Sigmund Freud may have been right all along. Dreams really could be our unconscious minds giving us a glimpse of our deepest, darkest desires.
Proponents of Freud’s theories on psychoanalysis — for so long scorned by the scientific establishment — may well be rejoicing. Scientists announced last week that they have found the region of the brain where dreams originate.
Swiss doctors, writing in the Annals of Neurology, describe the case of a 73-year-old woman who suffered a stroke to the occipital lobe of her brain. This region is responsible for the processing of visual information and, unsurprisingly, the stroke impaired the patient’s sight. A few days later she regained her sight, but a new problem emerged that astonished the doctors: the patient stopped dreaming.
Dr Claudio Bassetti, a neurologist at the University Hospital of Zurich said they had stumbled on an important clue to the origins of dreams. The patient’s experiences pointed to that part of the brain that acted as a sort of dream factory, as well as the extent of lesions needed to stop it working.
Bassetti and his colleague, Dr Matthias Bischof, used MRI scans to determine that the patient’s stroke had damaged areas located deep in the back half of her brain. Recent work has shown that this region is involved in the visual processing of faces and landmarks, as well as emotions and visual memories. The scientists say that it is a logical set of functions for a brain area that could generate or control dreams.
For six weeks after the stroke, Bassetti also studied the patient’s brain waves as she slept. They found no disruptions in her sleep cycle. Her rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — a paradoxical state where we remain fast asleep, but our brains are as active as during waking hours — was normal.
That was significant because dreaming and REM sleep often occur together. For many years it was thought that REM sleep was the physical manifestation of the dream state. Bassetti’s work, therefore, points to different brain systems underlying the two.
For generations scientists and psychologists have tried to unravel the mystery of dreams. Dream interpretation was a fundamental part of Freud’s work at the turn of the 20th century. He argued that dreams were a form of wish fulfilment, arising from our sexual urges. But his ideas were entirely subjective and, as such, scientists have struggled to accept them.
In the late 1980s Professor Mark Solms at the University of Cape Town proposed that two specific areas of the brain were required for the formation of dreams: the occipital lobe and a part of the brain’s frontal lobe that controlled motivation.
Solms’s theory also proposed a scientific explanation of psychoanalysis. Freud argued that dreams were representative of desires and Solms argued that they were controlled by a part of the brain that controlled motivation.
Bassetti’s work serves to prove part of Solms’s theory and the experiment itself is a great leap forward from what has come before.
”A lot of the time if somebody’s got brain damage and they can’t tell you any dreams, there is the possibility that it is because they’ve got bad memories,” said Dr Mark Blagrove, a psychologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom. This can yield false results because it might look as though the person is not actually able to produce dreams.
But Bassetti’s work got around this problem by investigating the patient’s attention and memory and ability to imagine things when awake. In addition, the patient reported that she dreamed three or four times a week before her stroke.
With time, some dreams did return. A year after her stroke, Bassetti’s patient experienced occasional dreams, but no more than one a week. The dreams were also less vivid and intense compared with before the stroke.
Bassetti said that more work studying the occipital lobe was needed to conclusively prove that it was indeed involved in dream production. Many psychologists believe that understanding why we dream is fundamental to understanding the human mind.
”Given that we spend so much of the night dreaming, you may have to come up with some evolutionary theory about why we do it,” Blagrove said. ”You can come up with two theories: one is that we’ve evolved to dream and the dream has a function. The other is that something else has evolved and dreaming is just a side product.”
Jennie Parker, a psychology researcher at the University of the West of England, said that dreaming is the most recurring form of human consciousness. ”If we can figure out dreams, we can figure out all other forms of human consciousness.”
Alternatively, the answer to the riddle of dreams may all be quite simple, mundane almost.
”I see them as the cinema of the mind,” said Dr Jim Horne of the sleep research centre at Loughborough University. ”They’re there to keep the brain entertained … and have very little significance beyond that.” — Â