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In Your Dreams: New Book Goes Inside 'The Transformative Power Of Our Nightly
Journey'46:48

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   November 20, 2018

   "Why We Dream -- The Transformative Power Of Our Nightly Journey," by
   Alice Robb. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
   closemore
   "Why We Dream -- The Transformative Power Of Our Nightly Journey," by
   Alice Robb. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

   With Meghna Chakrabarti

   Why do we dream? To defrag the brain? Unbound our unconscious? There's
   new science on the purpose of our nightly journeys.

Guests

   Alice Robb, science journalist. Author of "Why We Dream: The
   Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey." (@alicelrobb)

   Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor of psychology in the department of
   psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance.
   Editor-in-chief of the journal Dreaming: The Journal of the Association
   for the Study of Dreams. Past president of the International
   Association for the Study of Dreams. Author of "The Committee of
   Sleep," among other books.

From The Reading List

   Excerpt from "Why We Dream" by Alice Robb

   I spent the summer of 2011 digging holes and talking about my dreams.
   Within two weeks, I had blown through the novels I'd taken to the
   remote Andean village of Nepeña, where I was excavating Moche remains
   with my classmates and a Peruvian professor. I'd saved most of my
   suitcase for bulky rain gear and emergency jars of peanut butter; I
   hadn't anticipated how much time I'd have when my internet access was
   subject to the whims of an erratic café owner. So when my friend James
   passed me a beat-up paperback whose cover showed a man's brain being
   penetrated by a ray of sunlight and a puff of clouds, I willed myself
   to set my skepticism aside.

   As I scanned the table of contents, though, I couldn't help but roll my
   eyes at chapter titles like "Life Is a Dream" and "Rehearsal for
   Living." I cringed at the list of exercises: the eerie-sounding "twin
   bodies technique," the ludicrous "dream lotus and flame technique," the
   ominous "no body technique." Stephen LaBerge's Exploring the World of
   Lucid Dreaming had all the trappings of a New Age self-help screed, but
   with the closest English-language bookstore a six-hour bus ride away, I
   started to read.

   "Proverbially, and undeniably, life is short," LaBerge wrote. "To make
   matters worse, we must spend between a quarter and a half of our lives
   asleep. Most of us are in the habit of virtually sleepwalking through
   our dreams. We sleep, mindlessly, through many thousands of
   opportunities to be fully aware and alive." In what LaBerge called
   "lucid dreams," a sleeping person could become aware that she was
   dreaming and -- with a little practice -- control the plot of the
   dream. I was hooked.

   Most people experience a lucid dream at some point in their lives, but
   only about 10 to 20 percent have them regularly. For some in that
   minority, lucid dreaming is so pleasurable that it becomes a hobby or a
   kind of self-help. Lucid dreams can seem more vivid than reality; they
   can provide a high as intense as psychedelics and even deliver sexual
   gratification. (One psychologist claimed to reach orgasm in one-third
   of her lucid dreams, and measures of vaginal pulse amplitude have shown
   that women's dream orgasms correspond to real physiological changes.)
   Others use lucid dreaming to take control of nightmares or rehearse
   difficult real-life situations. Of all my memories of that summer in
   Peru -- drinking pisco in the desert, finding a mummified baby,
   unwrapping it under less-than-scientifically-optimal conditions -- the
   one that stands out most is the memory of my first lucid dream.

   At nine o'clock, I climbed into the bottom bunk and curled up in my
   sleeping bag, worn out from physical exertion and the monotony of
   digging. I set my alarm for five a.m. and drifted off almost
   immediately, my body too tired to let my mind wander down its usual
   anxiety-laden paths. And then, the scene changed. It was a summer
   afternoon -- not the Andean summer, with its thin warmth and cloudy
   nights, but a real summer, the kind of heat so extravagant you jump in
   the water and dry off in the sun. I soaked up the warmth I'd been
   craving, treading water in some bucolic pool I'd never seen before. I
   don't particularly like swimming in real life; I don't like exercising
   in any form without the distraction of podcasts or Pandora. But this
   was different -- effortless and sensual. I had a heightened awareness
   of every part of my body, the physicality of the cool water and the
   bright air and a surreal forest enclosing the pool in magnificent
   foliage. I woke up euphoric.

   The memory had none of the haziness that usually clouds dreams, and the
   details remain perfectly crisp years later. But I wasn't just elated;
   the whole thing was also vaguely disturbing. I hadn't been in my
   sleeping bag in a dusty dormitory in Peru -- I had been transported to
   some faraway place, and I preferred it there. My jaunt in the pool had
   shaken my sense of what was real, and I couldn't explain it with-out
   sounding crazy. All I knew was that I wanted to do it again.

   James and I spent the rest of the summer practicing LaBerge's tips. We
   recounted our previous night's dreams while we scratched the grime off
   ancient pots. We repeated LaBerge's mantra ad nauseam: "Tonight, I will
   have a lucid dream." We made up mantras of our own: "Tonight, I will
   fly to the moon." We learned to recognize the signs that we were
   dreaming, like finding ourselves flying or meeting dead people. Every
   couple of hours, we would do what LaBerge called a reality test, asking
   ourselves if we were awake or asleep -- a trick that, once ingrained,
   LaBerge promised would trigger lucidity.

   The bar for what constitutes good conversation may be lower when you
   spend most of your time scraping the sand with a trowel, but even after
   I left Peru, even when I had more than four people to talk to,
   high-speed WiFi, and whole libraries full of books, I couldn't stop
   thinking about dreams. They were so much fuller, so much more
   mysterious than I had ever imagined.

   I began keeping a dream diary, carefully logging whatever I could
   remember of my dreams in a spiral-bound leather notebook each morning;
   I had read that it was important to record something every day, no
   matter how fragmented or boring. The results were almost immediate.
   Within weeks, the entries in my journal went from a dutiful No
   recollection or brief, tentative snippets (I am watching the
   Nutcracker? There is a spider?) to two or three long, convoluted
   narratives almost every night. My new night life was every bit as
   active -- and at least as entertaining -- as my waking hours, and I was
   stunned: I understood that I had been having dreams like this all my
   life, but I had been promptly forgetting them, letting them fade away
   as though they had never happened. What adventures had I gone on and
   then forgotten? What opportunities -- to gain new insight or just to
   take a break from reality -- had I missed?

   Most new skills -- especially those that promise to change how you
   experience the world -- are difficult to learn. Mastering a new
   language takes years of concentrated study. Meditating requires
   patience and frequent, sometimes frustrating practice. Gains are
   incremental, often imperceptible. But improving your dream life can be
   as simple as increasing the time you devote to thinking about dreams
   from none at all to a minute or two each day, sparing a pre-bed thought
   for your intention to remember your dreams or taking a moment to write
   them down or speak them into your smartphone in the morning. The
   process is painless; the progress is swift. And the payoff is
   life-changing. Becoming aware of your dreams is like dipping into a
   well of otherwise inaccessible fantasies and fears, signs from our
   subconscious and creative solutions to projects and problems.

   Excerpted from Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly
   Journey by Alice Robb. Copyright © 2018 by Alice Robb. Published and
   reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights
   reserved.
     __________________________________________________________________

   New York Times: "Opinion: Why Do You Keep Dreaming You Forgot Your
   Pants? It's Science" -- "One muggy Saturday last summer, I went on a
   date with a man who seemed entirely fine. We drank two beers and went
   for a walk, and he explained why he liked certain buildings that we
   passed. We kissed, and his breath tasted like cigarettes. We parted
   ways, and I couldn't muster the energy to answer his emoji-laden
   follow-up texts about my weekend activities.

   "The date was mediocre at best -- but in the days that followed, I
   second-guessed my decision not to see him again. Maybe I had written
   him off too soon; maybe I should have given things a chance to develop.
   After all, he had some good qualities. He was handsome, tall, employed
   -- and not, refreshingly, as a writer.

   "It was only after a painfully on-the-nose dream a few weeks later that
   I stopped doubting my intuition. In the dream, I had agreed to a second
   date, and I had brought along two friends to observe our interactions
   and help me assess him. At the end of the group outing, my friends
   pulled me away and offered a unanimous decision: He wasn't for me. I
   had made the right call."

   Time: "People Say It's Boring to Talk About a Dream You Had. Here's Why
   You Should Do It Anyway" -- "When Shane McCorristine, a scholar of
   modern British history, went trawling through police reports from
   19th-century England, he was struck by the number that contained
   descriptions of dreams: witnesses and victims seemed to make a point of
   telling police and coroners if they had anticipated a crime or a death
   in their dreams. Telling dreams, he said, was a way to create "a social
   bond between a vulnerable person and the authorities." But he noticed
   that dream reports started dropping out of inquests and news stories in
   the 1920s, and he pinned the blame on Freud. 'Freudian theories were
   spreading, and they were recalibrating people's relationship with the
   dream world,' he said. 'There's increasing embarrassment around
   dreams.' Suddenly, they might be interpreted as signs of some latent
   neurosis or sexual deviance.

   "A century later, conventional wisdom dictates that dreams are not a
   subject for polite conversation. Writing for the New Yorker's website
   in 2018, Dan Piepenbring began a review of Insomniac Dreams -- a book
   about Nabokov's relationship with his dreams -- by apologizing for the
   topic: 'Dreams are boring. On the list of tedious conversation topics,
   they fall somewhere between the five-day forecast and golf.' A few
   years earlier, radio producer Sarah Koenig devoted an episode of This
   American Life to laying out the seven topics that interesting people
   should never talk about. Dreams came in at number four, right behind
   menstruation. In the Guardian, British writer Charlie Brooker claimed
   that listening to other people's dreams made him dream 'of a future in
   which the anecdote has finished and their face has stopped talking and
   their body's gone away.' Novelist Michael Chabon wrote in the New York
   Review of Books that discussion of dreams is all but banned from his
   breakfast table, railing against them as poor conversational fodder:
   They drag on and on. They get twisted in the telling. Most
   unforgivable, they are bad stories. When I explain the topic of my
   book, people frequently offer their sympathies: 'People must want to
   tell you their dreams,' they say with an I-feel-your-pain nod. 'Those
   are the most boring conversations.' "

   This program aired on November 20, 2018.

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