Just days before his assassination, President Lincoln reportedly had a vivid dream about his own death. Paul McCart ney heard the melody to “Yesterday” in his sleep though he woke up singing the words “scrambled eggs.” And Freud and Jung had a thing or two to say about dreams.
The Daliesque realm of the unconscious has long offered tantalizing hints of symbolism and prophecy. And even as science questions decades of assumptions about the importance and meaning of dreams, many people still consider them a bottomless well of wisdom and guidance.
Like Sir Paul and Salvador Dali, artists continue to plumb their dreams for inspiration. For his new film “Inception,” the director Christopher Nolan created futuristic special effects to evoke the subconscious strategies of a mental espionage specialist who plants and extracts information while his subjects sleep. The result is a mad rush of action, surreal settings and characters that may or may not exist.
As The Times’s A.O. Scott wrote in his review, “The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears.”
Some actors, including Meg Ryan and Harvey Keitel, are turning to that same unconscious reality to hone their craft. In workshops in New York and Los Angeles, they draw on Jungian psychology to act out roles from their own dreams.
“Actors are always searching for ways to get close to the psychology, the life, the experience of the characters they are creating,” Mr. Keitel told The Times. He added, “The dream work brought to the actor another tool ? we stage our dreams, we put them on their feet.”
Non-artists can also receive feedback about their dreams, without the expense of a psychoanalyst. In dream groups, which are proliferating in America and other countries, people are opening up their dreams for discussion.
“Telling your dream to a group of people can be a very intense experience,” Liz Hill, a technical writer who belongs to a dream group at a Unitarian Church in Ohio, told The Times. “It invites different perspectives, which illuminates aspects of the dream that you might not have thought of on your own.”
But for all our continuing search for poetry, meaning and guidance from dreams, neuroscience may be leaning toward a more prosaic interpretation. As Benedict Carey wrote in The Times, dreams may be more physiological than psychological, simply a tune-up for waking consciousness. Divorced from the waking senses during sleep, some scientists theorize, our brains continue to fire away with random impulses to keep things running smoothly.
“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” Dr. Rodolfo Llinas, a neurologist at New York University, told Mr. Carey.
As for those portentous symbols and prophecies, a study of 1,000 college students at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon universities cited in The Times suggested that self-serving bias plays a big role in how we interpret our own dreams. In other words, we see what we want to see.
In Freud’s case, that was sex. Lincoln could have had a death wish. And Paul McCartney may just have wanted breakfast.
KEVIN DELANEY
