A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Edwin Landseer - Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom (1848)

Source: Edwin Henry Landseer [Public domain]

We just experienced the summer solstice. In New England we have been having remarkably mild, and often rainy, weather, while Colorado just got two feet of snow and other areas of the country are having extremely hot weather. Historically, the summer solstice has been an important time as it was the beginning of the harvest and the start of the warmest part of the year. In the northern parts of the planet, this was, at long last, the end of the colder months and the time when life became a bit easier and food became more plentiful. This was a time of dreaming of luscious love and a possible future family.

The day of the solstice, June 21st, is when the axis of the Earth is most tilted toward the sun and so brings, in the northern hemisphere, the year’s longest period of daylight. While it marks the astronomical start of the season of summer, it has long been known as midsummer and has had great significance in many places around the planet. Numerous rituals and festivals are held on this day including at Stonehenge in England, and at sites in Mongolia, Sweden, and Finland, among other places. It is also the International Day of Yoga, celebrated in the USA.

This auspicious day reminded me of one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, the comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. It is a complex story of love, sleep, dreaming, magical potions, and mythical creatures. I have had the pleasure of seeing it performed by local actors on the stage in a nearby park during the evening of a long summer day. Experiencing this play brought home the sense that dreams can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from everyday reality. That experience made me want to further explore the nature and meaning of dreams. This turns out to be a difficult task.

We still can’t truly define what consciousness or reality actually are, and so it is difficult to say exactly what a dream is and how one can reliably distinguish the dream world from the world of consensus reality. Consensus reality being the world that we experience, presumably, more or less, in the same way that others do. We do know that humans basically pass through three different states of experience each day—wakefulness, deep sleep, and REM sleep. These have neural correlates and are experienced as distinct states by all people. Some aspects of them may not be remembered or perhaps only occasionally remembered, such as the content of dreams that occur during REM sleep.

The scientific study of dreams is extremely challenging and has made remarkably slow progress for a number of reasons, as noted by Stickgold (2017). Dreaming is poorly defined with no conclusive definition, lacks clear physiological correlates, has a largely unknown neurological basis, lacks behavioral correlates, does not have a known function, and may not exist in any other species than humans. These are indeed formidable challenges to address.

What exactly are dreams? We all have them but trying to describe them or understand them is not straightforward.

Currently, there is no single definition of dreaming but most efforts to describe what dreaming is center on the idea that dreaming is a state of mind and must be understood phenomenologically (Stickgold, 2017). Most often we think of dreaming as something that occurs during sleep but may also be extended to include that state of awareness we call daydreaming. It is less clear if dreaming must refer to hallucinatory images, cognitions, and emotional states that are different from those experienced during the day, or if they can be inclusive of simpler mental activity. For example, after climbing into bed, experiencing thoughts about various topics flowing through our mind while we are seemingly awake, but which are impossible to recall the next day. Because of the problem we have in determining exactly what dreaming includes, sleep specialists often use the term “sleep mentation”, as it can include all of the thoughts, perceptions, and emotional states that occur in sleep (Stickgold, 2017).

Dream research and dream analysis, either with a therapist or as a part of self-exploration, depends on recalled and reported dream material. It is possible to develop the skill of recalling dreams, with it being important to quickly write them down as they often quickly disappear from memory shortly after awakening. It is now clear that sleep mentation can occur in any stage of sleep. In non-REM stages, it may consist of a “dreamy” reverie of thoughts and ideas, the topics of which cannot later be recalled, while in REM sleep the reports are more complex. Generally, dreams are more often recalled when people are awakened from REM (rapid eye movement) than NREM (non-REM) stages of sleep. Reports from NREM sleep tend to be more like directed thought while those from REM tend to be more hallucinatory, bizarre, story-like, and longer (Stickgold & Wamsley, 2017).

Dreams have since ancient times been seen as predictors of the future. I have had many patients over the years who interpret their dreams as having predictive value. Interestingly, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung reported that he had predictive dreams, himself. In the year before World War I Jung had a number of dreams about Europe filled with blood, masses of dead bodies, and barren landscapes. He was frightened and believed that he could be becoming psychotic. He was saddened but relieved to learn of the start of the war that would seem to confirm the content of his dreams. Jung came to develop the idea that dreams are the expression of “something valuable from (the) unconscious that is trying to compensate for conscious attitude (ego attitude) with information that balances it” (Culberson, 2013). His view of dreams was that they could be sources of information from the unconscious about aspects of ourselves, our relationships, the transcendent - such as God or spirituality, or all of these simultaneously. Recording, studying, and understanding our dreams could, he believed, supply us with important and practical information.

Dreams have also been cited as sources of creativity. One famous example in science was the role of dreaming in the determination of the chemical structure of benzene. Benzene (C6H6) was discovered in the early 1800s by the British scientist Michael Faraday and is an important chemical used in organic chemistry. It is a carcinogenic substance used today as a precursor to other commercially used hydrocarbon products and is the substance that gives the sweet smell we may note when we fill our cars’ gas tanks. As more was learned about this chemical it was difficult for scientists to understand its chemical structure because there was only one hydrogen atom for every carbon atom rather than two as would be expected. The German chemist Friedrich Kekule deduced in the 1860s that the answer to the problem was that the atoms were bound in a closed ring structure. He reported that after extensive research and study this idea came to him as he was dozing off and saw before him rotating carbon atoms which coiled like a snake that caught its tail and kept rotating (like the Ouroboros from ancient Egypt). He awoke suddenly and over the course of the night worked out the details of the structure. (It should be noted that questions have been raised about his possible previous exposure to other scientists’ work that had suggested a ring structure.)

Dreaming Essential Reads

Can a Smartphone App Trigger Lucid Dreaming?

Behind the Magic and Mystery of Dreams

Taijitu

Source: "Yin and Yang" by Klem - This vector image was created with Inkscape by Klem, and then manually edited by Mnmazur.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

In the next several blog posts I will be exploring a number of issues related to dreaming. William Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.” As we explore the apparent sources of our dreams, the way they have been depicted in cinema, the structure of dream logic, the neural basis of dreaming, the similarities of dreams to other non-ordinary or altered states of consciousness, and various pathologies of the dreaming state, dreams, our “rare visions” will become a bit more understandable. The summer solstice is past, but our fascination with dreams continues on.