A-Mazing Dreams

Last weekend, I heard a story on NPR (I can't find it now so you'll just have to take my word for it) that had to do with dreams. The first part of the program dealt with studies with maze-running rats. Researchers monitoring the rats brain activity found that they could tell exactly what the rats where doing based on the sounds coming from their brains. A researcher who had his back turned to the rat could say, "now he's in the maze, now he's resting, now he's turning left, now he's turning right," and so on.

Then one day, the researcher, working on something else, realized that he was hearing the brainwaves of a rat running the maze-- except the rat was sleeping. From the familiar pattern, they could tell that the rat was running the exact same maze he had run during the day. They decided to see what would happen if put the rat's fingers in warm water. No, just kidding. They decided to see what would happen if they put the rat in two different mazes during the day. What happened was that the rat, in his or her dreams, mixed the mazes, creating new maze configurations.

In experiments with human subjects, the subjects played an interactive skiing video game. Participants would stand on a mat and mimic the actions of skiing to get through a slalom course for 45 minutes each day. The participants were awakened two minutes after falling asleep, at which time a majority of them reported dreaming about...surprise, skiing. However, when awakened two hours later, after a full sleep cycle, their dreams had morphed into things sort of like skiing, such as running very fast through trees, or sliding down a hill, or skateboarding. They didn't mention skiing at all.

The researchers hypothesized that during the day, events which have high brain-wave impact, such as crashing in a simulated ski run, or concentrating on a maze, get tagged with "sticky notes". At night, the brain reviews these sticky notes, and then creates a web of associations around them which become our dreams. Sometimes in dreams, we find new ways to solve problems, or think of new approaches to old situations. Other times, dreams are just weird.

This whole concept is fascinating to me. That animals dream (we knew they did), and dreams have cross-species similarities. That dreams can have a measurable origin and pattern, and that they may even have a function that helps us solve problems and find new ways of doing things in our daily lives. As a high school swimmer, I had trouble getting the breast stroke down. My rhythm was always off. One night, after practice, I dreamed of doing it perfectly, and the next day, I got in the pool and did it, just as I had in the dream, and never had trouble again.

The reason I'm writing this today is that I related this whole story to my friend Monty late last night, came home, went to sleep, and dreamed about... skiing. I skied to a tall building where I met up with an old friend with whom I no longer speak, and we played with two babies, one smart and not so cute, and one cute and not so smart, neither of which we could bring home with us. I was skiing in a city, which was difficult, especially on the trains, and at the end it became very difficult and I had to take the skis off. Like you needed to know that.