Learning Through Dreaming

As Freud saw it, dreams provide psychic gratification for suppressed desires. Researchers in the growing science of sleep-watching suspect that their mysterious function is much broader than that. The latest findings, as presented to the annual meeting of the Association for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep, are beginning to confirm the link, hitherto experimentally unproved, between dreams and conscious functioning. In dreaming, the experts now surmise, the healthy mind brings its emotional experience to bear on the stresses of the day and forges new mental mechanisms for dealing with them when they recur.

The source of this conviction was the discovery of a distinct phase of normal sleep which is known as REM. At fairly regular intervals during the night, the electrical waves of a sleeper's brain become as active as they are during wakefulness, and his eyeballs dart and swivel in a series of rapid eye movements (REMs). During these periods of REM sleep, which typically last 20 to 30 minutes, the sleeper is most likely to dream.

Instinctive Chickens. One hint that REM sleep may help creatures master and retain new experiences came from research on chickens. Instinct-driven chicks do most of the learning essential to their existence during the first 24 hours of life. It is then that they become attached to one very special cozy object; normally this is a mother hen, but under laboratory conditions they will accept such surrogates as an old shoe or a ball and learn how to recognize them. According to Dr. Ramon

Greenberg of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Boston, chicks during this particularly crucial period spend almost all their sleep in REM. Then, for the rest of their lives, they do without it almost completely.

No one really knows for sure whether animals in REM sleep actually dream, but they apparently undergo a learning process. University of California Psychologist William Fishbein has found that laboratory mice taught to expect electric shocks at the end of laboratory alleyways develop amnesia about their painful experience after they have been deprived of REM sleep. It is now provable that the more advanced a creature is, the more it can learn--and the more REM sleep it has. Humans in infancy, learning more intensely than they ever will again because everything is new to them, spend 50% of their sleep in REM, compared with 20% for adults.

REM sleep has little to do with certain kinds of wide-awake learning; adults who are deprived of REM, for example, show little or no decline in their ability to think logically or memorize. Nonetheless, Psychoanalyst Greenberg and Dr. Louis Breger of San Francisco's Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute contend that the dreams of REM promote a special kind of "emotional" learning. They believe that most dreams are unconscious responses to recent, emotionally intense experiences. If people are forced to go without REM sleep and its dreams, their ability to handle similar stress experiences the next day declines. In one experiment, Greenberg and two co-workers showed a group of volunteers a grisly bedtime film of an autopsy, measured the emotional tension that the movie provoked, and then let the volunteers have an uninterrupted night's sleep. When the subjects watched the movie again the next day, their reactions were considerably calmer than they had been the first time. But a test group of viewers, who did not have REM dreams because they were awakened before their brain waves began to show REM activity, could not get accustomed to the film. They watched the rerun with almost as much nervousness as they had shown during their first viewing.

Programming Patterns. These tentative experiments lend support to the theories of Physicist Edmond Dewan, who was one of the first scientists to suggest that REM sleep serves to bring into play fundamental computer-like "programming" patterns of the mind. "In higher organisms," Dewan says, "the brain is continually reorganized to meet the organism's current needs." To San Francisco's Breger, the crucial integration of REM is possible because the outside world is cut off and "social constraints" are minimal. In short, says Breger, "if something comes up in your present life that makes you anxious, during your dreams you can integrate it into ways of dealing with similar kinds of problems that are stored in your memory."

The fundamental question of why men dream is just beginning to yield an answer. One still incomplete search involves attempts to discover a link--logical enough in theory--between REM shortages and mental illness. Another is seeking to discover whether REM sleep and dreams activate the forces that unleash creativity or select what people forget. The experts are beginning to suspect that man's future knowledge of dreams will be generated by scientists who have the sense to take their research home and sleep on it.

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