Speaking of Psychology - The Science of Dreaming (SOP71)

Episode Date: January 2, 2019

We all dream yet many of us don’t know what to make of our nocturnal adventures. Dream scholar Deirdre Barrett, PhD, explains why we dream and what our dreams may be trying to tell us. She also offers tips on how to better remember your dreams to harness the power of your sleeping mind. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and scholar of dreams, who's on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program. She's the editor of the journal Dreaming and has written several books on the topic, including the Committee of Sleep. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Barrett. Hi, nice to be here.

So dreams are always a fascinating time. topic and we all dream, but many people don't remember them or don't really know what to do with their dreams. And you as a scholar of dreams know all about dreams and are even a past president of the International Association for the study of dreams. So I'll start off, I think a simple question with probably a long answer, but why do we dream? Well, it's not a simple question. It's probably the one where you'd get the most disagreement among dream psychologists. Personally, I feel think that we have rapid eye movement sleep, which is the stage in which most dreams occur, along with all mammals, for a lot of reasons, many of which are very biological that certain

neurotransmitters are being replenished in the brain during that stage of sleep, that there's some very physical body reasons for REM that we share with all mammals. But I think evolution isn't that simple. And when something's been around since the dawn of mammals, it tends to have function upon function layered on top of it. And I think for humans, there's a lot of problem solving that goes on in that state. But that's my answer.

And you would get everywhere from, you know, it has no function to, you know, dreams are our sort of wiser self-speaking to us from other dream psychologists. but that's my that's my concept of it yeah i mean i've always thought of it as sort of like it's telling you something you know your dreams are trying to maybe tell you something you have been avoiding or something you might not realize what's going on because it's really you're you know you are unconscious so i've always wondered if it's really your your sort of true self coming out

so i'm probably maybe in that camp just as a lay person just being interested in the study of dreams yeah i mean i like to say it's just it's our brain thinking and a different biochemical state. And I don't buy into the perspective that there's one book called Dreams are Wiser than Men. I don't think that what our dream, dreaming mind is thinking about an issue is always the correct one or wiser than our waking one. I think the benefit of dreams lie in just what a different biochemical state it is. So if we're kind of stuck in our usual everyday rational thinking, dreams may make an in run around that and show us something very different. But if you had to operate off one or the other, I think our waking mind is probably giving us

more good advice than our dreaming one. But the dream is a great supplement. Absolutely. And can you explain a bit about what the International Association for the Study of Dreams does? It's a non-profit organization whose mission is just to dissemination. It's a business. It's a disseminate information about dreams, and that's everything from the most basic education about things that have been known about dreams for a long time, to the general public and even to children, on to disseminating the latest research between professionals in the field. The ISD has one international conference a year. It has some online virtual conferences. It has some regional conferences, and it has two publications. I edit the journal Dreaming, which

ISD oversees the content, but APA is our publisher, and that is an academic journal for professionals in the field. But IASD also has another publication called Dreamtime, which is a magazine, which is much more informal discussion of dreams that the general public enjoy. Yeah, it's very interesting. Until I was... researching this topic, I didn't know there was such an association. Yeah, it's a great group. I recommend its website, and for anyone that can get there, its conferences are great. And unlike many organizations, it's a combination of professional and not professional.

So at the conference, more than half the presenters and about half the attendees are some kind of professional in the field, but there are lots of people who are just extremely dream interested who choose to come to the conference. Interesting. Maybe I'll end up there one day. So, you know, there's those common dreams that I think, you know, you read about, see in television and movies and people talk about, like being in a public place naked or having your teeth fall out or being chased.

So why do different people have similar dreams? I think I've always found that question really interesting. It's like, why would I have the same dream as some random person from, you know, a different walk of life? And has there been research into those common themes? Well, there's some research just on how frequently they occur and that does demonstrate that a few of those themes, including the ones you rattled off,

do occur pretty frequently to people of different ages and around the world. And some are more universal than others. And it tends to go with whether the metaphor they seem to be representing is universal. Clearly, all cultures have some norms about what parts of your body you're supposed to cover and not even if it's, you know, a tiny thong just covering your genitals in one culture and bailing, you know, from head to toe and another one, there's still a, how much of your body do you show and shame around showing more than you're supposed to.

to be. So the naked and public one seems to be quite universal. And I'll say, I'll say more a bit later about this, but we certainly don't think that you should ever just say one dream theme means exactly the same thing for anyone that dreams it. There's always an individual element. But there's some things like naked and public that are much likelier to be representing social shame, social anxieties, you know, just the common sense metaphor about being exposed in some uncomfortable way is usually what that dream is about for most of the people having it. Then there are other common themes that are a little more cultural bound, like most Western societies with our kind of schooling. Many, many people in the culture have recurring dreams about tests going wrong.

You've overslept. You've missed the test. You aren't figuring out where the classroom is. You're late. You can't find the classroom. You get into the exam. You realize you've studied. the wrong subject for it, the exams in hieroglyphics.

They're just all kinds of variations, but somehow you are, you know, about to mess up a test. And we see that in in Western schooling type cultures all the time, but you don't see that in hunter-gatherer tribes where, you know, learning to get out there and do adult tasks in some sort of, you know, more intern-like way is the way that they're educated and tests, obviously, they don't have sit-down exam dreams. And even in our culture, people who decide to be, want to be actors or musicians from an early age, they'll have a variation that's the audition dream. They're not sitting down to take an exam, but they're showing up with their musical instrument and they realize they've studied the wrong piece of music or they can't find the audition

Hall. So, so, so, so, so there's some variation even in those, those standard ones, but, but, there, there's something to the idea that there's some universal, very frequent dreams, meaning something similar for most people who have them. And those feelings behind those dreams could be, like you said, maybe some, some, some sorts of shame or some sorts of anxiety about what's, what's going to be, happened to be tested in some way, that sort of thing. So they're common feelings that underlie them. Well, and yeah, different, different shades for for different ones, but just in line with sort of what they otherwise are common metaphor. You know, if you, quote, feel exposed or feel naked, that's usually more of a shame

social disapproval. If you're being tested, you know, that's more than authority figure is evaluating you, sort of are you measuring up, you know, to society in general or an authority. So, you know, so there, most of the recurring themed dreams are anxiety dreams, but whether, whether it's about sort of being competent versus being socially appropriate, those, those tend to be represented by different specific things. And I've heard that some people say that dreams don't mean anything at all, that they're just random impulses from your brain when you're sleeping or perhaps just, you know, consolidating memories, that sort of thing. and that there's no deeper emotional meaning behind them. But, you know, many people do believe dreams are important that they help problem solve, perhaps find inspiration, which I'll ask in a few minutes. But what does the psychological research say about the importance of dreams?

And do we know what would happen if we didn't dream? Well, let me answer the first part first. It's a little simpler. there is some research. There's a limit to how much you can deprive people of REM sleep. And it does have to be depriving of REM sleep. Not quite all dreams happen in REM sleep. And one of the things that you see if you deprive people of REM sleep

is that you begin to get more reports that sound like full-fledged dream narratives out of other stages of sleep. A few of those happen anyway. But it's like there's some pressure to dream that if you don't let it happen in rapid eye movement sleep, it begins to happen in other stages of sleep. And then in the extreme, in some of the experiments, people seemed to hallucinate, even awake a little bit. So there's certainly a pressure to dream that can sort of break out of REM,

not that it's always totally confined there. But the other thing is if you're REM depriving people, you see deficits in certain things, or it doesn't even have to be REM deprivation, but you can do an experiment where the same amount of time passes between exposure to a task and retrying it, and people either do or don't get a REM episode in there. And from those experiments, it looks like other stages of sleep have mortgages. do with consolidating some simple straightforward kinds of memory and that rapid eye movement sleep is consolidating and learning more emotionally tinged memories and certain kinds of problem solving that require some abstract generalization from answers to single cases and beginning to see a

pattern across them, that people that get a REM period in between exposure to certain problem solving tasks do better. So that's REM sleep and that's not talking about the dream content. But we definitely, at dream content, we sometimes see very overt problem solving pop up. Somebody doesn't know the answer to a question until they have a dream that shows them the solution. So REM is doing something with that biologically, whether you're remembering dream content with it or not, but, but again, layered on top of REM for human beings, dreams. Dreams seem to be thinking about the problems and issues we've just been exposed to and sometimes solving them. And speaking about you just mentioned about how people use them to problem solver

inspiration. And you wrote about in your book, The Committee of Sleep, about some stories from famous artists and inventors like Paul McCartney, Salvador Dali, and the inventor of the sewing machine, how they received inspiration from their dreams, which produced beautiful works of art and practical tools like the sewing machine. Can you explain how we use dreams to problem solve and to find inspiration? Yes. I mean, there are two aspects of that. One is that it it simply happens spontaneously a fair bit that people who are stuck on a problem will have a breakthrough dream. And that was true in the case of the sewing machine inventor. That dream came out of nowhere without his asking for it in any particular way and showed him how to make the sewing machine.

And two kinds of problems are likely to get solved. spontaneously in dreams. One is anything that's a very visual spatial, because dreams are so visual. We can see things in a hallucinatory way in front of us. So the first computer-controlled anti-aircraft gun was dreamed, the sewing machine was dreamed, the structure of the benzene molecule was dreamed.

And all of those seem to be cases. where being able to see the thing very much more clearly than you could just do visual imagination awake was a helpful part of it. The other big cluster of solved by dreams are where you're stuck because the conventional wisdom is wrong. The benzene molecule is an example of both. Kekulae knew what the atoms in benzene were, but at that time, all known molecules were some kind of straight line with a side chain.

And so he was trying to arrange the atoms in a straight line in some way that made sense and explained the chemical properties. And that wasn't working. And he fell asleep and dreamed of molecules dancing in front of his eyes, farming, he said snakes, but they were straight lines of molecules. And eventually one of the snakes made of atoms reached around and took its tail in its mouth. And he woke up realizing that benzene was a closed ring. but all chemists would have been approaching it to make it some kind of straight line.

So dreaming just bypasses that conventional wisdom. It has to be done this way. It has to be done this way. And shows more possibilities. So very visual problems or problems where you need to think outside the box are likely to get help from dreams. But then the other aspect is that although these happen spontaneously, if people are trying to focus their dreams on a particular topic. We tend to call it dream incubation in psychology to say, tonight I want to dream the answer to a particular problem or I just want to dream on this

particular topic. You're much likelier to have a dream on that topic or even an answer to the problem than if you weren't doing that as a self-suggestion at bedtime. So everybody tends to get some help and inspiration and good advice from their dreams, but you can get more by asking your dreams to focus on particular topics. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm going to just touch on that while we're there. So if you, how do you use dreams to, you know, if you want to remember your dream better and you want to be able to have a dream journal and use it for those that problem solving, like I said, because sometimes people say, oh, I dream where I don't remember it. What tips do you have for that? So for someone who, how they can remember their

dream better and then how to do a dream journal? Okay. Well, the first tip is the most banal, but it's really the most important. Get more sleep than the average America does. If you get eight hours of sleep and night, you will remember a lot more dreams than if you're getting less than that. Yeah. And it's not, um, we interact. rapid eye movement sleep about every 90 minutes through the night, but each REM period is getting longer. So the first one is just a few minutes, whereas the last one can be getting closer to half an hour in length. So if you sleep four hours instead of eight, you're not getting half your dream time. You're getting 20% or less of your dream time when you truncate your sleep because the dreams are

coming every 90 minutes, but they're getting much longer through the night. So getting enough sleep is extremely important. That's the simplest car with high and low dream recall. But other things are the intent. I mean, often people that are taking class on dreams or reading a book on dreams will just, it becoming more relevant, they'll remember more dreams. In fact, People listening to today's podcast are likely to remember a dream tonight just by virtue of doing that than otherwise. But you can increase that with, again, a dream incubation like I was talking about for problem solving, but just focused on recall. If you're just telling yourself as you fall asleep, I want to remember my dreams tonight. I want to remember my dreams tonight.

That increases the likelihood. And then as you already alluded to, keeping some sort of dream journal, what you do in the morning is just as important. First of all, aside from the journal, just it's better to wake up naturally than to an alarm clock, but, you know, I know everyone can't do that. Yes, it is difficult. Whichever way you wake up, if you lie there for a moment and try to think about nothing other than your dream, if you already recall it, if you're not going to write it down or tell it to a recorder, at least rehearse it in your mind. But if you don't recall a dream when you first wake up, just lie there and see what content at all is there in your mind. Like, did you wake up kind of thinking about your brother?

Or did you wake up feeling a little sad? Because sometimes if you just stay focused on that hint of content, a dream will come rushing back. Oh yeah, I was thinking about my brother because I dreamed that he did thus. I was sad because I this dream this just happened. So dream memory is very fragile and sometimes it's hovering there as you first wake up. So don't do anything else first before focusing on the dream. And secondly, recording it is nice to have the record but also tends to fix it in your your mind, even if you're not referring back to the Dream Journal that much.

So some people still prefer to handwrite things in beautiful leather-bound journals, have a sort of a nice association for some people. You know, or you can, if your laptops next to your bed, you can reach for it and type. But I know that a lot of people are using their smartphones. There are all sorts of apps. Dreams Cloud is one of them, DreamScope, that have apps where you generally you can set your alarm on the app, make that your alarm in lieu of the other one.

And they have all sorts of gentler tones to wake you up or even a voice saying, what were you dreaming, as the first thing you're going to hear. and then your phone is already set to if you speak in response to the alarm or the voice saying, what were you dreaming? It's automatically going to record without you're having to reach over and activate it or anything. So those are some of the easiest, you know, and then they all do speech to text. So you have an account of it.

So a lot of the people I know these days, I still type mine out, but most of my students use an app on their phones. Yeah, that's interesting using technology for our dreams. And I noticed that I usually will like, I have to do the hovering where I kind of like, what did I dream? I'll kind of recall it. And then I can sort of get it firmly planted in my memory and then I'll write it down when I get the chance. I've been known to do that on the metro on the way to work. Sitting furiously writing in my journal, my notebook I have.

Just I don't want to forget anything. Yeah, just rehearsing it in your mind, I mean, especially like in the middle of the night, if you don't want to disturb a bed partner by speaking your dream or something, if you just kind of run through it in your mind, that tends to fix it into long-term memory because otherwise, so many people recall waking up from a dream in the middle of the night and going, oh, wow, that was such a weird dream. And that's all you remember about it.

Or even, I don't need to write this one down. I'm certainly going to remember this one. And then you don't. But if you, even without writing it down, if you play it through, that kind of gets it from short term to long term memory. And going back to the content of dreams, why do some people have recurring dreams? And what do we know about what reoccurring dreams mean? Recurring dreams are usually thought to be themes that are more important for that,

person. Freud talked about day residue, and it's one of his concepts that's still taken quite seriously, the idea that things that happen in the preceding 18 hours are much likely to show up in your dream than sort of other random previous days. And so lots of dreams are about very recent events, and they may be one-time concerns about a about things that just happened that day. And, you know, and they're still worth interpreting, but they're going to be about a very specific current sort of issue. Whereas if a dream recurs over and over,

it, I mean, it may be activated by events of a particular day, may make a long-term issue more salient, but it's certainly going to be about something that's a kind of long-term character logic issue for that person. So in general, we think of, recurring dreams as somewhat more important. If you only have time to analyze a few dreams, your recurring dreams would be ones to target. And often people talk about having nightmares or violent dreams. And I've spoken to friends and, you know, myself included, we've had those

kind of scary dreams. So what do those dreams mean? And what do you do if you have violent dreams or nightmares often? Well, there are two very different kinds. One is the, The metaphoric, they're scary, but otherwise the content seems much like other dreams. It's fairly metaphoric, which is chasing you down a hall in an old building or something. And children have more of those kind of garden variety metaphor nightmares than adults. They tend to decrease with age, but almost everyone has a few of those. versus post-traumatic nightmares where you've suffered one or more extremely violent, terrifying, waking life events. And in post-traumatic nightmares, the event tends to unfold very much like it did awake.

Some people, it replays exactly like they were in a video of the episode of getting raped or being in this, battlefield or house burning down around them over and over and over exactly like it happened. Or more commonly, it's pretty close to how it happened, but it's either got a bit of bizarre dream distortion, but not as much as most dreams, or often the post-traumatic nightmares go one step further, like somebody was holding a gun to someone's head threatening to pull the trigger in real life, and they actually do pull the trigger in the gun. The dream, like the dream goes one step further, whatever was most feared is about to happen, actually happens. So garden variety nightmares, they're just normal to a certain extent.

And some people who have them don't particularly mind them. I've heard a lot of people either say that it's kind of like horror films, that, you know, there's a kind of adrenaline rush and they kind of enjoy. They're nightmares, and I've heard other people who say they don't enjoy them, but they feel like they learn something, like it's always pointing out to them things they're anxious about that they hadn't thought of. So many people who have nightmares of that kind of garden variety type don't particularly want them to go away. And I think that interpreting them just like you would other dreams, thinking about, you know,

what in my waking life, you know, feels like that feeling. and pit of my stomach when the witch is chasing me down the hall is, you know, the way to deal with those. But post-traumatic nightmares just re-traumatized people. It's like having the horrible event happening again night after night after night so that it never recedes into the past. And everyone has post-traumatic nightmares hates having them. Nobody likes those.

And I think that it's also not a mystery. you know, if you were raped and you're dreaming about a rape or your house burned down and you're dreaming about flames every night, there's not a, gee, why are you dreaming that like there is about the witch? So there are techniques that can make people stop having post-traumatic nightmares that involve. You can coach people to just wake up if they start, but it seems to be even more effective to have people come up with an alternate scenario, a kind of mastery dream. If the nightmare starts again, how would you like it to come out differently? And psychologists kind of happened onto this technique because it happens occasionally,

spontaneously. People have had a nightmare over and over and over about a real event. All of a sudden we'll have this dream where someone comes and rescues them or they do fight off the attacker or in a very dreamlike magical way, the whole trauma is swept away. And they wake up feeling so much better. And so we found that some people in PTSD groups would hear somebody say, oh, I used to have a nightmare until one night I had this other wonderful dream. And just hearing that the next week, a couple other patients in the group would say they had.

So now we coach people to come up with an alternate scenario that they would like to see happen and kind of get an individual. I mean, for the same sounding trauma, some people would rather have someone rescue them. Other people would rather fight off some attacker themselves. A lot of sexual abuse survivors would most like to tell off the abuser about why this was so wrong. and other people want very magical, you know, shrink the attacker or the fire down, you know, to a quarter inch high, dream-like things. So once you come up with an alternate scenario,

you practice that at bedtime. This is, again, another variation on dream incubation, just telling yourself, you know, if my traumatic nightmare starts, I, you know, I want, you know, this scenario and picture the alternate. scenario and and that that works for a lot of people a lot of people have the alternate dream and then never have the nightmare again and then in the research studies some people do that

and the nightmares stop without their at least consciously recalling having the alternate dreams so we don't really know if they have it and forget it but it still serves its purpose or if simply the visualization of the scenario, you know, awake at bedtime has a similar effect for some people. Yeah, it's really fascinating that you have some control over this. I mean, if you tell yourself you want this dream to stop or to reach a better conclusion, that's really fascinating. Yes. I mean, the areas in our brain associated with memory are not quite as active,

but they're certainly somewhat awake as we dream. So requests to our dreaming mind do very often get through. It's not a one-to-one, you know, just ask for it once, and you'll dream on this topic. Or you'll have this other dream. But it's very often effective, especially with repetition more than one night. And moving on to pets, let's say. I know you said animals, mammals do go into REM sleep. But, you know, if you've watched your pet dog on the ground, when their thoughts start falling asleep,

my dog barks and she, you know, twitches or likes, that sort of thing. So it looks like they're dreaming, you know, as far as we can tell. But so do animals dream and how do we know if they do or don't? Well, that's a very, that's a very good question. I tend to assume that they do. We know that all mammals except cetaceans. Whales and dolphins do not have REM sleep. They have this strange sleep where they sleep with one hand.

half of their brain at a talk. But all other mammals have alternate between non-rimmed sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and their brain has activity that looks very similar to hours when we are dreaming. So I am willing to make the leap and say that I think that mammals are dreaming in whatever they're elephant or mousy or doggy or catty version of that. is some of my colleagues would not, would not say that. I mean, that some of my colleagues would not assume any consciousness to other mammalian species or only passed a certain level in the evolutionary hierarchy.

But yeah, I think they have the same brain state that we dream in. I think they're probably dreaming in some way. The only, the only slight evidence for dreamer, reports from animals are Penny Patterson who had the guerrillas Coco and Michael. Coco died, I believe. But Coco used to sign kind of fantastic scenarios right upon awakening and no other time. She'd sign about cars flying through the sky, or she'd sign something about seeing a person who she actually hadn't seen in six months. And those sort of signing not real fantastic things only seemed to happen upon awakening.

So Penny assumed that those were dream reports. And, you know, you could argue about that. But I think that sounds quite likely. And the gorilla Michael, who didn't have quite as big assigned vocabulary, but I guess he's still learning. He's certainly still alive and well. He was known to have had his entire extended family group killed by poachers. And then he was picked up as an infant and sold through several iterations. And eventually went to Penny's Reserve.

He had a very traumatic killing of all of his family in front of him. And she said that he used to wake up signing bad people kill gorillas, bad people kill gorillas. And again, only in the morning. So she interpreted that not just as a memory, but as seeming like he was probably having a post-traumatic dream about the event. And again, that's very soft evidence. It's an end of two. It's very subjective. It's fun to think about.

But possibly we have dream accounts from two gorillas. But just in general, they are having the same brain state as REM sleep. So I think it's likely that they're dreaming. Now, they're not necessarily dreaming when they're twitching and moving, though, because in humans, although there's something called REM behavior disorder where you act out your dreams, We are, we and other mammals are supposed to be paralyzed during REM sleep and normal, healthy people and animals. That is the case. Where sleepwalking in non-REM sleep is much more common for people.

And so I think that most times that you see much activity during sleep, you know, when dogs are are woofing or moving their legs a lot as they, that's, probably out of non-rim sleep, which just seems to be mild slight activity in motor areas that's not associated with a big dream scenario in humans. Human sleepwalkers usually don't recall anything or it's a very simple I was trying to get from place A to place B rather than a dream account. So I think when you see your dog making the most noise and moving the most, it's not necessarily dreaming. If when you see its eyelids moving rapidly under its eyes, even if it's completely still, that's when it's likely to be dreaming. Okay, interesting. I'll pay more attention there, my dog's eyes.

And when you and I spoke before, we talked about lucid dreaming, which I know that the journal dreaming has touched on in various ways. And you've said it's also become a topic in popular culture since the movie Inception came out a number of years ago. So can you explain more about what lucid dreaming is? Well, the definition is simply that it's a dream in which you know it's a dream. At some point, you're going, this isn't real. I'm dreaming. Many people, once they're lucid, they then have a lot of control over the dream. If they're being chased down a hall by which they can choose, no, I don't want to have a witch dream anymore and, you know, dissolve the door.

dark building into a beautiful palace or being outdoors and some and some of their friends instead of the witch. So some people can switch a dream all around once they know they're lucid, but not everyone. So the definition is simply knowing your dreaming, even if the dream keeps unfolding in a very dreamlike way. And most people really enjoy lucid dreams. There's occasionally people stay distressed by by scary content but usually even if you let the witch stay there and you turn around and ask her why she's chasing you and what she represents once you know she's a dream witch you're not scared anymore so most lucid dreams are are very positive and people enjoy having them so what does that mean exactly does that mean part of

is part of your consciousness turned on at that moment Yes, the EEGs of people having lucid dreams, I mean, back in the 80s it was established that they really did seem to be in rapid eye movement sleep. And that was big news because it had been sort of questioned maybe they're waking up into some sort of fantasy waking state. But Steve LaBerge proved that people having lucid dreams are really in rapid eye movement sleep. and that's about all that sleep labs could tell at that time. But more recently, now that there are much, you can put on many more tiny EEG leads and reconstruct a much better 3D image of what's going on in the brain, what that shows is that the person is basically in rapid eye movement sleep,

but it's not a completely typical episode of rapid eye movement sleep. the prefrontal cortex, the area right behind our forehead that has a lot to do with abstract thinking is very much damped down during REM sleep. It's often misstated that it's turned off or something in REM sleep. That's not true. There is activity there at a lower level, even in normal REM sleep. But in lucid dreams, there is usually a little more activity in the prefrontal cortex than there is during other rim periods. And that's exactly the area where noticing

discrepancies, the fact that the prefrontal is damped down during most dreams is why we don't question, you know, bizarre. You know, most of the time if we're flying, we're just thrilled to be flying, not questioning how we can. You know, if somebody that you know is dead is showing up in your dream, you usually don't question how that can be. Sometimes you do. So that area that notices things are odd or just even reflects on what's the nature of this experience, that's just turned back up not as much as on average as when we're awake, but somewhat more than in typical dreams. So that seems to be necessary for lucid dreaming.

That's interesting. And what are you currently doing with your dreaming, research? Well, the most recent research study that I finished was a comparison of the content of dream accounts to the content of sleep talking episodes, finding that they were similar in many ways compared to waking speech. They both express much more fear than we typically talk about awake. They're less set in the present than our waking topics. But then there's some differences like there's much, much more anger in sleep talking

than in either dreams or awake, dreams in waking speech have much more in common in terms of pretty low levels of anger from most people. And sleep talking involves much more anger. So that was my most recent research study, and I'm not starting another one real soon because I'm trying to finish a book, which is kind of a sequel to my book, The Committee of Sleep, which is all about dreams and creative problem solving. I both have more theoretical things that I want to say about it. But also, once that book came out, while I was writing it, I had to chase down people who'd have amazing problems. solving dreams. But once it came out, I was getting letters from, including some famous, you know, ones with major accomplishments that had come from a dream that I didn't know about. So,

great. More content for you. Yeah. Great. When is that coming out? It's not even in press yet. It's probably coming out in a year and a half, I would guess. But it's, it's more of a focus than research right now. So Dr. Barr, can you talk about what you dream about? Well, my dreams are, they're probably more similar to other dream researchers than to the average person. Because with only one, I know one dream researcher who says that he would just at a grad school where the person doing the most interesting research who wanted the most research assistance and was the most charismatic figure was doing dream research and that he personally had never thought about much about dreams until getting to grad school. But most dream researchers are drawn to the field because we remember more dreams than average.

Our dreams are more vivid than average. We tend to have more lucid dreams and flying dreams and just almost any unusual category of dreams that you mention that will have a certain low base rate in the general population. I and other dream researchers have more of. So I was just always fascinated by all these nocturnal adventures, which I did remember more of in more detail than the average person. And I think a lot of psychologists go to grad school and then pick a specialty within psychology. But for me, it was much more the other way around. I was just focused on dreams as this fascinating thing as a kid.

And as I got to be a little older, I realized if someone was going to pay you to study dreams, you better go to graduate school in psychology. So I don't have any way of characterizing. You know, I have all the things we've talked about, recurring dreams, lucid dreams, problem-solving dreams, a few nightmares, not particularly. high rate of those. And I have dreams that have solved very practical problems. I have many more dreams that I think are more about my interpersonal, emotional issues where I dream about people who are important to me and in the dream I'm doing something different than the way I'd usually react to them. And I wake up and realize that that has some implications for things to do in real life.

I have some dreams that are just so gorgeous visually that I've started making art from my dreams. I've just been doing that for about three years, but I sold some art and have some art and art shows. And it's all dream art. I have no interest in making art other than to represent some of these images that I just want to drag back into the waking world for other people to see them. I did see that actually when I was just looking into researching this topic. I saw your artwork and it was striking, striking beautiful, very colorful. And can you describe what your favorite piece of art you created? Probably a pair.

Most dreams I just make one piece of art from them. But I had a dream where I was walking through Harvard Square, which is the neighborhood where I live, late at night. And I was discovering these little animals up on the rooftops. and thinking they must have been living there all the years I did, and I just never looked up and seen them before. And then eventually they were down in the street, and I was thinking, oh, they only come down late at night.

And in the dream I thought, and I've never been in the middle of Harvard Square in the middle of the night. That's extremely not true. But in the dream it was. So I was discovering these wonderful animals that live on the roof and come down into the streets. And so I actually went down and photographed several different buildings that were on this route through the square.

But it was one of the Harvard Lampoon building and another of a spot called Charlie's Kitchen that are just interesting buildings that are kind of lit up interestingly at night anyway. And they had the most captured the feel of the dream before I started adding all the little magical creatures up on the roof and spilling down into the street. So I guess it was the happiest.

with the two I made out of that dream came out, really just as I'd seen them in the dream. And what do you use for materials? Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture? No, it's digitally manipulated photography. So for a few of them, like one, I dreamed about a mask changing all these ways. I found that I really love masks. So I take pictures when I go to mask exhibits. So I already had enough pictures of masks to start morphing into that dream. But for the one I just mentioned, I went down, took pictures of the building, and so a real photograph of the building was the basic backdrop. And I left the sky and the brick in certain areas unchanged so that it kind of looks photographically real. But then I played somewhat with the surface of the building, but mainly I put in.

little creatures, some of which I created from scratch in digital programs and others. I actually took photographs not of real animals, but of like little carvings of already not quite realistic animals and manipulated them a little bit more digitally. So it's always collaged photography within lots and lots of digital manipulation to give it the surreal look that the dream had. So dreams are also inspiration for you as well. Yes, definitely. I mean, they've been inspiration for, you know, things in my research life and work as a clinician

and interpersonal relationships for a long time. And I'd only been writing about art from dreams. But lately, it's, yeah, all of my art is completely inspired by dreams. Well, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Barrett. Nice, nice to talk to you. If you've been a long time listener or are new to our show, please consider giving us a rating in iTunes or if you have time, write a review. We'd really appreciate it. Also, we'd like to hear from you directly. So if you have any comments about the show or ideas for us, please email me at K-Luna at APA.org. That's K-L-U-N-A at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other podcasts like APA Journal's Dialogue about new psychological research and progress. notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever

you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, speakingofpsychology.org, and listen to more episodes and to see more resources on the topics we discuss. I'm Caitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.