Deirdre Barrett (English)

Where dreams come from is a podcast featuring successful people from around the world who have pursued their dreams to arrive at a station in life. I'm your host, Sanjeev Chatterjee. I'm a professor of cinema and journalism. And in my creative life, I make documentary films. I started this podcast to explore what it takes for people to follow their dreams, even while being true to who they are, at least who they believe they are. So far in this podcast, most of my guests have told us about their aspirations in life, and their quest to achieve their dream. My guest today, Deirdre Barrett is different. She studies dreams. She writes books about the dreams people have in their sleep. And she teaches classes at Harvard about those dreams. Deirdre has been interested in dreams from a very young age, and her searches in part about the dreams we have while asleep, and they're bearing on our waking lives. Deierdre Barrett, welcome to where dreams come from. Hi, nice to be here. Our conversation today is unusual for this podcast, because usually we talk to people who had aspirations that they were following, but you are an expert on dreams dreams, as in things we see when we are sleeping. So I will try to keep my conversation. Limited that I wanted to know where your interest arose. To study dreams or be fascinated with dreams. I always had very vivid dreams from the earliest childhood ones I can remember i just i remember dreams every night and they were really more surreal adventures than most people's. So most of the dream researchers I know tend to have a much more vivid than than average dream life. So I think getting interested in my own dreams is where it started. And tell me a little bit more about dream searchers or dreamers searchers were a fairly broad group. What What I do is mainly on dream content, I collect people's dream journals and correlate it with their gender and some waking personality traits and nationalities. Or I do some clinical work where I'm looking at how the dreams of people who suffered a major trauma differ from other people. I do intervention studies where either I'm working with people who have post traumatic nightmares in coaching them on changing those, or I've done some studies on problem solving dreams, not just the ones that happen naturally, but on teaching people bedtime dreaming calibration, where they can self suggest the dream content focus on a particular problem or question, what is the correlation of what we dream about? To our lives, there's something called the continuity hypothesis, which has been pretty well proven now, which, which posited that we dream about things that are very consistent with the concerns in our waking life. Long ago, some of the psychoanalytic dream theories, especially young tended to say that whatever developed in our waking personality, that that the sort of opposite trends that were less developed in our conscious self would be developing in our unconscious and showing up in dreams so that that people that were very sweet awake might be more aggressive in their dreams, or people who are very assertive awake might be very passive and shyness and fears would be coming out. But that that opposite hypothesis proves not to be true. There's much more consistency to the trends that people show awake and asleep. Something you said caught my attention. So how does culture and religion perhaps and nationality play into it? All of those external things certainly affect our dreams. They are somewhat socially shaped. But actually some of the some of the similarities are even more striking than the differences across cultures or societies or nationalities. We seem to be hardwired for fears about a lot of the same things and striving for social relationships. And especially through this pandemic. I've been so struck by how similarly people all over the world are dreaming about it, the same motif show up all around the The world. But definitely you can see some differences that are culturally determined like in most societies, men will dream about men about two thirds of the time and women about 1/3 of their characters and women dream about 5050. But in cultures that are much more sexist than our own, where women are really kind of to be seen, but not heard, you see even more male characters, it's still there more women in women's dreams than men. But the but the total number go down, you have particularly studied trauma and dreams. And we are in the middle of still in the middle, I think of the COVID crisis. What have we learned? or What did you learn through this? This process, I started this survey on March 23, of 2020. And it's it's still ongoing. But the book came out when we were about six months into the pandemic. And I've seen an evolution in what people dreamed over time, early on, there were lots of dreams that were just very directly about fear of catching the virus. And about half of those were very literal, the person was spiking a fever, or they were coughing or having trouble breathing and thinking they were getting the virus in a very literal way. And about half of them were more metaphors for getting the virus. And some of the metaphors you see in any sort of disaster or crisis are similar. And I think there's sort of primally instinctively coded into us, we often dream about natural disasters in place of something going on in the modern world. earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, when that's not the actual issue, and I saw those after 911. And I saw a lot of them with COVID. But then there have been some metaphors that seem very unique for the COVID pandemic, like there were lots of dreams early on of the dream or being attacked by bugs. And it was no one type of bug but swarms of flying insects, like bees, Hornets swarming at the dreamer, masses have wriggling worms moving toward them, armies of cockroaches running toward them, just all sorts of bugs, but almost always lots and lots and lots of them. And I think that, partly in English and several other languages, not all the way we have this word, pan like word where we say I'm coming down with a bug to mean, I'm getting a virus or at least getting sick. So I think that dreams often do sort of pun like things with visual images substituting for for words. But also I think, very closely related to that, that lots and lots of small things that cumulatively could harm or kill, you make a swarm of bugs, a very, very apt metaphor for all the virus particles coming into your body. So so that's one big cluster of dreams that I've never seen for other crises that were very distinctive to this, there was a smaller cluster of invisible monsters where we're out there, you can't see them. Sometimes you could hear their footsteps or you could see their shadows. Sometimes you just knew there were these invisible monsters that could jump on you at any moment. And I've seen monsters standing in for other crises, but not invisible ones. So So there, the similarities were striking with with other disasters, but but also there were some unique things. And then it really evolved over time. It was mostly about fear of getting the virus at first, but then after a while, those never went away. They have not gone away To this day, but but there began to be many others like as different countries and parts of this country went into lockdown for a while or had quarantines and stay at home orders. There became a lot that were about those more secondary effects of being furloughed from one's job or having one's kids home from school or being told to stay at home. And those tend to split into groups were the people who were sheltering at home alone had these exaggerated scenarios about isolation and loneliness, and they were being thrown in prison, especially solitary confine that there were multiple ones where somebody had to either be alone on a spaceship or they were appointed to be a one person, colony in one case to Mars and another case to Saturn. So just these narratives I'm all alone far away from anybody else. That exaggerated what they were feeling about staying home in their apartments, in the popular way of thinking. We think about dreams, I think as aspirations in life. But the way you have just spoken about it, I'm wondering if dreams are triggered by fears more than aspirations, I think at least as much and certainly if you're talking about something like dreams about a pandemic, more of them are going to be fearful. I mean, when I do research on creativity and problem solving, and I'm having people incubate things that would be useful in their professional endeavors, then many more of those come out as being something that relates to aspirations. So I think that that our dreams just range across everything we'd be thinking about awake. So we wouldn't say our waking thoughts are just about aspirations or just about fears. And I think dreams, dreams are similarly wishes, fears, just all kinds of other mundane things. Just everything worth thinking about a week might turn up in a dream, but some of them are definitely dreaming in the nighttime sense about our dreams and the aspirational sense. I have to ask that, you know, having been in academia for a considerable amount of time. In my own lifetime, I've seen a tremendous spike in young people's mental health issues. Is there a correlation between mental mental health? And what we dream about and how we dream about them? Yes, I mean, it is, like I said, about sort of general continuity with waking life. That's true. of mental health problems. There, there are two things that are the strongest predictor of nightmares. And one of them interestingly, is just how vivid your dreams are, and how much dream recall you have. So there's some tendency for some of the same people who would have kind of beautiful, transcendent dramatic adventures in their dreams also to have somewhat more than their share of nightmares. But the other correlate is how anxious Are you specifically? So the same people who have waking anxiety disorders tend to have many more dreams that are anxious or, or even nightmares. So so there's kind of just how vivid are your dreams thing that that sort of cuts across the positive, negative or seeming to be tied into mental health versus mental illness? But yes, definitely depressed people have more negative content in their dreams and anxious people have more fearful content in their dreams. And you, you do see it, paralleling the waking state. And what do we know about people who can't recall any of their dreams, it's like a bell shaped curve. It's really rare for someone to say that they haven't recalled a dream in years that they have no dream recall at all, or that they haven't since they were a child, although that you do encounter that occasionally. That's not unheard of. But But much more typically, there's a range between people who'd say they only recall a few dreams a year and people who say they were called dreams most nights, there's that's just if you got 100 people together, you'd hear both of those ends of the continuum. And there there are a number of things that correlate with how much dream recall people have the the most boring but the really strongest predictor is how many hours a night you sleep. Because we we have rapid eye movement sleep when when most dreams occur every 90 minutes, but each REM period gets longer through the night. So the first one is just a few minutes, and then it's going on like 2025 minutes, potential potentially in the longest period at the end of the night. So if you sleep six hours instead of eight, you are not getting three quarters of your dream time as you get three quarters of your sleep time you are getting much less than that. So we are a chronically sleep deprived society. You're talking about things that could trigger dreams in the How much do you sleep, it's really a matter of how determining how much you're dreaming, but for all of the other things I'm talking about. For a given amount of sleep. Most people are spending the same amount of time in the dream state and it's a matter of how much do you recall your dreams rather than triggering the dream to originally happen? We mo Most of us forget most of our dream content, in what ways has our understanding of how dreams while we are sleeping core relate to our waking lives. I think that young and Freud both had some really important ideas that are so incorporated into modern psychology that they're not even the ones that we talk about as union or Friday in that much. I mean, Freud didn't invent the idea that dreams are unconscious, or metaphorically representing things for us. But he's certainly the one that took that idea out of Western philosophical traditions and kind of dragged it into western medicine and psychology and applied it to mental health issues. And, and so that idea that, that dreams are metaphorically representing unconscious trends is pretty widely accepted. And we don't really call that for adn or young agreed with with that part anymore. We just think of that as kind of a psychological given. And some of the things like dreams being so visual and the representation and tending to condense one or more people or elements into into one thing in a dream for Freud was was pointing out a lot of things about dreams that we just take for granted now that were not as, as obvious to people before. And young put so much emphasis on dreams as telling us about other aspects of ourselves that we're not totally in touch with. And again, with it being the unconscious, and that some of these things were kind of inherited, shared human tendencies and others were specific to our personal experience. So let's say that I'm someone who recalls dreams very vividly. What are some things you can say about such a person there, there's a range, it's not like recalling dreams vividly automatically tells you for sure certain characteristics, but you'd be likelier to be getting more sleep than most people in our society, you'd be likely or to be fairly psychologically minded and introspective and just interested in psychological things in general, and more than average Lee interested in dreams, you may wake up a little more gradually and lie and relax when you first wake up rather than leap up and turn your attention to some practical task at hand. So there are lots of sort of on average, if you have a group of people who recall dreams better than average, most of them will do each of these things. There's not a perfect one to one correspondence for any of those. Do dreams have a practical application in our lives? I think dreams have many practical applications. First of all, I think that dreams may be doing things for us without us consciously doing anything with them awake. I mean, there's research that suggests that they kind of readjust our emotional state from what we went to sleep with. That that there's a certain psychological healing that's that's happening during rapid eye movement, sleep, even if we don't recall our dreams, but especially like that the effect of some of the recalled content changes our mood or way of thinking about things in positive ways without necessarily having to focus on it are the things we can do to enhance our dreams through a more positive direction? Yes, I think in a superficial sense, but this has been a very common request to the pandemic, people just talk about having more anxiety dreams than they would like, and they feel like it's a vicious cycle that they're anxious by day so they're, they have anxious dreams, so they wake up more anxious and, and so you can use that time dreaming, calibration just to try to have fewer anxiety dreams and have the dreams you'd like instead, you don't want to don't want fall asleep going, I hope I don't have an anxiety dream that just makes makes it come to mind. So you want you want to think what you would like to dream maybe there's a person that you haven't gotten to see through the pandemic, maybe there's a favorite place that you'll go to soon when things open up even more. So I want to dream about this person or I want to dream about this place or maybe flying dreams or your favorite dream. I want to have a flying dream tonight. So that can just make your experience happier. Some people want more adventure than they're getting now but others people want more sort of soothing, calm, safety kind of imagery and their dreams. So you can do that with dream incubation. But you can also challenge yourself more and and think about problems that you want to solve or questions that that you have. How do I want to change my life? Once this is over? How do I want to be a different person than before this happened as a question to fall asleep asking yourself, you can definitely use it to focus on the since you use dreams in more of aspirations, so we can actually suggest what we want to dream like, on demand. Yes, and it does not work perfectly. In one study where I had college students incubating dreams on particular practical problems that they were trying to solve in a week of doing that 50% of them dreamed about their target problem or question, and then about 25% dream, some sort of answer to it. But but so. So if it's more like the dream about a particular person, that's about a 50% success rate, just in having a nice happy type of dream. In Dreaming an answer to a simple question that's about a quarter of people will succeed in that in the course of, of a week. And, and many of the failures are simply that person doesn't recall any dreams at all from that period. I mean, some people would call some dreams that didn't target it. But really, at least half the failures are just I failed to recall dreams, you have actually documented your own dreams on your website in the form of art, is there a purpose to that? Or is that just something you wanted to do? I guess it's it's mostly something I wanted to do. Um, I've written about dreams and art, I'm very interested in dreams and creativity broadly. So I've certainly written about other artists who make images from their art. And I've always seen such compelling imagery in my own dreams that both I wanted to look at it again, to be able to kind of stare at it the way I can actually look at it in the dream rather than just remember it. But I also wanted to be able to show it to other people, you know, that this is this creature, I saw a dream, or this is this amazing architectural structure I was in last night. And I, I really can't paint or sketch very realistically, when I tried to do that. It's kind of an exercise in frustration. So it was really about six years ago that I sort of finally figured out that by a combination of taking photographs, and then doing very heavy digital manipulation and changes on them, I could produce something that looked quite a bit like, like imagery that I was seeing in my dream. So I've kind of been wanting to drag my dream images into the waking world for my whole life. And periodically would wake up and draw something and then just not like the drawing. But But once I was doing it with the manipulating photographs with with all the new digital programs, their sub programs and Photoshop, and then there all these other freestanding programs like deep dream that really helped with that. So So I found that very rewarding. And again, that just the number one thing is to see my own dream images again, but I like that some other people can see them and some of them enjoy them. And some of them resonate with them and start telling me things that are similar about their dream world. So just like with a dream sharing, I feel like sort of dream sharing visually by making art is is a way of connecting people. And it's fairly different dreams that I might do the most intense interpretation and work on or right about as an illustration, I love problem solving dream, versus the ones that just have compelling images that make me want to, to reproduce it better. Thank you very much for taking this time with me this afternoon. This was interesting. I enjoyed it. Thank you. My take away from this conversation with Deirdre Barrett, is that we each one of us need not think of ourselves as helpless subjects of our dreams. We have a clear role to play in giving shape to our dreams while sleeping and in real life. Today's episode was edited by Scott album for media for change. I am Sanjeev Chatterjee