuation. Some Jungians today argue that lucidity disturbs the process of individuation by putting the dream ego in control of something that is much more powerful and ancient than we could possibly understand.¹

It’s always been a bizarre position, seems to me, as some styles of lucid dreaming have much in common with Jung’s method of active imagination, a way of interacting with the dream from a relaxed waking state. As Jungian psychotherapist James Hall and psychiatrist Andrew Brylowski noted in 1991, in both active imagination and lucid dreams, we can enter into a fruitful dialogue with spontaneous imagery and narrative.

Lucidity as Tainting the Dreaming Mind

There’s three main issues with this idea that lucidity is damaging or somehow unnatural.

First, lucid dreams are not the same as control dreams. You can be lucid and not in control of either the dream environment or the dream body. And you can regularly direct the dream’s direction without lucidity. Dream control is a separate skill than maintaining self-awareness in the dream. They often come together, but this may be a culturally-entrained association.

Regarding lucid control dreams, the unconscious mind is still doing most of the heavy lifting anyways. Awareness, choice, and occasional bouts of dream-stomping magic don’t add up to dream generation. Robert Waggoner says it best, “does the sailor control the sea?”

But, are some control dreams denying the dream’s voice–I would venture yes. I do not have a doom and gloom perspective about this co-creative work, however. Lucid control dreams can be worked therapeutically like any other dream. Ironically, lucid control dreams dovetail right into one of Freud classic theories about dreams: that they can reveal conscious wishes.

Secondly, this myth rests upon a false dualism: that the dream is an unconscious process, and lucid dreaming is a conscious one.

This notion assumes dreams are experiences that happen to us, in which the dream ego makes few choices but rather is dragged along by the force of the dream.

We continue to think, reason, and focus our attention in dreams

Studies in cognitive psychology paint a different picture, in which dream narratives have been shown to be full of choices, thoughts, and active decision making. Thinking about feelings, wondering about choices, and other kinds of complex dream thoughts are called “meta-cognition.” A 2010 study by Tracey Kahan and Stephen LaBerge found that dreams have similar levels of meta-cognition awaking life experiences.

That’s a startling claim, showcasing a couple things:
1. Dreaming thought is much more complex than we’ve given it credit for.
2. Waking life is not as lucid as we might expect!

In this light, lucid dreaming is not a conscious dream, but a more conscious dream.

Seriously, if dreaming was wholly unconscious, we would not remember the experience. Are all dreams we remember tainted by consciousness?

Spontaneous Lucid Dreaming

The last issue I have with the view that lucid dreaming is a conscious corruption of the dream is that many people, myself included, have had spontaneous lucid dreams throughout their lifespan.

Because lucid dreaming is a learnable skill, critics of lucid dreaming (who more often that not have not experienced it for themselves) have assumed that it is only through “tricks and tactics” that the rational ego injects itself into a dream, proceeding to muck up the works.

But spontaneous lucid dreams are fairly common: many lucid dreamers have the experience and then later learn that this ability has a name. According to one early study, 20% of the population have spontaneous lucid dreams once a month.² Even the master of lucidity induction, Stephen LaBerge, had his first lucid dream as a child, long before he began his studies about lucid induction methods.³

And of course, consciousness in dreams has been around for thousands of years before modern psychology could tsk-tsk. We were probably lucid dreaming in the Stone Age, given that our brains have not changed much, if at all, in the last 100,000 years.

Lucid dreaming is natural, and there’s room for consciousness in our dreams. Awareness does not imply exploitation, because the dream is not an untouched wilderness.

We already live here.

Next up: is lucid dreaming evil or sinful?

Notes

¹ For a dated, but still relevant, review of contemporary dreamworkers and therapists who have argued against lucid dreaming, see Shafton’s Dream Reader p. 470.

² Snyder, T. J. & Gackenbach, J. (1988), Individual differences associated with lucid dreaming. In J. Gackenbach and S. LaBerge (Eds), Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain (pp. 221-259). New York: Plenum Press.

³ The Mind at Night: the new science of how and why we dream by Andrea Rock, p. 50

First Image (cc) Wilderness by Elido Turco – Gigi

Sigmund Freud is considered the father of dream science, even though most of his dream theory is largely discredited today. But from the get-go Freud assumed that dreaming was an expression of the mind-brain system, a premise still widely accepted by scientists, psychologists and philosophers today. Still, in popular culture, we still hear the question asked, “Do dreams have meaning? or are they random bits of brain trash?”

So let’s take a look at the neurological and cognitive evidence, focusing on the brain layer by layer. Many parts of the brain contribute to the experience of dreaming: from the lower brain and upwards to the middle and higher brain structures. Nihilists may gnash their teeth, but judging by the theories coming out of neuroscience today, it appears that meaning is built into the fabric of dreaming itself.

The Lower Brain Structures REM sleep
Evolutionarily speaking, the brain stem is the most ancient part of the human brain, shared by all vertebrates.  In 1977, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley discovered that electro-chemical pulses from the brain stem create the architecture for REM sleep.  Not all dreams occur in REM sleep of course, but it is this stage of sleep that provides the relatively active mind state where many of our remembered dreams occur. These brain stem pulses create the substructure of the dreaming experience, including how long the REM period lasts.

The idea that these brain stem pulses are essentially randomly generated has been misinterpreted by many a journalist to mean that the content of dreams is also randomly generated or “meaningless.” Rather, this hypothesis suggests that the function of dreaming is primarily physiological. Psychologists don’t dispute this. And as Hobson himself has clarified, he does think that dreams have psychological meaning—in fact Hobson has kept his own dream journal for decades.

What about the idea that dreams are the defragging of the brain — the process of deleting information? This theory comes to us from Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison in 1982, known as the “reverse learning theory of dreams.” While it conveniently mirrors computer science, the evidence for defragging as the function of REM is rather poor, and most scientists do not support it today.

The Middle Brain Integrates Emotions
When dreaming sleep begins, the middle brain becomes an electro-chemical fireworks display of activity. In fact, the middle brain is so active in REM sleep that Hobson (1999) has appended his theory of brain generation  to suggest that it may be just as responsible for the structure of dreams as the lower brain. This part of the brain is shared by all mammals.  Also known as the limbic system, it regulates emotional responses and cravings. During dreaming, the middle brain is more active than it is in waking life, so you could say that emotional intelligence is the guiding structure here.

Fear is a primary emotion in dreams

One part of the middle brain is especially active: the amygdala, a walnut-sized lump that philosopher Rene Descartes, and later Emmanuel Swedenborg, once thought was the seat of the soul.  Today, we call the amygdala is the seat of emotion, and especially fear, due to its role in maintaining fight or flight responses.

But why so emotional? Dream researcher Rosalind Cartwright argues that we are replaying old memories and updating them with information from recent experiences.  This is emotional logic: it’s not about cause and effect, but emotional correspondences. Cartwright’s laboratory research suggests that most dreams are negative in emotion, the most common ones being fear, anxiety, anger and confusion.

This idea is mirrored in the evolutionary theory of dreaming, which supposes that dreams rehearse possible threats. Threats from the past are important data in this sense, showcasing how a dream can both be about the past and future simultaneously.

The Higher Brain Takes a Nap

So, when we’re we are in dialogue with a talking bear, how come we usually don’t realize that we’re in a dream? Neuroscientist Allen Braun (and company) published a provocative finding in 2002 using new evidence from brain imagery scans. They discovered that, during dreaming sleep, the higher brain is essentially offline. The higher brain is the newest part of the brain –the cortex—and humans have the most grey matter, as well as the most infolded grey matter, in this layer than all the other mammals. Braun argues that the prefrontal cortex—which generates language, logic, and critical thinking–is taking an electro-chemical siesta while we argue with that talking bear.For whatever reason, we largely accept the bizarre landscape around us.

Working memory may be out to lunch, but something is oddly familiar when we are in the dream itself. Perhaps, as depth psychologist James Hillman argues, there’s a part of ourselves that belongs in the dreamworld, and is quite comfortable with the rules of the realm.

Something similar happens in other highly creative states. For example, a recent fMRI study (Limb & Braun, 2008) showed reduced activation in the prefrontal cortex when expert jazz musicians were spontaneously jamming compared with when they were playing memorized pieces. From this perspective, dreaming sounds like a flow state as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, not a deficiency in cognition.

Keep in mind, some critical thinking still occurs in dreams, as we actually co-create dreaming outcomes when we “work around” the weird plot changes and bizarre visual imagery that the other parts of the brain throws our way. Indeed, cognitive psychologist Tracey Kahan has amassed plenty of quantifiable evidence that we have meta-cognition in dreams. Metacognition used to be thought of as the pinnacle of waking thinking, and dreams were assumed to be completely devoid of it. Kahan’s data shows that we still think about our feelings, ponder decisions, and wonder about what’s going on around us in the dreaming narrative.

The extreme of this trend in metacognition, of course, is lucid dreaming, which is when the dreamer knows “this is a dream.”  Scientifically validated by Stanford psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge, lucid dreaming is marked by conscious choices, active thought, and logical reasoning in the dream. This claim was recently strengthened by researcher Ursula Voss in 2009, who along with her colleagues from Neurological Laboratory in Frankfurt, Germany, published strong evidence that the brain has heightened activity in the frontal and frontolateral areas during these “self-aware” dreams.

But where is the meaning? You decide, literally.

As cognitive psychologist Bill Domhoff has quantitative shown, the content of our dreams largely matches our interests, worries, and preoccupations from waking life. Domhoff’s evidence supports the continuity hypothesis for dreaming, one of the most widely supported modern theories of how dream content is formed, experienced in the moment, and interpreted upon awakening.

In my world, reviewing theories about how the brain creates and interprets the dreaming experience does not reduce dreaming to “only” a biological event. Rather, a holistic approach to dreaming must integrate the material, the psychological and the transpersonal to reflect the depth of our experience.

Today the question is not do dreams have meaning but rather emerges as:

what do you find meaningful?

References

Allan Hobson and R. McCarley, The Brain as a Dream State Generator: an Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977), 1335-1348.

Psychology Today: Dreaming up a good mood

Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin., Hobson, J.A. (2009). Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 2009 Sep 1;32(9):1191-200.

Balkin, Braun, Wesensten, Jeffries, Varga, Baldwin, Belensky, Herscovitch, 2002. The process of awakening. Brain, 125, 2308-2319

Kahan, Tracey and Stephen LaBerge. Dreaming and waking: Similarities and differences revisited. Conscious and Cognition, 2010

Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS One, 3(2), e1679.

First Image credit: Brain coral by bsmith4518

This is guest post by psychotherapist and author Scott Sparrow.

A client of mine once dreamed that she was lying in bed. A man dressed in a robe, with a hood covering his face, walked up and stood beside her bed. He said, “I want your heart.” Visualizing the man ripping her heart from her chest, the woman awoke in terror.

She asked what countless people have asked upon awakening from such a dream, “Who was that man? What does this mean?” If she had posed this question to a frequent lucid dreamer, he or she might disregard the dreamer’s preemptive search for an interpretation,  and say, “Too bad you didn’t become lucid. Then you could have realized that it was only a dream.”

A therapist, looking at the dream as an indication of past trauma, or unrealized potentials, or both, might ask in classic noninvasive fashion, “What are your associations to this figure? How might he serve as a metaphor for some aspect of your life?”

If the dreamer had simply become lucid, she could have responded fearlessly, or simply woke up. Her fear would have subsided with the realization that the man and his disturbing words were only part of a dream. Or, if the dreamer had acquired in retrospect the insight that the man portrayed, for instance, the dominating, Apollinian quality of maleness, she may have realized that her sense of self was feeble in the presence of such strength, and she may have associated her fear with actual past events and relationships.

What’s Missing

Lucid dreamers and psychotherapists are quick to dismiss each other's perspective but each have what the other lacks

Both of these approaches — of the lucid dreamer and the dream analyst — have merit and can produce meaningful results, but what is lacking in both of these orientations is the balancing perspective of the other. In my experience, lucid dreamers can be too quick to go off in search of something more desirable.  It’s their dream after all, so why not bag the old dream and go in search of a new one?

And therapeutic dream analysts, especially those of a psychodynamic bent, may remain stuck trying to discern the meaning of the imagery without regard for the dreamer did, or could have done, to alter the dream’s outcome.

As an early lucid dreamer, I was passionate about the possibilities of experiencing higher states of awareness, and dream interpretation was initially not very important to me. My little book, Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light (ARE, 1976)––an outgrowth of my master’s thesis––went to the heart of what I considered the ultimate lucid experience: communion with the white light. I was largely uninterested in the unresolved conflicts to which dreams often alluded.

To give some sense of my priorities as a hot-shot lucid dreamer, I once told a psychoanalytically trained colleague the following dream:

I am on the streets of a Mexican town with my two best friends. We meet a beautiful woman, who could be a prostitute. We flirt with her, and them make arrangements to visit with her that evening. Just as we say goodbye to her, I notice my father standing nearby in the shadows. I know that he has overheard our conversation with the woman, and I can discern his disapproving look even in the low light. But just as we stand facing each other in silence, there is an explosion to the east. We both turn and see an orb of white light the size of several suns hovering 50 feet above ground. I look at my father lit-up face, and can see that he has forgotten the tension that was between us. I become aware that I am dreaming as the light begins to approach and pass over us. Then there is another explosion, and the light appears again to the east. This time, a strong wind begins to blow in its direction, and I am pushed along toward it until I lose my footing and fly up into the light.

When I shared this dream with my psychoanalytically trained friend, he immediately seized upon my relationship with my father, and wanted to ask probing questions regarding my sexuality and my father’s values. I was shocked that he would trivialize such a profound experience. I grew increasingly irritated with his questions, and cut short our conversation.

Somewhere in my late 20s, however, I began to shift to the therapeutic side of dream studies. Not only was I encountering my own powerful unfinished business in non-lucid and lucid dreams alike, but I began to pursue a career as a psychotherapist, working with individuals for whom the prospects of having a lucid dream seemed as remote as winning the lottery.

At first, I was convinced that if my clients could achieve lucidity in dreams depicting their life struggles, the therapeutic process could be greatly accelerated. I tried on many occasions to introduce lucid dream induction as a therapeutic intervention. While some of my clients were successful in having memorable and therapeutic lucid dreams, the great majority of them were not.

The Revelation

A breakthrough came for me in the form of a realization about ordinary dreams. In working with  clients on a day-to-day basis, I began to notice that dreamers already exercise considerable reflective awareness in their non-lucid dreams. In retelling their dreams, dreamers exhibit the kind of deliberate thinking that characterizes waking cognition, but everyone seemed to have overlooked that fact. Just because dreamers aren’t lucid, I concluded, it doesn’t mean that they are always passively involved in the dream’s unfoldment and outcome. To the contrary. I wanted to shout from the housetops that dreamers were not merely “recording secretaries” in the dream, but were reflective and clearly influencing the outcome of virtually every dream!

It was right in front of our eyes, but neither the lucid dreamers who seemed overly focused on lucidity per se, nor the content-oriented dream analysts who remained devoted to analyzing the imagery, seemed cognizant of this feature of ordinary dream reports.

To me, it was an astounding fact, upon which an altogether new theory of dreaming could be developed.  I was talking about this “revelation” 30 years ago, and have never stopped talking about it. It’s simple: If the dreamer is reflective and thus capable of exercising a wide array of responses, and if these responses actually alter the course of the dream as they seem to do, then all dreams can be seen as an interactive, relational process, and analyzed from the standpoint of relational dynamics.

So from this point of view, systems-oriented family therapists are probably better at analyzing the dream than psychodynamically trained therapists.

A Co-creative Model for Dreaming

I wasn’t the first to articulate a cocreative, relational model of dreaming and dream analysis. I found a kindred spirit in the work of Ernest Rossi, who in his seminal work, Dreams and the Growth of Personality, announced that “there is a continuum of all possible balances between the self-directive efforts of the dreamer and the autonomous creation of the dream content.”

In this pithy statement, Rossi basically said that there are two systems interacting in every dream–the dreamer and the source of the imagery. (To those of you who are interested in brain science, you will probably think of the two prevailing positions on dream generation – but that is a vastly complex debate, which exceeds the scope of this essay.) By positing these two somewhat distinct co-contributing elements in the dream, he laid the groundwork for a view of the dream as an interactive, relational, and co-created event.

This view of dreaming make full lucidity less necessary for good things to happen, and treats it as a special event within a continuum of awareness that is readily observable in ordinary dreams. It also suggests that the dream content, as a largely autonomous creation, may ultimately elude the understanding and control of even the highest states of lucidity.

A relational view of dreaming can also threaten the traditional clinical view that dream images can be analyzed as static content, unaffected by what the dreamer is feeling, thinking, and doing in the dream. What kind of interpretive conclusions can we draw if the dream imagery is in constant flux, tethered to and influence by the dreamer’s responses? One can no longer say, “this means…,” but instead has to describe the dream process in such terms as, “this is what happens when you respond in this way.”

Although this approach can frustrate a person’s needs for “answers,” it underscores personal responsibility and unacknowledged competencies, as well as approaching the dream as an unfolding relationship.

Editor’s note: This is part I of an introduction to a new relational method of dreamwork called the Five Star Method. Stay tuned for part II which goes into detail about each of the steps for this way of working with dreams.

About the Author

G. Scott Sparrow, EdD is a psychotherapist and Associate Professor at University of Texas – Pan American, and the author of many books including the classic Lucid Dreaming: Dawning of the Clear Light.  His website for dream mentorship is the DreamStar Institute.

The neuroscience of dreaming is a relatively new enterprise but has quickly become the major paradigm of experimental dream research today.  J. Allan Hobson, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Harvard University, is the undisputed celebrity of this scientific outlook, and the author of several popular books on the topic.  Hobson, in his 30 years of tireless work, is also perhaps the greatest provocateur in the field of dream studies, stirring up old philosophical conflicts such as the value of objective science over experience, and mechanism over meaning.

But what Hobson is really known for is sticking it to Freudian theory.  In his break-out 1977 paper, Hobson and co-author McCarley declared victory over Freud (and the entire psychoanalytic community) by reporting their discovery that dreams in the REM state form by grace of neurochemical changes in the brain.  As Kelly Bulkeley notes (1994), Hobson presented his work as a polemic against Freud, whose influence he accused of preventing scientific progress in the study of dreams.  His central beef with Freudian theory is the notion that dreams are full of hidden messages by design. On the other hand, Hobson agrees with Jungian dream theory that dreams reveal more than they conceal, and can be quite transparent in significance.

The Biochemistry of Dreaming

Hobson argues that dreams are clumsy narratives stitched together by the forebrain to make sense of the activation of biochemical changes and erratic electric pulses originating in the brainstem.  This is Hobson’s theory of dream formation in a nutshell, which he has updated many times over the last 30 years, and is still referred to as the activation-synthesis hypothesis of dream formation.

The theory sheds light on several aspects of dreaming cognition.  Most importantly, Hobson’s discovery of the role of neurotransmitters in dreaming has stimulated robust research into the biochemistry of consciousness and revolutionized the way that mental illness is conceptualized in psychiatry.  REM dreaming is characterized by low serotonin levels and high acetylcholine levels, which may explain why dreams are so hard to remember: they are never encoded in short-term memory in the first place.  When we wake up, serotonin floods the brain and our dream experiences from just a moment before are carried away by the tide.

Why are Dreams so Weird?

Hobson’s theory also offers a partial solution to why dreams are so wacky.  In waking life, the brain performs reality checks and strings together logical stories to keep up with our thoughts, emotions and movements as we interact with the world.  But in dreams, this ability is zapped when the serotonin valve is turned off, bringing about a state of consciousness ruled by strong emotions and uncanny sensations.   It’s a chaotic place to be sentient, but the mind is so motivated to construct meaning that bizarre narratives are hastily thrown together so we can make order out of the mess.  It’s a patch-job, at best, says Hobson.

Conflicts and New Solutions

One problem with Hobson’s original activation-synthesis model was that the theory presumes that all dreams occur in the REM state.  However, two neuroscientists, James Foulkes and John Antrobus, have independently shown that long narrative dreams with bizarre elements can happen in non REM states too (see Rock 2004).  Neuro-psychologist Mark Solms (1997) has also convincingly reframed the role of REM as an “alarm clock” for the mind to start dreaming, not as the prime creator.  All of these researchers suggest that biochemical activation is not the sole genesis of a dream’s structure.

Hobson (1999) responded to criticism by modifying his position with some new brain imaging data that shows that the forebrain (specifically the limbic areas) are also highly activated in REM.  The implication here is that emotions may be as big a factor in dream genesis/structure as brainstem activation.  In other words, whenever someone suggests that “dreams are random nonsense,” you can helpfully remind them that view is 20 years out of date and even the anti-Freudians have since changed their tune.

Since then, Hobson has widened his research interests, and is now after the Holy Grail in scientific philosophy: the mind/body problem, also known as the hard problem: how does brain relate to mind and consciousness?  Hobson’s contribution is the AIM model of consciousness.  AIM reaches far beyond REM dreams, and predicts possible states of consciousness by mapping the states along three lines of inquiry (instead of just one as in activation-synthesis).

The AIM Model of Consciousness

1. Activation: how active is the brain, measurable in electrical activity?
2. Input source:  is the generated imagery external, internal, or a combination?
3. Modulation: which neurochemical system is operating – the cholinergic (REM dreams and some altered states) or adrenergic (ordinary waking consciousness?

A fun example for AIM is lucid dreaming, which Hobson describes as a “hybrid state that features both waking and dreaming consciousness.”  Recently, Hobson and his merry band found that while lucid dreaming is similar to ordinary dreams in modulation and input (ie both are cholinergic and made of internally-generated visual imagery rather than taking in information from the senses), lucid dreams have higher activation in the GAMMA (40hz) range in the frontal and frontolateral areas of the brain.

Mechanisms Don’t Trump Meaning

Many have made a straw man out of Hobson by misinterpreting his work as a defense against the meaningfulness of dreams.  I have admittedly done so in the past before reading his primary works, no doubt influenced by all the rancor he stirred up in the psychoanalytic community.  But in real life, Hobson is a dream enthusiast, and is reputed to have over 100 volumes of personal dream journals.

And more to the point, Hobson’s theory suggests that meaning and creativity are fundamental to the experience of dreaming, but that this meaning may not be present in the initial formation of dreams.  Even as early as 1977, Hobson and McCarley suggested that dreams “are not without psychological meaning and function.”  The significance of the dream narrative, in Hobson’s present view, comes only after the powerful neurochemical perimeters are set and interpreted by the higher-order parts of the brain that deal with language, logic and the mapping of emotions with remembered experiences.

However, despite his backpedaling, Hobson still believes dreaming consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biological causes.

Personally, I think that Hobson’s work cannot comment on issues of meaning, because his scientific paradigm has already bracketed out those subjective queries.  And, besides, armed with an integral approach to science, learning about the material correlates to an extraordinary experience is not threatening to the value of the experience itself.

But if you believe in an immortal soul or a higher self that is unsullied by our gray matter, Hobson may disagree, after he offers to scan your brain.

For some great introductory reading by Hobson, check out:

Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep by J. Allan Hobson

13 Dreams Freud Never Had:the New Mind Science by J. Allan Hobson

Additional References:

The Wilderness of Dreams by Kelly Bulkeley (1994)

The Mind at Night: the New Science of How and Why We Dream by Andrea Rock (2004)

Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel by Robert Bosnak (2007)

Allan Hobson and R. McCarley, The Brain as a Dream State Generator: an Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1977), 1335-1348.

Allan Hobson, “The new Neurospsychology of Sleep: implications for Psychoanalysis,” Neuro-psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1(2): 159.

Mark Solms, The Neuropsychology of Dreams: a Clinico-anatomical study, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.

Introductory image (CC): Synapse by Mark Cummins

Any survey of modern dream research must include Calvin Hall (1909-1985).  Hall was a behavioral psychologist who explored the cognitive dimensions of dreaming.  His work began before the discovery of REM sleep, so little was known about the biology of sleep and dreams.  Hall drew worldwide attention for his cognitive theory of dreaming, which was among the first scientific theories of dream interpretation based on quantitative analysis… rather than wishful thinking.

Dreams Images are the Embodiment of Thought

Central to Hall’s cognitive theory is that dreams are thoughts displayed in the mind’s private theater as visual concepts. Like Jung, Hall dismissed the Freudian notion that dreams are trying to cover something up.  In his classic work The Meaning of Dreams (1966), Hall writes, “The images of a dream are the concrete embodiments of the dreamer’s thoughts; these images give visual expression to that which is invisible, namely, conceptions.” (p. 95).

So dreams reveal the structure of how we envision our lives, a display that is clearly valuable for anyone who remembers and studies their own dreams.

The Way We See the World

After studying thousands of dreams collected from his students and from around the world, Hall suggested that the main cognitive structures that dreams reveal include:

conceptions of self (how we appear to ourselves, the roles we play in life)

conceptions of others (the people in our lives and how we react to their needs)

conceptions of the world (our environment: is it a barren wasteland or a nurturing place?)

conceptions of penalties (how we view the Man.  What is allowed? What is forbidden?)

conceptions of conflict (our inner discord and how we struggle with resolving it).

As a behavioral psychologist, Hall believed these conceptions are antecedents to our behavior in the waking world.  They’re like maps to our actions, and “with these maps we are able to follow the course of man’s behavior, to understand why he selects one road rather than another, to anticipate the difficulties and obstacles he will encounter, and to predict his destinations.” (as qtd in Van De Castle, p. 190)

Content Analysis: the Hall-Van de Castle Scale

Hall’s work is still widely cited today, but his greatest legacy is the system of dream content analysis he developed with psychologist Robert Van De Castle in the 1960s.

Known as the Hall Van De Castle scale, this quantitative system scores a dream report with 16 empirical scales.  Some scales are settings, objects, people, animals, and mythological creatures.  You know, the sort of things you see walking down the street on any given day.  (If you haven’t seen any chimeras or griffins recently, then you’re working too much). Other scales include emotions, sexual content, aggression, etc. .

The value of the project is that there are now hundreds of thousands of dreams measured using the HVdC system, creating a “baseline” for normal dreaming cognition.  So researchers can add dreams from special interest groups (children, Vietnam vets, Armenian students) to measure their profiles against the norm. (see Figure 1 for an example of the possibilities)

This innovation is a huge milestone in the scientific study of dreams.  Now researchers can easily get a snapshot of dreaming cognition that is measurable, quantitative, and statistically significant. Besides psychologists, this scale is still used widely today by sociologists and anthropologists.

And thanks to Hall’s student Bill Domhoff, now a powerful dream research figure in his own right, much of Hall and Van De Castle’s database is available online.

Dream content has coherent meaning—that is the main message behind Hall’s work with dreams.  This view later came under fire by the controversial work of neuroscientist Allan Hobson, who implied that dreams may be nothing more than images stitched together from random brain pulses.   This rift is the central conflict in dream studies today.

Learn more about Allan Hobson and the neuroscience of dreaming.

Further Reading:

The Meaning of Dreams (1953/1966) by Calvin Hall

Our Dreaming Mind (1994) by Robert Van De Castle

Finding Meaning in Dreams: a quantitative approach (1996) by William Domhoff

Except for Dr Freud, no one has influenced modern dream studies more than Carl Jung.

A psychoanalyst based in Geneva, Switzerland, Jung (1875  -1961) was a friend and follower of Freud but soon developed his own ideas about how dreams are formed.  While depth psychology has fallen out of favor in neuroscience, Jung’s ideas are still thriving in contemporary psychoanalytic circles.  Popular applications directly based on Jung’s research include the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, the polygraph (lie detector) test, and 12-step addiction recovery programs.

The basic idea behind Jungian dream theory is that dreams reveal more than they conceal. They are a natural expression of our imagination and use the most straightforward language at our disposal: mythic narratives.  Because Jung rejected Freud’s theory of dream interpretation that dreams are designed to be secretive, he also did not believe dream formation is a product of  discharging our tabooed sexual impulses.

And surprisingly enough, Jung did not believe that dreams need to be interpreted for them to perform their function.  Instead, he suggested that dreams are doing the work of integrating our conscious and unconscious lives; he called this the process of individuation.  It’s easiest to think of individuation as the mind’s quest for wholeness, or that quality of applied wisdom that separates elders from grumpy old men.   While not required, working with dreams and amplifying the mythic components can hasten along the process.

Archetypal Images Bring Balance

Jung drew heavily from Medieval texts and described his psychology as alchemy

This mythic world of Jung’s is the realm of the archetypes, which are the universal energies of every human who is not only in conflict with society but also with him or her self.  Jung suggested that the archetypal images that come through dreams may be derived from different organs and thought centers in the body, and as such represent evolutionary drives.

Despite all the conflict, order is where it’s all headed from Jung’s perspective.  The quicker we can balance all these ancient needs, the more productively we can live.  The psychotherapist’s role is to provide hope for this order by helping the client make sense of their night visions and how they relate to waking life.

In Jung’s reckoning, the psychotherapist is like a modern shaman or priest who helps the individual create a personal mythology that works by throwing out maladaptive patterns and establishing healthy ones in their place.

The Collective Unconscious is not a Psychic Soup

The components of our mythic lives all have a similar structure throughout the lifespan.  This is Jung’s collective unconscious, an idea that is usually misrepresented in popular culture today as some kind of psychic reservoir of knowledge.  Jung was pointing more towards the psychological constants in all societies, such as rites-of-passage into womanhood, or the growing fascination with death after middle age.

The confusion over the collective unconscious  might have to do with the fact that Jung believed in telepathy. Ever the empirical scientist, Jung wrote “I would not assert the law behind them [telepathy] is “supernatural”, but merely something which we cannot get at yet with our present knowledge” (1974, p. 48).

If you are interested in how dreams can reflect the Big Moments in our lives, as well as our natural aptitude for mysticism, then start with Jung’s Dreams, Myths and Reflections, his autobiography.  It is rich and provocative.

Jung’s dream journal has also just been published for the first time, in limited numbers.  Known as the Red Book, this is the journal that Jung kept during his “encounter with the unconscious” during WWI, in which he holed up in his studio and purposefully went crazy for a while.  He claimed later that all the seeds for his major ideas are represented in the Red Book, which is full of ornate drawings and calligraphy.  This book may prove to rewrite everything we thought we knew about Carl Jung.

Next, we’ll look at the work of Calvin Hall, creator of the first cognitive theory of dreams.

Further Reading:

Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Carl Jung

Dreams by Carl Jung

I’ve been brewing this post series for a long time.  Many readers have asked me to review the influential theories of dream formation that are still at work today.   Unfortunately, in our Western culture, where dreaming has long been considered insignificant, advances have been slow due to a lack of funded research. And no one has yet offered a holistic theory of dreaming that accounts for how dreams form in the brain, what they mean, and why human cultures around the world draw significance from them.   Instead, we have many competing theories, all of which look at different aspects of the dreaming world.

Basically, 21st century dream research is in a state of fragmentation.

As troubled as the field is as a whole, dream researchers are all are doing important work.  One of the troubles with the field that everyone has to contend with is that any theory of dream formation drags along with it a theory of how dreams should be interpreted.  This creates, more often than not, a self-referential system that highlights the data that are sympathetic with the theory but is blind to data that do not fit.  This problem is easier to deal with in other scientific endeavors, but when the object of our study is our own consciousness, objectivity becomes difficult.

So, in this post series about the major theories of dreams now popular today, I recommend a both/and perspective.  The success of one theory does not necessarily negate another, because they may be dealing with different aspects of dreaming cognition.  This hasn’t stopped the debates and rivalries in the field of dream science, of course.  But I hope to highlight the similarities of rival theories as well as their differences.

Freud – the Father of Modern Dream Research

Sometimes, a cigar is just a penis.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is the most popular dream theorist known today, and his ideas are still drawing water a century after he wrote his magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams.  Freud trained as a doctor and specialized in the brand new field of neurology, the study of the brain.  But times were tough for Jewish scholars as Freud came of age in Vienna, so he established a private practice and focused on treating people with mental disturbances.

Freud had many research interests (such as the effects of cocaine on consciousness), but the study of dreams was his favorite because he believed dreams hold important clues to the way our minds work, which could lead to more effective ways of treating mental illness.

Freud’s theory of dreams is biological in origin, but psychological in practice.  In a nutshell, Freud showed how dreams reflect basic instinctual drives that are common to all humans, but repressed in polite society.  The Victorian flavor of Freud’s culture especially highlighted how tabooed thoughts and desires causes anxiety, phobias, and even mental illness in some individuals.  Dreams provide a relief to this internal conflict by discharging these desires in a cloaked form that is acceptable to the conscious mind.

Contrary to popular belief, Freud did not suggest that all dreams are sexual in nature. Other conflicts can be expressed too, such as aggressive and selfish drives (Bulkeley, 1997, p. 17).  These drives are clearly visible in children, Freud argued.   When dreams express these hidden drives, they often reveal personal material from our childhood memories when our instinctual natures first clashed with the censorship of society.

The expression of these drives comes through our dreams as wishes.  This is the central truth in Freudian dream interpretation. Dreams express the realization of our intentions, ambitions, and hopes, no matter how much we try to deny them.

Disguised Wishes Fuel Acceptable Dream Content

But of course our dreams do not show this baldly.  Rather, Freud claimed that this under-layer of meaning, or latent content, is disguised as ordinary experiences that reflect our current life situation or recent past.  This surface layer is the manifest content of the dream, and it is largely composed of day residue, or fragments of experiences we remember from the last few days.

Like all dream interpretation systems, Freud’s theory has a circular logic at its heart.  When pressed how nightmares are really wishes, Freud somewhat lamely argued that the dreamer must be a sado-masochist, and the suffering in the dream is fulfilling that secret desire for humiliation and pain.  And if that was shown to be untrue, then the dreamer must secretly want to prove Freud wrong, revealing another wish.  Meh… there’s no way out.

Freud’s method of dream interpretation is psychoanalysis (a term, by the way, coined by lucid dreamer Fredrick van Eeden in 1892).  He encouraged his patients to freely-associate the dream to older memories of their lives, to make connections between the past and the present, and to facilitate a transformation of the dream’s memory so it can more quickly do its discharging work in the brain.

Is Freudian Dream Theory Still Valid?

It’s easy to take potshots at Freudian dream theory, but keep in mind this was the first attempt to systematically interpret dreams in modern science and it’s inspired the entire field of psychology.  Several aspects of Freud’s theory still ring of truth – especially the observation that dreams are often pointedly embarrassing and hint at tabooed material close to the dreamer’s heart, rather than reflecting random nonsense.   Dreams have meaning, and we can scientifically study this meaning-making.

Also, his claim that dreams inter-splice long-term memories (childhood urges) with short-term memory (day residue) is a claim made by several current neuroscientists, pointing to the possibility that dreams have a role in learning.   I will discuss more of the neuroscientific revival of Freudian thought in another post.

But first, we will next look at Freud’s contemporary Carl Jung, another founding father of modern dream studies.

Further reading:

The Psychology of Dreams by Kelly Bulkeley.

Interpretation of Dreams by the Man.

Not surprisingly, the lucid dreaming community or even normal sleeper may claim either that their dreams are unique or that “I don’t do drugs!”

This might be true, but the research shows that everyone does psychedelics if they would want to or not. Our brains produce them endogenously (naturally) and our lungs also produce them in even higher amounts.

The Structure of Psychedelic Experience

Humans have long been interested in the alteration of their consciousness. They have done so through a variety of means, including external chemicals, physical stressors and mental disciplines. Humans have also taken great care to pay attention to their dreams’ actions which regularly provides an altered state in which the experience inadvertently interacts with their so-called subconscious.

No matter what path individuals take to reach these altered states, the states themselves bear striking similarities to one another. By understanding the connections between the disassociation (change in normal consciousness) of individuals in both dreams and in the use of drugs, one may be able to understand waking consciousness better as well as conscious altered-type disorders.

Chemically, it’s a strong possibility that hallucinogens are more like dreaming than dreaming is like hallucinating.

Sleep Modulation and Circadian Rhythms

You may understand the stages, what REM is, and that even we get paralyzed during the REM stage of sleep. But the real magic of sleep lies within the circadian rhythm and histamines.

The circadian rhythm is a brainstem-controlled mechanism for keeping time, heartbeat, heat control, and many other automatic functions. The one aspect of circadian rhythm that deals mainly with sleep is the temperature control. Temperature control during the 24 hours cycle of the circadian rhythm allows our core temperature to change from cold to hot or hot to cold depending on the phase in the 24 hour cycle (Barrett & McNamara, 2007).

During sleep onset, our circadian rhythm automatically lowers the body’s core temperature using the body as a radiator. Melatonin (the dream mechanism)  helps increase this temperature change, and it also helps to produce drowsiness. The key point here is that though melatonin may help induce change in temperature, it also has another function while we are asleep.

In short, melatonin may be the raw material to our private psychedelic experience.

Dream Transitions in the Pineal Gland

Our brain is like an on off switch. When we are awake our brain is perceived as on, or specific chemical process are taking place in specific areas of our brain that run off of neurotransmitters, specifically serotonin. When we are sleep our brain is considered off, or once again specific chemical process are taking place with different areas of our brains activated again using neurotransmitters, specifically acetylcholine and histamines which continue to push our brains toward the REM phase of sleep until its ready to wake up.

During this night time process, our brains also use the hormone melatonin in producing compounds into serotonin which is further processed into tryptamine and pinoline (a known MAOI). When combining these nightly produced compounds, which is produced in the largest quantities during REM sleep, you have the possibility of creating one of the most potent psychedelics available in the world today, DMT.

In layman’s terms, dreaming may naturally release the most powerful hallucinogen known to humankind.

Here is a quote from Callaway (1988) who explains the process in more technical terms:

The pineal gland is a chemical production factory, either producing melatonin or serotonin depending on the presence of absence of light. In this process, light source information is relayed from the eyes via the optic nerves and results in the activation of synthesizers that either produces melatonin in the absence of light or serotonin in the presence of light, becoming the brains largest producer of serotonin. Also in the absence of light, other process are continued as melatonin is then processed into tryptamine and pinoline. Pinoline is a beta-carbolin called 6-Methoxytetrahydro-beta-carboline and acts as a monoamine oxidase-A inhibitor (MAOI) which in turn allows for the increases concentrations of serotonin (Callaway, 1988).

In other words, the buildup of these two known types of hallucinogens in the form of pinoline and tryptamines could easily explain the visual mentations experienced during specific pineal gland stimulation. Callaway also thinks this could explain schizophrenia.

The Link with DMT, LSD-25, and Other Psychedelics

Albert Hofmann and a model of the LSD-25 molecule

With the abundance of serotonin, the methyltransferases which covert serotonin into psychedelics, and the amplification ability of beta-carbolines, the pineal gland is one of the most logical places for indigenous DMT synthesis (Strassman, 2001).

Also chemically similar to melatonin is LSD-25, which relates specifically to the activity on the raphe nucleus (a control center for serotonin release) (Hobson, 2002).  Few studies into the relationship of the formation of DMT or LSD-25 in the pineal gland have been conducted; however, indigenous DMT has been found in the lungs and brain of humans.

Though DMT, LSD-25, and other psychedelic drugs are similar in structure, the effects of these drugs are sometimes dramatically different. These differences are based on the individual as well as the environment of the individual taking the drug. A few instances have occurred where the same psychedelic trip has been described by different people taking the same drug. The amount of drug administered is also another key factor in how the effects of the drugs will be experienced.

So are We Hallucinating our Dreams?

Or are we dreaming our hallucinations?  With the great possibilities that one of the most potent psychedelic compounds known to man is formed in the pineal gland that is most active at night, we can see why it’s so common that individuals dream of radical unexplainable experiences and places. It is all so possible that the secretion of this chemical compound into our brain could induce a lengthy “trip” or what we call dream.   The length of the dream would vary (and does) based on the amount of sleep a person obtained allowing for the formulation of this psychedelic compound and allow for a longer psychedelic experience.

Someone might say, “Well, why do psychedelic hallucinations seem to vary from dreams?” As described before, set and setting has a lot to do with the type of experience a person has while on a psychedelic.  The setting of most psychedelic trips is during the day time, with friends, while awake and aware. The settings of most dreams are while at night, with another partner if anyone, and unaware or asleep.  The amount of the drug would also very as during a self induced external psychedelic experience someone may take a large quantity of the drug, whereas at night while the brain is super sensitive to internal stimuli, the brain could excrete a small amount of the same drug and produce a powerful alteration.

Over all, I think that this field of study is an important aspect in understanding why we sleep and most importantly why we dream. There is still a lot of research to be conducted on this topic, but over the last few years it has grown in popularity and has been provided some scientific credibility that is well deserved.

About the Author:

Lee Adams is a a writer and researcher interested in dreams, psychedelics and good science. He maintains the website LucidConsciousness.com.

References

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