In dreams we fly, we fuck, we fight, we fantasize, do fantastic impossible things…and yet we barely remember the dreams the moment we wake up, and any tattered memory-embers we may have of our freeform sleeping brain image-trajectories are soon washed from our minds by the day’s events. If we could only understand our dreams, we feel we would know ourselves and have a much better handle on solving the tantalizingly just-beyond-our-understanding-grasp life-fragment hieroglyphs confusing and delighting and terrifying and arousing us on a nightly basis. And that may be so…who knows? Who knows much of anything about life?

Well, maybe people like Patrick McNamara can help us out a little bit. McNamara, who is a PhD in the Department of Neurology of the Boston University School of Medicine, has written this interesting science textbook to try and solve a few of life’s sleeping, dreaming mysteries. It synthesizes past and current thinking on the science of dreaming with a few hypotheses of the author’s own, and it’s very interesting stuff indeed. What occurs to you upon reading this book is how little true research seems to have been done into the new science of dreaming, with McNamara bemoaning the fact that many of the results he has to draw upon come from the 1960s, and that there aren’t a lot of control groups to draw from. But he works with what he does have, and from his limited scientific pool he draws a few conclusions about sleep and dreaming (mostly the latter):

Sleep appears to be an energy conservation phase.

The dreams of men have far more threatening strangers in them, as befits our role as hunter-gatherers competing for females against other males.

Non-REM and REM dreaming are two distinct phases of dreaming, with the former setting up the latter, which contains the dreams we can sometimes remember on waking.

If awoken from a dream, it is possible for the emotional content of the dream to affect our waking emotional and mental state.

Dreaming helps us construct a narrative ‘self’ to give order to our lives and help us make sense of our experiences and existences; it’s basically editing our day’s experiences and helping us remember the bits we learned from or that we feel may be important in some (not always conscious) way. Dreams consolidate certain key images into the memory, facilitating remembrance and recall (and thus making the waking ‘story’ of our lives) at a later date.

One quarter of chronic nightmare sufferers have family members who have attempted or completed suicide.

REM percentages are increased in people who plan, attempt and complete suicide; interruption and reduction of REM dreaming can make depressed people initially feel better.

Emotions in dreams are mostly negative – 80% of dreams have negative emotions in them; only half of dreams involved dreamer-success scenarios in males, and only 40% on females.

There seems to be a lapse in self-reflectiveness in dreams.

During a day, we may imagine scenarios when, if we’d done something differently, a different outcome may have been achieved. We visualize the alternate options and what may have happened had we chosen this different way. These different options are them sometimes given image form in our dreams, literally showing us what may have happened under different circumstances, presenting all the different images of the scenarios imagined but then forgotten.

Dreams simulate threatening events, and thus allow for rehearsal of threat perception and threat avoidance. This is in part why dreams are overly negative or over-represent threatening scenarios.

Females are more likely to dream of family members (19%) than males (12%).

REM dreaming lets a mother know a child is a good strong healthy investment genetically and deserves resources from the mother’s body, by producing ‘costly’ hard-to-fake signals about the child’s strength and viability as a gene carrier; crying, movements, smiles, suckling, etc. This happens in infant sleep; we dream far less REM dreams when we are older and don’t need to signal our mothers.

REM dreaming is a negative, physiologically costly thing for a body to produce, but necessary to maintain early mother-child bonding attention. Children who don’t bond with their mothers and receive comfort and care and soothing and suckling during the early, critical months after birth perceive the world as a hard, harsh place on a base physiological level and thus unconsciously make a decision to have more offspring of their own to make sure some of their genes survive this harsh environment the future children would be born into. This environment may not necessarily actually be harsh, but to an infant without comfort it is perceived so and thus adaptive gene survival measures are made.

We learn to relate to each other in our dreams when growing up, rehearsing interpersonal interaction scenarios and how they might turn out; talking to others, playing with them, etc. This helps us relate to and interact with other people in our waking lives.

Now. There are other things in this book about dreaming and sleeping and how they intertwine and what they tell us about our dream-lives, but I’ll leave you to find them out for yourselves! You want me to do all the work? Don’t be so lazy! Hopefully I’ve just whetted your appetite for this totally fascinating work. One word of warning if you are going to buy it, though: it’s a science textbook, which means it has a lot of hardcore scientific formulas and equations and information about brain chemistry and function; it’s hardly popular science. I’m not the best person to review this book with regard to its technical proficiency aspects, being as I am a layman, but still gained a lot of fascinating information from my reading.

One thing that impressed itself upon me as I read was just how little we truly know about dreaming, how little work on it that has been done and how much more there is to be done before we come close, as a race, to having any true baseline understanding of where we go each night and why. This book came out in 2004, so I would imagine there would have been a fair bit of work done on dreaming since then. And I know I, for one, can’t wait to find out all about it. Isn’t life amazing?

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com