The autocomplete questions Sleep
Why do we dream? You
asked Google
– here's the answer
David Shariatmadari
Every day, millions of internet users ask
Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some
of the commonest queries
Wed 3 Jun 2015 08.33 BST
Maybe we should ask the duck-billed platypus.
Duck-billed
platypus:
Ornithorhynchus anatinus
-billed: Combines with adjectives to
indicate that a bird has a beak of a particular kind or appearance.
Beak: A bird's beak is the hard curved
or pointed part of its mouth.
Back in the 1950s, scientists working on humans
identified a state marked by increased brain activation, accelerated breathing
and heart rate, and muscular paralysis. But perhaps the most remarkable feature
was a flickering of the
eyes beneath closed eyelids – because all these
physiological changes took place while the subjects were fast asleep.
Flickering:
Moving
swiftly, esp back and forth
Beneath:
Under
Fast
asleep: Someone
who is fast asleep or sound asleep is sleeping deeply.
What the researchers had discovered became
known as the “rapid eye movement” (REM) phase. Under normal circumstances, it
recurs every 90 minutes or so, and takes up around 25% of our total time spent
sleeping. It quickly became clear that people woken during REM had much better recall of their dreams; in
fact, they would often say they’d
just that moment been dreaming. As a result, the scientific community
began to think of REM as the outward manifestation of the dream state. For the
first time in human history, the most extraordinary and fantastical part of our
lives had been subject to experimental observation.
Recall: Total recall was translated in
Spain as Desafio total.
They’d
just that moment been dreaming: They said they only dreamed at that moment.
Not only that, but animals were found to
experience REM as well – some of them more often and for longer than humans. We
now know that the REM-iest
mammal of them all is, bizarrely enough, Ornithorhynchus
anatinus, known to you and me as the duck-billed platypus. Perhaps we shouldn’t
be surprised, since, as Nature notes, “an account from as long ago as 1860,
before REM sleep was discovered, reported that young platypus showed ‘swimming’
movements of their forepaws
while asleep”.
REM-iest: Note the superlative
construction
Bizarrely: Something that is bizarre is
very odd and strange.(de manera estrofolària / de forma estrafalaria)
Forepaws: Either of the front feet of
most land mammals that do not have hoofs
Hoof: The hooves of an animal such as
a horse are the hard lower parts of its feet.
Authors might conjure up androids that dream of electric sheep,
but can we now say for sure that platypuses dream of juicy crayfish? Not quite.
Oneirology, despite all we now know about the physiology of sleep, remains a
puzzling and controversial field. During non-REM sleep DNA is repaired and the
organism replenishes itself for the day ahead. But the question of why we – and
probably most other mammals – dream, one that troubled our ancestors, is still
pretty hard to answer today.
Conjure
up: If you
conjure up a memory, picture, or idea, you create it in your mind.
Until relatively recently, it was taken as a given that dreams were meaningful. These
strange visions that came during the night, when the darkness all around spelt
danger, must be messages from the gods, or glimpses of the future. The dreams of powerful men
or women could become famous; a class of people emerged whose job was to
decipher them, since they might foretell the fate of the clan or nation. The Old Testament tells
the story of Joseph, called on to interpret the pharaoh’s dreams of seven
“fatfleshed” cows and seven “leanfleshed” ones. He trusted in God, who gave him
to understand that this meant years of plenty for the kingdom, followed by a
terrible famine. ( fæmɪn
)
Meaningful: If you describe something as
meaningful, you mean that it is serious, important, or useful in some way.
Spell: The first sense is speak each
letter in the word in the correct order. In this case is more related with
magic. If something spells a particular result, often an unpleasant one, it
suggests that this will be the result. A spell is a situation in which events are controlled by a magical
power.
Foretell: If you foretell a future event,
you predict that it will happen.
Fatfleshed
& leanfleshed cows: Flesh is the soft part of a person's or animal's body between the bones
and the skin. Fat is to hava a lot of flesh. If meat is lean, it does not have
very much fat. (vaques groses i vaques magres / vacas gordas y vacas flacas)
Premonitions aren’t just the stuff of ancient
history, however. Ten days before he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, Abraham
Lincoln dreamt this:
I heard subdued sobs,
as if a number of people were weeping.
I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken
by the same pitiful sobbing,
but the mourners were
invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the
same mournful sounds of
distress met me as I passed along ... I kept on until I arrived at the
East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on
which rested a corpse wrapped
in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as
guards; and there was a throng
of people, some gazing mournfully
upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead
in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President’ was his
answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which
awoke me from my dream.
Subdued
sobs: Subdued
sounds are not very loud. When someone sobs, they cry in a noisy way, breathing
in short breaths.
Weep: Cry
Pitiful: Sad
Mourner: A mourner is a person who
attends a funeral, especially as a relative or friend of the dead person.
Sounds
of distress: Sounds of suffering, sounds of pain.
Sickening: You describe something as
sickening when it gives you feelings of horror or disgust, or makes you feel
sick in your stomach.
Wrap /
wrapped: When
you wrap something, you fold paper or cloth tightly round it to cover it
completely. A wrap is a piece of clothing which women wear round their
shoulders, either to keep them warm when wearing an evening dress, or for
decoration over a coat. So, in Spain it can be a “rebequita” and the thing that
covers a “burrito”. Note
the definition of Rebeca in RAE: “Chaqueta femenina de punto, sin cuello,
abrochada por delante, y cuyo primer botón está, por lo general, a la altura de
la garganta. Del n. p. Rebeca, título de un filme de A. Hitchcock, basado en
una novela de D. du Maurier, cuya actriz principal usaba prendas de este tipo.
Throng: A throng is a large crowd of
people.
Coincidence, of course. Lincoln was at constant
risk of attack, on the brink
of victory after a bitterly fought
civil war. But we can all recognise the uncanny quality of his dream: that chilling, portentous
atmosphere. Where does it come from?
Brink: Limit, edge, point, border
Fight /
fought / fought
Uncanny: If you describe something as
uncanny, you mean that it is strange and difficult to explain.
Chilling: If you describe something as
chilling, you mean it is frightening.
For the psychologist Linda Blair, there are two
types of dream. The first represents a sorting-through of the contents of the day, a settling of sediment that is
of no great consequence. But there are others, “those dreams that are
accompanied by an emotional reaction, whether that’s happy, sad, or angry. They
do have meaning.”
Sorting-through: Classification
Settling: To put in order; arrange or
adjust as desired
These, she believes, are attempts to deal with issues in our lives that we
have been unable to resolve consciously. “They travel down into our unconscious mind to be worked on, where they don’t distract
us and distress us so much.” Does she believe in premonition? “Dreams are
predictive in my opinion,” she says, adding that “they don’t really predict the
future, because no one can do that. But what they predict is what you’re going
to be solving soon in terms of problems.” As a result, her patient’s dreams are
valuable tools, allowing her to take a shortcut to the heart of a problem
that’s clinically important but may not have been articulated in any other way.
Though Blair’s work draws on a range of sources, it has its roots
in the revolution begun by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the 20th century. He
was the first to attempt dream interpretation within a scientific framework,
and saw dreams as the disguised
expression of unconscious sexual and aggressive drives. But what he regarded as
scientific many now see as mere conjecture.
Draw on: Approach
Disguise: If you disguise yourself, you
put on clothes which make you look like someone else or alter your appearance
in other ways, so that people will not recognize you.
“Freud was incredibly important in giving
people another way of thinking about dreams,” says John Aggleton, professor of
cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University. “But the problem has been
converting those ideas into something that’s truly testable. And that’s where,
from a neuroscientist’s viewpoint, there’s always been a stumbling block.” But, he
concedes, “there are a number of common themes in dreams. A lot of people dream
about sex. The couple of recurring dreams that I have, and I’m sure other
people have the same dreams, one of them is about losing my teeth, and another
– and this is the classic one lecturers have – is just going to talk and
finding out I’ve got no clothes on, no trousers and no underwear and there’s
nothing I can do about it.”
Stumbling
block: If you
stumble, you put your foot down awkwardly while you are walking or running and
nearly fall over. A stumbling block is an obstacle
Surely these kind of dreams demand a
psychological explanation? “Yes, but they could also point to a really boring
thing which is the fact that you dreamed you’ve lost your teeth because you’ve
put your hand across your mouth and made it feel uncomfortable. Likewise, it
wouldn’t be terribly surprising if feedback from how your clothes or lack of
clothes feel might be guiding the way in which some of these dreams recur.”
What else have those sceptical of psychological
theories of dreaming come up with? In the 1960s, scientists found that when an evolutionarily ancient structure called the pons was removed in cats, all
REM sleep stopped. Some concluded that, during the REM phase, chemical
messaging from the pons activated higher areas of the brain, prodding them to produce
images and sensations, completely randomly. Dreams, then, were the higher brain
making “the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream
imagery from the relatively noisy signals sent up from the brain stem”.
Pons: a piece of connecting tissue;
specif., the bridge of white matter at the base of the brain, containing neural
connections between the cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla oblongata
Prod: To stimulate, to provoke
For some, this provided a new basis for
understanding dreams: they’re the sparks and effusions of a system in standby
mode – like the crackles
of an old TV set cooling down. For Patrick
McNamara, director of the evolutionary neurobehaviour laboratory at Boston
University, it’s a myth that still needs busting. “One of the main things that gets on my nerves is [the
idea] that dreams are just random flux during the night, that they mean
nothing.” Instead, he says, “there’s pretty good evidence now that dreams are
functional”.
Crackle: If something crackles,
it makes a rapid series of short, harsh noises. The radio crackled again.
Cool down: If
someone cools down or if you cool them down, they become less angry than they
were. In this case means that the TV set is closing.
Get on one’s nerves: To
irritate, annoy, or upset one
Recent research has eroded the idea that dreaming only occurs during
REM sleep, and that it’s a “bottom-up’
process”, with older parts of the brain activating the more recently
evolved ones. But the paradigm initially shifted as a result of hundreds of
studies of the content of individual dreams. These showed that people across
cultures dreamed about similar things: for McNamara, evidence of an adaptive
mechanism at work.
Erod: If someone's authority,
right, or confidence erodes or is eroded, it is gradually destroyed or removed.
Geological term.
Bottom-up process: from the
lowest level of a hierarchy or process to the top
But why are they adaptive – beneficial to our
survival as a species? Is it the old psychotherapeutic idea that dreams are the
keys to unlocking problems involving relationships? “I think there’s good data
that suggests that some of the things dreams do is help facilitate better
social interactions,” McNamara says. But for him the real advantage is somewhat
less poetic.
“Most scientists who study dreams think that we
dream in order to practise avoiding threatening situations during the day … Men
tend to dream about aggressive interactions with other men, whereas women tend
to dream about verbal interactions with both men and women. And another pattern
that was found repeatedly was that whenever male strangers appear in dreams,
they tend to signal physical aggression.”
He goes on: “For men, the primary competitors
for sexual access to females were other men, so they dream of aggressive
interactions with other men. The appearance of male strangers signalling
physical aggression probably relates to the fact that the most severe threats
in ancestral times came from them. Raiders from a different tribe coming around
and trying to steal women and resources: those were major survival threats.”
It’s interesting that, more than a century
after Freud, whose focus on sex and aggression was ridiculed as an obsession by
his detractors, they can once again be deemed the reason we dream. For
therapists like Linda Blair, working in a broader framework – and for whom evidence is what
helps a patient in distress – this can never be enough.
Broader: Wide
“I think there’s too much richness in each
person’s brain to reduce things so specifically. For me dreams can mean
anything. I don’t know until the patient and I work it out together.” Blair
sees dream interpretation – which can itself produce subsequent clearer, or
more baffling, dreams –
as like “kneading dough”,
working with an issue that might at first be too frightening or repulsive to
apprehend, until it’s in a state that you’re ready to deal with. This can mean
gradually coming to understand metaphors that are the subconscious’s way of
bringing difficult issues to our attention. She cautions against jumping to
conclusions over the meaning of fatfleshed cows and catafalques, however. “There are no
universal dream symbols. Each person has their own symbol system, their own
special private language and one of the real fun things to do in therapy is to
decipher that.”
Baffling: Impossible to understand;
perplexing; bewildering; puzzling
Knead
dough: When
you knead dough or other food, you press and squeeze it with your hands so that
it becomes smooth and ready to cook. Dough is a fairly firm mixture of flour,
water, and sometimes also fat and sugar. It can be cooked to make bread,
pastry, and biscuits. (massa, pasta / masa, pasta)
One thing we’ll never be able to access, of
course, is the private language of the platypus. And the likelihood that
animals dream – as Aggleton says, “anybody’s who’s got a pet dog or cat will be
sure of that” – is a good reminder of the fundamental mysteriousness of all
this. For humans, dreams are bestial, instinctive and intellectual all at once.
They are distorted versions of our desires and the taut thrillers we write every night. Why do we
dream? Because we are alive.
Taut: Something that is taut is
stretched very tight. (tibant / tirante)
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