But that hasn’t stopped Antti Revonsuo, a Finnish philosopher who teaches at the University of Turku. At the 2008 IASD conference last month, researcher Katja Valli discussed the newest findings of the Revonsuo’s team in regards to their Threat Simulation Theory for dreams.

Dream well or I'll eat you

In a nutshell, the theory states that the biological function of dreaming is to stimulate threatening events in order to rehearse the perception of threats and how to go about avoiding them. So our ancestors are those who were good dreamers, and used dreams to practice the mental and physical skills needed to survive in the world. What isn’t stated in this theory is whether or not dreams need to be remembered for them to do the job. Perhaps dreaming the tiger and forgetting about it did the trick?

This theory rests on the widely-accepted observations that most remembered dreams are stressful – filled with negative emotions and dramatic conflicts. Revonsuo focuses on this empirical dream content, and has spent the last decade illustrating the patterns of threats in the dreams of children, traumatized patients, nightmare sufferers, and even some contemporary hunter-gatherers for cross-cultural comparison.

Most recently, Revonsuo, Katja Valli and their team (see citation below) have focused on the threatening images of children – comparing traumatized children versus non-traumatized. They found that traumatized children (from war, abuse, and natural disasters) do indeed have more threats in their dreams. It’s as if their early life triggered the dream simulation into high-gear.

Anyhow, many clinical psychologists would agree that dreams are revealing of our central conflicts, our past traumas, and so they represent a way of working with the turmoil of living. What marks this as an evolutionary theory, however, is tying this folk wisdom (and I mean this with all respect – this is empiricism at the ground level) to the evolutionary goals of reproductive success and the passing on of ones genes.

I”d love to hear some psychologists and anthropologists comment on this paring!

For me, this theory is intriguing, but it does not account for a mechanism that clearly links “successful dreaming cognition” with reproductive success. I”m not a strict materialist either, but if you”re going to play that game, you gotta stay within the rules. If we”re just ticking meat sacks, then we need mechanisms.

The footprints of Acahualinca - 6000 years old human prints in volcanic ash in Manuagua, Nicaragua

Deeper still, this theory rests on the assumption that early human life was full of risks and trauma that are not present today – the old “tiger in the woods,” red tooth and nail. Reminds me of the Footprints of Acahualinca, which I saw in Nicaragua a couple years ago. For many years these amazing “fossilized” human footprints from 6000 years ago were thought to show a tribe of humans fleeing from a volcano. That has been recently disproved, based on improved geological information and dating techniques

But look at the gait of those footprints – this is a group of people sauntering across the mudflats, not running for their lives. It’s so easy to project “disaster and terror” onto the distant past, but truthfully there is more danger in the world now than ever before. Tigers still eat solitary humans, but today’s real dangers are much bigger and systemic: overpopulation, mass extinction rates, peak oil, GM foods, and the techno-military wing of global capitalism that threatens all of us.

My point is: life is still hard, and life is still beautiful. Dreaming as threat stimulation is only the first slice of the function of dreams being currently debated in the West. Ultimately, the theory a great first step, but it denies the rich imaginal levels of dreams that are just as important for human meaning: which is what people really talked about around the campfire a hundred thousand years ago.

VALLI, K., REVONSUO, A., PALKAS, O., ISMAIL, K., ALI, K., PUNAMAKI, R. (2005). The threat simulation theory of the evolutionary function of dreaming: Evidence from dreams of traumatized children. Consciousness and Cognition, 14(1), 188-218. DOI: 10.1016/S1053-8100(03)00019-9

In science, these values are usually not transparent. However, in the study of dreams our personal beliefs influence our perception so much that we literally experience different realities. That’s why dream interpretation is dismissed by hard scientists, and also why Freudians dream about their mothers and Jungians dream about Germanic mythological creatures.

And the cynics? They have the lousiest dreamlife of us all, characterized by random and meaningless fragments of memory that only reinforce their belief in a dead and chaotic world. That’s too bad for them. As Henry Ford supposedly said “Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

Rather than decreeing that all the schools of dream interpretation are untrue, a more holistic approach suggests that they are true enough for those who subscribe to that system. This value of cultural relativity is how anthropologists deal with the dizzying array of differences in human populations, because nobody has the final say on the meaning of meaning-making. There is no objectivity, no final analysis, and no judgement day when it comes to the human visionary capability that is dreaming.

Yet relativity only goes so far, as we are biological creatures living in a more-than-human ecology. These human universals of dreaming are elusive, but advances in neuropsychiatry, ethnopsychology, and empirical dream content studies are leading the way to a greater understanding. To this date, however, no serious theory about the role of dreaming in evolutionary psychology has been presented, largely due to the belief that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of biological processes.

In other words, from a materialistic standpoint, dreaming is the flotsam and jetsum of the human experience. Ergo, the universality of dreaming is moot.

While reason is a great tactic in the waking world, it can be self-limiting when we try to make sense of our dreams with reason alone. Analytical thinking is good for only one purpose, namely, dicing things into pieces. To understand dreaming cognition, we need to consider putting it together before we pull it all apart.

I believe mythology can complement Western scientific materialism, and so can our own experiences and intuitions that are grounded in emotional intelligence. These irrational ways often are the most reasonable course of action when trying to understand our dreams because these are precisely the ways of thinking that construct dreaming cognition.

These essays are about my beliefs, my intuitions, and my mythologies of the dreamscape. They are not meant to provide answers but stimulate new questions about our dreams and why we bother remembering them in the first place.

Continue with Belonging in the Dreamworld.

Moss writes:

Here’s an open secret: Dreaming isn’t really about sleeping; it’s about waking up. Dreams wake us up to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. They can tell us what we need to know and alert us to actions we need to take.

What I like about this article is that Moss does not stray into the sweet, sticky morasse that most pop-psychology pieces indulge in: that dreams are “messages from our subconscious mind” to our waking ego. Nay, instead Moss briefly discusses recent neurobiological research that suggests that dreams are inherently tied to our desires, concerns, and motivations. In other words, yes, there is meaning in dreams but it’s not necessarily a deeper source than our waking ego, but instead characterized by more flexible kinds of thinking.

Moss goes further, suggesting that dreams have a biological function. This is actually contrary to many researchers” beliefs in the field, most charismatically led by Bill Domhoff. Others will agree that dreams can have a psychological function, but it’s a post-hoc slapped-together social prop that has nothing to do with how dreams arose biologically, sort of like how your average scapulamancy reading has nothing to do with the biomechanics of pig locomotion.

But Moss’s rendering of human evolution is also much more flexible than most dream researchers as he considers psi phenomena to be evidence for dreams” evolutionary function. That’s pretty bold, and definitely an area of research that needs some more heavy investigating (as well as investing). Sadly, evidence for this possibility will remain anecdotal (because we all have stories, don’t we?) until a change in the dominant paradigm for Western science allows the Academy to look at the research that has already been done….

Perhaps Moss’s piece in Parade Magazine is an indication of this shifting worldview?

For more of Moss’s views on the possibilities of dreams, I recommend his Conscious Dreaming.

What makes this ensemble so incredible is that it has been dated to @ 160,000 years ago – roughly 40,000 years “too early” by yesterday’s history textbooks. If the dates are not contested, this has some powerful new implications for the way human evolution is seen to occur.

Here’s the whole AP story about Curtis Marean’s find.

From a consciousness studies perspective, I am drawn to Marean’s interpretation of the red ocher as “symbolic behavior.” Ocher is commonly interpreted in prehistoric contexts as used for fabric dying, wall drawing, and possible body marking. Marean really likes the body and face marking hypothesis, but until his actual article is published in Nature and explains the context I remain slightly skeptical. But any of these behaviors are certainly breaking new cognitive ground much, much earlier than we have ever seen.

The adornment issue pokes at a sore spot in evolutionary psychology. This sore spot is our lack of understanding of how consciousness really intertwines with our early history. Body marking is considered a socially complex behavior that emerges only with higher levels of cognition, levels that can handle abstractions such as group identity and individuality. More body marking = more consciousness = more modernity. Here lies the bug-a-boo of creativity, that much celebrated proof of modern humanity’s uniqueness from all other hominids. It’s a pretty astounding discovery in the first place, so it’s interesting that Marean played up the sensationalist “symbolic cognition” angle for the press.

Basically, the fact that a small group of artistic, clam-baking beach combers partied through the lower paleolithic while the rest of the early humans bopped each on the heads with clubs is very troubling to our notions of “human progress.” It’s also another nail in the coffin for the supposed “creative revolution” in the upper paleolithic in Europe.

Naturally, Fox News reported this press release with the headline “Early humans used make up.” Yes, progress is definitely on the up and up.