Speaking of Psychology: The science of dreaming, with Deirdre Barrett, PhD

We all dream yet many of us don’t know what to make of our nocturnal adventures. Dream scholar Deirdre Barrett, PhD, explains why we dream and what our dreams may be trying to tell us. She also offers tips on how to better remember your dreams to harness the power of your sleeping mind.

Deirdre Barrett, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Barrett is the editor of the journal Dreaming. She is a past president of both the International Association for the Study of Dreams and the American Psychological Association’s Division 30, The Society for Psychological Hypnosis. Barrett has authored several books including Supernormal Stimuli, Waistland, The Committee of Sleep and The Pregnant Man & Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist’s Couch and edited The New Science of Dreaming, Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy, The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreams and Trauma and Dreams. Her current research focuses mostly on dreams and evolutionary psychology.

Kaitlin Luna: Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and scholar of dreams who's on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program. She's the editor of the journal Dreaming and has written several books on the topic including the Committee of Sleep. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Barrett.

Deirdre Barrett: Hi, nice to be here.

Kaitlin Luna: So dreams are always a fascinating topic. We all dream but many people don't remember them or don't really know what to do with their dreams and you, as a scholar of dreams, know all about dreams and are even a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. So I'll start off with, I think, a simple question with probably a long answer but why do we dream?

Deirdre Barrett: Well it's not a simple question it's probably the one where you'd get the most disagreement among dream psychologists. Personally I think that we have rapid eye movement sleep which is the stage in which most dreams occur along with all mammals for a lot of reasons many of which are very biological that certain neurotransmitters are being replenished in the brain during that stage of sleep that there's some very physical body reasons for REM that we share with all mammals. But I think evolution isn't that simple and when something's been around since the dawn of mammals it tends to have function upon function layered on top of it and I think for humans there's a lot of problem-solving that goes on in that state but that's my answer and you would get everywhere from you know it has no function, to you know dreams are sort of our wiser self speaking to us from other dream psychologists. But that's my that's my concept of it.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah I mean I've always thought of it as sort of like it's telling you something, you know your dreams are trying to you tell you something you have been avoiding or something you might not realize what's going on because it's really you are unconscious so I've always wondered if it's really your sort of true self coming out so I'm probably maybe in that camp just as a lay person just being interested in the study of dreams.

Deirdre Barrett: Yeah I mean I like to say it's just it's our brain thinking in a different biochemical state and I don't buy into the perspective that…there's one book called Dreams are Wiser than Men, I don't think that what our dream dreaming mind is thinking about an issue is always the correct one or wiser than our waking one, I think the benefit of dreams lie in just what a different biochemical state it is so if we're kind of stuck in our usual everyday rational thinking, dreams may make an end run around that and show us something very different. But if you had to operate off one or the other I think our waking mind is probably giving us you know more good advice than our dreaming one, but the dream is a great supplement.

Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely and can you explain a bit about what the International Association for the Study of Dreams does?

Deirdre Barrett: It's a nonprofit organization whose mission is just to disseminate information about dreams and that's everything from the most basic education about things that have been known about dreams for a long time to the general public and even to children on to disseminating the latest research between professionals in the field. The ISD has one international conference a year, it has some online virtual conferences, it has some regional conferences and it has two publications. I edit the journal Dreaming which ISD oversees the content, but APA is our publisher and that is an academic journal for professionals in the field. But ISD also has another publication called Dream Time which is a magazine which is much more informal discussion of dreams that the general public can enjoy.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, it's very interesting. Until I was researching this topic I didn't know there was such an association.

Deirdre Barrett: Yeah, it's a great group. I recommend its website and for anyone that can get there its conferences are great and unlike many organizations it's a combination of professionals and not professionals so at the conference more than half the presenters and about half the attendees are some kind of professional in the field but there are lots of people who are just extremely dream interested who choose to come to the conference.

Kaitlin Luna: Interesting maybe I'll end up there one day. So, you know, there's those common dreams that I think you know you read about see in television and movies and people talk about like being in a public place naked or having your teeth fall out or being chased. So why do different people have similar dreams. I've always found that question really interesting, like why would I have the same dream as some random person from a you know different walk of life and has there been research into those common themes?

Deirdre Barrett: Well there's some research just on how frequently they occur and that does demonstrate that a few of those themes including the ones you rattled off do occur pretty frequently to people of different ages and around the world. Some are more universal than others and it tends to go with whether the metaphor they seem to be representing is universal. Clearly all cultures have some norms about what parts of your body you're supposed to cover and not even if it's you know a tiny thong just covering your genitals in one culture and bailing you know from head to toe in another one, there's still a how much of your body do you show and shame around showing more than you're supposed to be. So that the naked in public one seems to be quite universal and I'll say more a bit later about this, but we certainly don't think that you should ever just say one dream theme means exactly the same thing for anyone that dreams it. There's always an individual element. But there's some things like naked in public that are much likelier to be representing social shame, social anxieties you know just the common-sense metaphor about being exposed in some uncomfortable way is usually what that dream is about for most of the people having it. Then there are other common themes that are a little more cultural bound like most Western societies with our kind of schooling many, many people in the culture have recurring dreams about tests going wrong, you've overslept, you've missed the test, you aren't figuring out what the classroom is, you're late, you can't find the classroom, you get into the exam you realize you studied the wrong subject for it, the exam’s in hieroglyphics, they're just all kinds of variations. But somehow you are you know about to mess up a test. And we see that in Western schooling type cultures all the time, but you don't see that in hunter-gatherer tribes where, you know, learning to get out there and do adult tasks in some sort of, you know, more intern like way is the way that they're educated and test obviously they don't have sit-down exam dreams. And even in our culture people who decide to be want to be actors or musicians from an early age, they'll have a variation that's the audition dream. They're not sitting down to take an exam but they're showing up with their musical instrument and they realize they've studied the wrong piece of music or they can't find the audition hall so there's some variation even in those standard ones but there's something to the idea that there's some universal, very frequent dreams meaning something similar for most people who have them.

Kaitlin Luna: And those feelings behind those dreams could be, like you said, maybe some sort of shame or some sort of anxiety about what's going to happen to be tested in some way that sort of thing. So they're common feelings that underlie them.

Deirdre Barrett: Well yeah, different shades for different ones but just in line with what otherwise are common metaphors you know if you “feel exposed” or “feel naked”, that's usually more of a shame social disapproval. If you’re being tested, you know that's more of an authority figure is evaluating you sort of are you measuring up you know to society in general or in authority? So most of the recurring themes dreams are anxiety dreams but whether it's about sort of being competent versus being socially appropriate those tend to be represented by different specific things.

Kaitlin Luna:  I've heard that some people say that dreams don't mean anything at all that they're just random impulses from your brain when you're sleeping or perhaps just, you know, consolidating memories, that sort of thing, and that there's no deeper emotional meaning behind them. But, you know, many people do believe dreams are important, that they help problem-solve, perhaps find inspiration which I'll ask about in a few minutes, but what does the psychological research say about the importance of dreams and do we know what would happen if we didn't dream?

Deirdre Barrett: Well let me answer the first part first, it's a little simpler. There is some research, there's a limit to how much you can deprive people of REM sleep and it does have to be depriving of REM sleep, not quite all dreams happen in REM sleep and one of the things that you see if you deprive people of REM sleep is that you begin to get more reports that sound like full-fledged dream narratives out of other stages of sleep. A few of those happen anyway but it's like there's some pressure to dream that if you don't let it happen in rapid eye movement sleep it begins to happen in other stages of sleep. And then in the extreme, in some of the experiments people seemed to hallucinate awake a little bit. So there's certainly a pressure to dream that can sort of break out of REM not that it's always totally confined there. But the other thing is if you’re REM depriving people you see deficits in certain things or it doesn't even have to be REM deprivation, but you can do an experiment where the same amount of time passes between exposure to a task and retrying it and people either do or don't get a REM episode in there. And from those experiments it looks like other stages of sleep have more to do with consolidating some simple straightforward kinds of memory and that rapid eye movement sleep is consolidating and learning more emotionally-tinged memories and certain kinds of problem-solving that require some abstract generalization, from answers to single cases and beginning to see a pattern across them, that people that get a REM period in between exposure to certain problem-solving tasks do better. So that's REM sleep and that's not talking about the dream content but we definitely, in dream content we sometimes see very overt problem-solving pop up somebody doesn't know the answer to a question until they have a dream that shows them the solution so REM is doing something with that biologically whether you're remembering dream content with it or not but again layered on top of REM for human beings dreams seem to be the about the problems and issues we've just been exposed to and sometimes solving them.

Kaitlin Luna: Speaking about what you just mentioned about how people use them to problem-solve or get inspiration and you wrote about in your book, The Committee of Sleep, about some stories from famous artists and inventors like Paul McCartney, Salvador Dali and the inventor of the sewing machine how they received inspiration from their dreams which produced beautiful works of art and practical tools like the sewing machine. Can you explain how we use dreams to problem-solve and to find inspiration?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, I mean there are two aspects of that. One is that it simply happens spontaneously a fair bit that people who are stuck on a problem will have a breakthrough dream and that was true in the case of the sewing machine inventor that that dream came out of nowhere without his asking for it in any particular way and showed him how to make the sewing machine. And two kinds of problems are likelier to get solved spontaneously in dreams. One is anything that's a very visual-spatial because dreams are so visual we can see things in a hallucinatory way in front of us so the first computer-controlled anti-aircraft gun was dreamed, the sewing machine was dreamed, the structure of the benzene molecule was dreamed and all of those seemed to be cases where being able to see the thing very much more clearly than you could just do visual imagination awake was a helpful part of it. The other big cluster of solved-by dreams are where you're stuck because the conventional wisdom is wrong. The benzene molecule is an example of both. Kekulé knew what the atoms in benzene were but at that time all known molecules were some kind of straight line with a side chain and so he was trying to arrange the atoms in a straight line in some way that made sense and explained the chemical properties and that wasn’t working and he fell asleep and dreamed of molecules dancing in front of his eyes forming, he said snakes, but they were straight lines of molecules and eventually one of the snakes made of atoms reached around and took its tail in its mouth and he woke up realizing that benzene was a closed ring. But all chemists would have been approaching it to make it some kind of straight line. So dreaming just bypasses that conventional wisdom, ”It has to be done this way, it has to be done this way” and shows more possibilities. So very visual problems or problems where you need to think outside the box are likely to get help from dreams. But then the other aspect is that although these happen spontaneously if people are trying to focus their dreams on a particular topic, we tend to call it dream incubation in psychology, to say tonight I want to dream the answer to a particular problem or I just want to dream on this particular topic you're much likelier to have a dream on that topic or even an answer to the problem than if you weren't doing that as a self-suggestion at bedtime. So everybody tends to get some help and inspiration and good advice from their dreams, but you can you can get more by asking your dreams to focus on particular topics.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah that's really interesting and I'm gonna to just touch on that well we're there so if you want to remember your dream better and you want to be able to have a dream journal and use it for those that problem-solving like I said because sometimes people say, “Oh I dream but I don't remember it”, what tips do you have for that? So for someone to remember their dream better and then how to do a dream journal.

Deirdre Barrett: OK, well the first tip is the most banal but it's really the most important: Get more sleep than the average American does. If you get eight hours of sleep a night, you'll remember a lot more dreams than if you’re getting less than that. And it's not, we enter rapid eye movement sleep about every 90 minutes through the night but each REM period is getting longer so the first one is just a few minutes whereas the last one can be getting closer to half an hour in length so if you sleep four hours instead of eight, you're not getting half your dream time, you're getting twenty percent or less of your dream time when you truncate your sleep because the dreams are coming every 90 minutes but they're getting much longer through the night. So getting enough sleep is extremely important that's the simplest [unintelligible] with high and low dream recall. But other things are the intent. I mean often people that are taking class on dreams or reading a book on dreams it will become more relevant they'll remember more dreams in fact people listening to today's podcast are likelier to remember a dream tonight just by virtue doing that than otherwise, but you can increase that with again a dream incubation like I was talking about for problem solving but just focused on recall. If you're just telling yourself as you fall asleep, “I want to remember my dreams tonight, I want to remember my dreams tonight”, that increases the likelihood and then as you already alluded to keeping some sort of dream journal. What you do in the morning is just as important. First of all aside from the journal, it's better to wake up naturally than to an alarm clock but you know I know everyone can't do that. Whichever way you wake up, if you lie there for a moment and try to think about nothing other than your dream if you already recall it, if you're not gonna write it down or tell it to a recorder, at least rehearse it in your mind. But if you don't recall a dream when you first wake up just lie there and see what content at all is there in your mind. Like, did you wake up kind of thinking about your brother, did you wake up feeling a little sad because sometimes if you just stay focused on that hint of content, a dream will come rushing back, “Oh yeah I was thinking about my brother because I dreamed that he did this” or “I was sad because this dream that just happened.” So dream memory is very fragile and sometimes it's hovering there as you first wake up so don't do anything else first before focusing on the dream. And secondly recording it is nice to have the record but also tends to fix it in your mind even if you're not referring back to the dream journal that much so some people still prefer to hand write things in beautiful leather-bound journals, have a sort of a nice association for some people, or if your laptop's next to your bed you can reach for it and type, but I know that a lot of people are using their smartphones. There are all sorts of apps. Dreams Cloud is one of them, Dream Scope, that have apps where you generally you can set your alarm on the app, make that your alarm in lieu of the other one and they have all sorts of gentler tones to wake you up or even a voice saying, “What were you dreaming?” as the first thing you're going to hear and then your phone is already set to if you speak in response to the alarm or the voice saying, “What were you dreaming?”, it's automatically going to record without you're having to reach over and activate it or anything. So those are some of the easiest you know and then they all do speech to text, so you have an account of it so a lot of the people I know these days, I still type mine out, but most of my students use an app on their phones.

Kaitlin Luna: It's interesting using technology for our dreams. I noticed that I usually will like have to do the hovering where I kind of like [ask myself] “What did I dream” and then I’ll recall it and then I can sort of get it firmly planted in my memory and then I'll write it down when I get the chance. I've been known to do that on the Metro on the way to work. Sitting furiously writing in my journal, the notebook I have.

Deirdre Barrett: Just rehearsing it in your mind, I mean, especially like in the middle of the night if you don't want to disturb a bed partner by speaking your dream or something, if you just kind of run through it in your mind that tends to fix it into long-term memory because otherwise so many people recall waking up from a dream in the middle of the night and going, “Oh wow that was such a weird dream” and that’s all they remember about it or even “I don’t need to write this one down I’m certainly going to remember this one.” Even without writing it down, if you play it through that kind of gets it from short-term to long-term memory.

Kaitlin Luna: Going back to the content of dreams why do some people have recurring dreams and what do we know about what reoccurring dreams mean.

Deirdre Barrett: Recurring dreams are usually thought to be themes that are more important for that person. Freud talked about day residue and it's one of his concepts that's still taken quite seriously the idea that things that happen in the preceding 18 hours are much likelier to show up in your dream than sort of other random previous days. And so lots of lots of dreams are about very recent events and they may be one-time concerns about things that just happened that day and they're still worth interpreting but they're gonna be about a very specific current sort of issue. Whereas if a dream occurs over and over it may be activated by events of a particular day, it may make a long-term issue more salient but it's certainly going to be about something that's a kind of long-term character logic issue for that person. So in general we think of recurring dreams as somewhat more important if you only have time to analyze a few dreams, your recurring dreams would be ones to target.

Kaitlin Luna: And often people talk about having nightmares or violent dreams and I've spoken to friends and you know, myself included, we've had those kinds of scary dreams. So what do those dreams mean and what do you do if you have violent dreams or nightmares often?

Deirdre Barrett: Well they're two very different kinds. One is the metaphoric, they're scary but otherwise the content seems much like other dreams it's fairly metaphoric witches chasing you down a hall in an old building or something. And children have more of those kind of garden-variety metaphor nightmares than adults, they tend to decrease with age but almost everyone has a few of those. Versus post-traumatic nightmares where you've suffered one or more extremely violent, terrifying waking life events and in post-traumatic nightmares, the event tends to unfold very much like it did awake. Some people it replays exactly like they were in a video of the episode of getting raped or being in this battlefield or house burning down around them over and over and over exactly like it happened. Or more commonly it's pretty close to how it happened but it's either got a bit of bizarre dream distortion but not as much as most dreams or often the post traumatic nightmares go one step further like somebody was holding a gun to someone's head and threatening to pull the trigger in real life and they actually do pull the trigger like the dream goes one step further. Whatever was most feared about to happen actually happens. So garden-variety nightmares there they're just normal to a certain extent and some people who have them don't particularly mind them. I've heard a lot of people either say that it's kinda like horror films that you know there's a kind of adrenaline rush and they kind of enjoy their nightmares and I've heard other people who say they don't enjoy them, but they feel like they learn something like it's always pointing out to them things they're anxious about that they hadn't thought of. So many people who have nightmares of that kind of garden variety type don't particularly want them to go away and I think that interpreting them just like you would other dreams thinking about you know what in my waking life you know feels like that feeling in the pit of my stomach when the witch is chasing me down the hall is you know the way to deal with those. But post-traumatic nightmares just retraumatize people it's like having the horrible event happening again night after night after night so that it never recedes into the past and everyone who has post-traumatic nightmares hates having them nobody likes those and I think that it's also not a mystery, you know, if you were raped and you're dreaming about a rape or your house burned down and you're dreaming about flames every night there's not a “Gee, why are you dreaming that” like there is about the witch so there are techniques that can make people stop having post-traumatic nightmares that involve, you can coach people to just wake up if they start, but it seems to be even more effective to have people come up with an alternate scenario, a kind of mastery dream. If the nightmare starts again how would you like it to come out differently and psychologists kind of happened on to this technique because it happens occasionally, spontaneously people have had a nightmare over and over and over about a real event all of a sudden will have this dream where someone comes and rescues them or they do fight off the attacker or in a very dreamlike magical way the whole trauma is swept away and they wake up feeling so much better. And so we found that some people in PTSD groups would hear somebody say, “Oh I used to have a nightmare until one night I had this other wonderful dream” and just hearing that the next week a couple other patients in the group would say they had. So now we coach people to come up with an alternate scenario of what they would like to see happen and kind of get an individual, I mean for the same sounding trauma, some people would rather have someone rescue them other people would rather like fight off some attacker themselves. A lot of sexual abuse survivors would most like to tell off the abuser about why this was so wrong and other people want very magical you know shrink the attacker of the fire down you know to a quarter inch high dreamlike things so once you come up with an alternate scenario you practice that at bedtime this is again another variation on dream incubation just telling yourself you know if my traumatic nightmare starts I want you this scenario and picture the alternate scenario and that that works for a lot of people. A lot of people have the alternate dream and then never have the nightmare again. And then in the research study some people do that, and the nightmares stop without their at least consciously recalling having the alternate dreams, so we don't really know if they have it and forget it, but it still serves its purpose or if simply the visualization of the scenario you know awake at bedtime has a similar effect for some people.

Kaitlin Luna: OK that's really fascinating that you have some control over this I mean if you tell yourself you want the this dream to stop or to reach a better conclusion that's really fascinating.

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, I mean the areas in our brain associated with memory are not quite as active but they're certainly somewhat awake as we dream so requests to our dreaming mind do very often get through it's not a one-to-one, you know just ask for it once and you’ll dream on this topic, but it's very often effective especially with repetition more than one night.

Kaitlin Luna: And moving on to pets. I know you said animals, mammals, do go into REM sleep but you know if you've watched your pet dog on the ground when they start falling asleep, my dog barks and she, you know, twitches her legs, that sort of thing so it looks like they're dreaming, you know, as far as we can tell but so do animals dream and how would we know if they do or don't?

Deirdre Barrett: Well, that's a very good question. I tend to assume that they do. We know that all mammals except cetaceans, whales and dolphins do not have REM sleep, they have this strange sleep where they sleep with one half of their brain at a time, but all other mammals alternate between non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and their brain has activity that looks very similar to ours when we are dreaming . So I am willing to make the leap and say that I think that mammals are dreaming and whatever they're, you know, elephant or mousy or doggie or catty version of that is. Some of my colleagues would not would not say that, I mean some of my colleagues would not assume any consciousness to other mammalian species or only past a certain level in the evolutionary hierarchy but yeah, I think they have the same brain state that we dream in I think they're probably dreaming in some way. The only slight evidence for dream reports from animals are Penny Patterson who had the gorillas Koko and Michael. Koko died, I believe. But Koko used to sign kind of fantastic scenarios right upon awakening and no other time, so she'd sign about cars flying through the sky or she'd signed something about seeing a person who she actually hadn't seen in six months and those sort of signing not real fantastic things only seemed to happen upon awakening. So Penny assumed that those were dream reports and you know you could argue about that but I, you know, I think that sounds quite likely and the gorilla Michael, who didn't have quite as big of a signed vocabulary, but I guess he's still learning he's certainly still alive and well, he was known to have had his entire extended family group killed by poachers and then he was picked up as an infant and sold through several iterations and eventually went to Penny's reserve so he had a very traumatic killing of all of his family in front of him. And she said that he used to wake up signing, “Bad people kill gorillas, bad people kill gorillas”, and again only in the morning so she interpreted that not just as a memory but as seeming like he was probably having a post-traumatic dream about the event. And again, that's very soft evidence, too, and subjective but possibly, we have dream accounts from two gorillas but just in general they are having the same brain state as REM sleep, so I think it's likely that they're dreaming. Now they're not necessarily dreaming when they're twitching and moving though because in humans, although there's something called REM Behavior Disorder where you act out your dreams, we and other mammals are supposed to be paralyzed during REM sleep, and with normal, healthy people and animals that is the case. Where sleepwalking in non-REM sleep is much more common for people and so I think that most times that you see much activity during sleep, you know, when dogs are woofing or moving their legs a lot as they… that's probably out of non-REM sleep which just seems to be mild slight activity in motor areas that's not associated with a big dream scenario in humans. Human sleep walkers usually don't recall anything or it's a very simple, “I was trying to get from place A to place B”, rather than a dream account so I think when you see your dog making the most noise and moving the most it's not necessarily dreaming. When you see its eyelids moving rapidly under its eyes even if it's completely still that's when it's likely to be dreaming.

Kaitlin Luna: okay interesting I'll pay more attention to my dog's eyes. And when you and I spoke before, we talked about lucid dreaming which I know that the journal Dreaming has touched on in various ways but and you've said it's also become a topic in popular culture since the movie Inception came out a number of years ago, so can you explain more about what lucid dreaming is?

Deirdre Barrett: Well the definition is simply that it's a dream in which you know it's a dream. At some point you're going, “This isn't real, I'm dreaming.” Many people, once they're lucid, they then have a lot of control over the dream. If they're being chased down a hall by witch they can choose, “No, I don't wanna…I don't want to have a witch dream anymore” and you know, dissolve the dark building into a beautiful palace or being outdoors and some of their friends instead of the witch. So some people can switch a dream all around once they know they're lucid but not everyone. So the definition is simply knowing you're dreaming even if the dream keeps unfolding in a very dreamlike way. And most people really enjoy lucid dreams. There's occasionally people stay distressed by scary content but usually even if you let the witch stay there and you turn around and ask her why she's chasing you and what she represents once you know she's a dream witch you're not scared anymore so most lucid dreams are very positive and people enjoy having them.

Kaitlin Luna: So what does that mean exactly? Does that mean part of your consciousness turned on at that moment?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, the EEGs of people having lucid dreams…I mean back in the 80s, it was established that they really did seem to be in rapid eye movement sleep and that was big news because it had been sort of questioned maybe they're waking up into some sort of fantasy waking state. But Steve LaBerge proved that people having lucid dreams are really in rapid eye movement sleep and that's a battle all that sleep labs could tell at that time. But more recently now that you can put on many more tiny EEG leads and reconstruct a much better 3-D image of what's going on in the brain, what that shows is that the person is basically in rapid eye movement sleep but it's not a completely typical episode of rapid eye movement sleep . The prefrontal cortex, the area right behind our forehead that has a lot to do with abstract thinking, is very much damped down during REM sleep it's often misstated that it's turned off or something in REM sleep. That's not true, there is activity there at a lower level even in normal REM sleep. But in lucid dreams, there is usually a little more activity in the prefrontal cortex than there is during other REM periods and that's exactly the area we're noticing discrepancies. The fact that the prefrontal is damped down during most dreams is why we don't question, you know, bizarre, you know, most of the time if we're flying we're just thrilled to be flying not questioning how we can…somebody that you know is dead is showing up in your dream, you usually don't question how that can be, sometimes you do. So, that area that notices things are odd or just even reflects on what's the nature of this experience, that's just turned back up not as much as on average as when we're awake but somewhat more than in typical dreams so that seems to be necessary for lucid dreaming.

Kaitlin Luna: That's interesting. And what are you currently doing with your with dreaming research?

Deirdre Barrett: Well the most recent research study that I finished was a comparison of the content of dream accounts to the content of sleep talking episodes. Finding that they were similar in many ways compared to waking speech. They both express much more fear than we typically talk about awake. They're less set in the present than our waking topics. But then there's some differences, like there's much, much more anger in sleep walking than in either dreams or awake, dreams and waking speech have much more in common in terms of pretty low levels of anger for most people. And sleep talking involves much more anger. So that was my most recent research study and I'm not starting another one real soon because I'm trying to finish a book which is kind of a sequel to my book, The Committee of Sleep, which is all about dreams and creative problem-solving. They both have more theoretical things that I want to say about it but also once that book came out while I was writing it I had to chase down people who'd have amazing problem-solving dreams but once it came out I was getting letters from some famous, you know, ones with major accomplishments that had come from a dream that I didn't know about.  

Kaitlin Luna: Great, more content for you. When is that coming out?

Deirdre Barrett: It's not even in press yet it's probably coming out in a year and a half I would guess. But it's more of a focus than research right now.

Kaitlin Luna: So, Dr. Barrett, can you talk about what you dream about?

Deirdre Barrett: Well my dreams are probably more similar to other dream researchers than to the average person. I know one dream researcher who is just out of grad school where the person doing the most interesting research who wanted the most research assistance and was the most charismatic figure was doing dream research and that he personally had never thought about much about dreams until getting to grad school. But most dream researchers are drawn to the field because we remember more dreams than average. Our dreams are more vivid than average. We tend to have more lucid dreams and flying dreams and just almost any unusual category of dreams that you mentioned that will have a certain low base rate in the general population, I and other dream researchers have more of.  So I was just always fascinated by all these nocturnal adventures which I did remember more of in more detail than the average person and I think a lot of psychologists go to grad school and then pick a specialty within psychology but for me it was much more the other way around. I was just focused on dreams as this fascinating thing as a kid and as I got to be a little older I realized if someone was gonna pay you to study dreams then you better go to graduate school in psychology. So I don't have any way of characterizing, you know, I have all the things we've talked about: recurring dreams, lucid dreams, problem-solving dreams, a few nightmares, not particularly high rate of those, and I have dreams that have solved very practical problems, I have many more dreams that I think are more about my interpersonal emotional issues where you know I dream about people are important to me and in the dream I'm doing something different than the way I'd usually react to them and I wake up and realize that that has some implications for things to do in real life. I have some dreams that are just so gorgeous visually that I've started making art from my dreams. I've just been doing that for about three years, but I sold some art and have some art in art shows and it's all dream art I have no interest in making art other than to represent some of these images that I just want to drag back into the waking world for other people to see them.

Kaitlin Luna: I did see that actually when I was just looking into researching this topic, I saw your artwork and it was striking, strikingly beautiful. Very colorful. And can you describe what your favorite piece of art you created?

Deirdre Barrett: Probably a pair. Most dreams I just make one piece of art from them. But I had a dream where I was walking through Harvard Square which is the neighborhood where I live late at night and I was discovering these little animals up on the rooftops and thinking they must have been living there all the years I did, and I had just never looked up and seen them before. And then eventually they were down in the street and I was thinking, “Oh, they only come down late at night.” And in the dream, I thought, “I've never been the middle of Harvard Square in the middle of the night” and that's extremely not true but in the dream,  it was. So I was discovering these wonderful animals that live on the roof and come down into the streets and so I actually went down and photographed several different buildings that were on this route through the square but it was one of the Harvard Lampoon building and another of a spot called Charlie's Kitchen that are just interesting buildings that are kind of lit up interestingly at night anyway and they had most captured the feel of the dream before I started adding all the little magical creatures up on the roof and spilling down into the street. So I guess I was the happiest with the two I made out of that dream came out really just as I'd seen them in the dream.

Kaitlin Luna: And what do you use for materials? Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture?

Deirdre Barrett: No, it's digitally manipulated photography. So for a few of them, like one I dreamed about a mask changing in all these ways, I found that I really loved masks, so I take pictures when I got a mask exhibit, so I already had enough pictures of masks to start morphing into that dream. But for the one I just mentioned, I went down took pictures of the building and so a real photograph of the building was the basic backdrop and I left the sky and the brick in certain areas unchanged so that it kind of looks photographically real but then I played somewhat with the surface of the building but mainly I put in little creatures, some of which I created from scratch and digital programs, and others I actually took photographs, not of real animals but of like little carvings of already not quite realistic animals and manipulated them a little bit more digitally, so it's always collaged photography with then lots and lots of digital manipulation to give it the surreal look that the dream had.

Kaitlin Luna: So dreams are also inspiration for you as well?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, definitely. I mean they've been inspiration for, you know, things in my research life and work as a clinician and interpersonal relationships for a long time and I'd only been writing about arts and dreams but lately it's, yeah all of my art is completely inspired by my dreams.

Kaitlin Luna: Well that's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Barrett.

Deirdre Barrett: Nice to talk to you.

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