Across the pond

Sigmund Freud has had a bad press in the last few decades. Classic five days a week psycho-analysis has gone into near terminal decline; cognitive behavioural therapy has become the new orthodoxy for those who favour the talking cure. Scientists have poured scorn on his ‘non-scientific’ thinking, demolishing the oepidus complex, and proclaiming the advantages of drugs for curing the mentally ill. The investigative journalists have had a field day exposing his private life, and the way he treated his wife and they have found evidence to suggest that he may not even have cured his patients.

But last week’s BBC Horizon programme, which collected together a lot of the latest scientific evidence about the nature of dreaming, should give the vast body of anti-Freudians pause for thought. Thanks to the invention of the sleep laboratory, scientists have been able to discover about how the brain works when we are asleep and this in turn has helped our understanding of how the brain works when we are awake.

But, as well as that, the sleep scientists have been gathering a vast amount of evidence as to how to the mind works. For several decades now they have been waking people up, immediately after, the bed-side screen indicated they were dreaming, and asking them to relate their dreams.

This evidence demonstrates that Freud got at least one thing right; the although what we remember of our dreams are mostly only fragments. And that the whole dream is far from the random nonsense, which scientists in the early years of computers likened to down time of computers. Dreams are more like novels, poems or pictures. And like these art forms they are telling us something which can be useful in our waking lives.

So there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that remembed dreams can help us to solve problems in our daily lives.

And perhaps more important the sleep studies suggest that even those dreams which we do not remember at all may have helped us to solve problems and increase our understanding of our own behaviour and of the behaviour of others. In other words some of the time when we are asleep, we are thinking, but in a different way that when we are awake.

In the early years of the sleep laboratory studies, the scientists thought that dreaming happened when the sleeper’s brain waves indicated REM sleep. But more recently they have discovered that we dream sometimes when the brain-waves are showing a non-REM pattern.

One intrepid scientist conducted an interesting experiment to try and establish the differences between the REM dreams and the others. He asked the sleepers to fill in a questionairre about how they were feeling immediately after they were woken up.

He found that after REM dreams the sleepers most often reported feeling bad about themselves and pessimistic. But after non-REM dreams, they were feeling good about themselves and optimistic.

That suggests to me that non-REM dreams are much more like the ‘day-dreaming’ we do when we are awake, when we see the world through rosy-coloured spectacles and imagine we can move mountains and win the heart of our beloved.

Whereas night dreams all too often leave us troubled. We feel there is something nasty in the woodshed, even though we are none too sure what it is.

So overall the scientists are now finding evidence to suggest that Sigmund was ahead of his time and that he was not a Fraud. Although his method involved probing into the unconscious mind, he was very cautious about interfering with it. Unlike many today’s therapists and the hypnotists.

His essential message was never more relevant than in our 24/7 world. In you’ve got a problem don’t stay up all night trying to find the answer on the internet.

Just go to bed and sleep on it.