Into The Dream Lab by Michelle Carr: Can you cure your nightmares?

The academic Michelle Carr decided to become a dream scientist after a disturbed night’s sleep in 2008. She opened her eyes, sat up and saw the rest of her body still lying there asleep. She realised she was dreaming, and later marvelled that her slumbering brain had been able to produce such an eerily real experience.

Carr has since spent hundreds of nights in laboratories all over the world, watching people sleep – and often waking them up at just the right moment, to ask them gently what they were dreaming of. What’s striking, she writes in her fascinating new book, is how similarly we dream, wherever we come from.

Up to 70 per cent of people report having encountered typical dream themes such as being chased or falling, being naked or inappropriately dressed, or discovering secret passageways or rooms at home. Most of us have recurring dreams that can persist over a lifetime: in your teens you might dream you’ve missed an exam, for instance, then you might revisit the dream over the decades that follow.

Much is yet unknown about how and why we have dreams, Carr writes, but they seem to help us in several ways. Using our dream avatars, we rehearse skills that are useful in waking life: athletes and musicians dream of practising their sport or instrument, for instance. In one study, subjects were asked to navigate a virtual maze before and after a daytime nap. Sleeping boosted all the subjects’ performance, but those who dreamed of the task improved ten times more than those who didn’t.

Of course, our dreams often reflect the day we have just had – they bear traces of what Freud called ‘day residue’. But intriguingly, after material collected over the course of a day has appeared in a dream that night, it often disappears, only to resurface five to seven days later, a phenomenon known as ‘dream lag’. ‘White dreams’, meanwhile, refer to when you wake up with the unmistakable sense of having dreamed, but can’t remember anything specific. It could be, Carr writes, that such dreams lack the perceptual detail required for them to be remembered.

One positive function of dreams is that they seem to ‘dilute’ stressful memories, by mixing them up with other material: happy childhood recollections, flights of fancy such as jumping between lily-pads (one of my favourite dreams). It may feel unfair when we dream about the very thing that is worrying us, but doing so can be helpful. In a study of divorced women, those who initially had more negative dreams involving their ex ended up being less depressed one year later than those who didn’t dream of their ex.

We tend to think of dreaming as a mental activity, but it’s a surprisingly physical one too. Dreams ending in orgasm correspond to real physiological orgasm, Carr writes, and our sleeping minds often work detail from the world around us (noises, pressures on our limbs and so on) into our dream, knitting it all into a coherent whole. If you’re dreaming and there is a thud nearby, your brain may even delay the perception of the sound until it has worked it into a corresponding door-slamming dream. While we generally assume that twitches in limbs at night are caused by dreaming, research suggests that dreams are fashioned around such twitches – as if to make sense of them. A ‘hypnic jerk’ is when your legs or body suddenly twitch as you’re falling asleep. This often combines with a mental image, such as falling down a flight of stairs.

One of the pleasures of dreaming is feeling unencumbered by our physical limitations: in one dream I used to love as a child, I would drive into the sea and see fish flickering around my large glass car. More than a third of paraplegics’ dreams, Carr writes, involve voluntary leg movements, in which they might walk, swim or even ski.

Of course, often our dreams tip from being useful and intriguing to tormenting. Fully 80 per cent of patients with a drug addiction report having drug dreams in the first few months of quitting. Nightmares are strongly correlated with suicide risk, Carr notes – more than insomnia, depression and anxiety. Insomniacs, incidentally, often dream they are awake and dream they’re thinking, leaving them with the impression they haven’t slept at all.

Those who have been through childhood adversity are, unsurprisingly, more likely to have nightmares; but so are people who have a highly sensitive personality. The most common treatment for nightmares, Carr writes, is imagery rehearsal therapy, in which the sufferer describes their nightmare while they’re awake, then works to ‘rescript’ it – come up with a version that will cause them less distress. In one example, a woman who was being afflicted by a nightmare involving being stuck in a room with five rabid tigers imagined actually being one of the tigers. Immediately, she felt the tigers’ panic at being trapped in such a small space, and realised they weren’t trying to threaten her.

Interestingly, rescripting a nightmare is much harder to do if you don’t believe you can. But dreams, Carr has found in her research, are more malleable than we tend to believe, and successfully treating nightmares can be life-changing.

Satisfyingly, Carr confirms that we really do sleep worse when we’re somewhere new. This is ‘first night effect’, and it’s thought that the brain is monitoring its environs more closely, a phenomenon some scientists also call the ‘night watch’.

Many of us dream of dead friends and family members. This can be deeply upsetting: in a study of survivors of the Pol Pot genocide, for instance, dreamers who were visited by the dead at night were left distressed, as they believed it indicated the deceased had not yet been reborn. Others, though, find grief dreams soothing and lastingly meaningful. One woman quoted recalls a dream in which her late husband sat by her side and told her: ‘I’ve been to the end of time and back and you know what? I still love you.’