Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Last night—or rather, early this morning—I had an extremely vivid dream. I was in some exotic locale on a cruise, but the cruise was a big ship traveling very rapidly down a narrow canal through a city that seemed to be a combination of Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Latin America. Somehow two friends and I had accidentally gotten off the boat, and desperately needed to get back on. The problem was that we didn’t know where the boat would stop next, and we couldn’t find out. We kept going to many information booths, and stopping many people, to find out—but no dice.
I knew that on the boat was my colleague Trevor Price, and I had a cellphone and his number, so I tried to call him to find out where the ship would stop so we could get aboard. But the cellphone was weird: the buttons wouldn’t work, or they’d jump out on springs, and the phone began disintegrating. I woke up terrified that I’d been left behind.
Lately my dreams have turned from dreams of frustration—usually dreams involving being unable to find the room of a final exam in college, or having to take an exam on a subject I know nothing about—to dreams of sheer terror. Last night’s was especially vivid. I was taken to a torture center run by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge (perhaps the infamous Security Prison 21, about which I recently read), and was placed by the door, forced to watch the prisoners dragged in, kicking and screaming. Then I was taken inside and made to watch the torture. That consisted of prisoners being tied to horizontal metal poles by their arms. Then guards would apply blowtorches to the poles, which became red hot. Seared by the metal, the prisoners would scream horribly. And then I woke up.
I have no idea what this means, but torture with red-hot instruments was used by the Khmer Rouge. Of the 17,000 prisoners put in that security prison, only 7 came out alive.
Many people have recurring dreams, with academics especially prone to the “final exam: can’t handle it” dream. Please recount below either your own recurring dream, or your latest dream. And tell me what you think my dream of last night meant (yes, I know dreams may be random phenomena, but in many there’s often a kernel of truth: the “day’s residuum,” as I think Freud called it).
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest (4.1.168-170)
I should preface this with my regular caveat: I-am-not-a-scientist, nor do I play one on TV. My level expertise only allows me to say the rough equivalent of “Oh hey, this looks interesting.”
As a child I often used to watch my dogs dreaming. Clearly they were running, sometimes barking and huffing, sometimes panting. It used to fascinate me, and I wondered where in their heads they were running. Was it a field they knew? Were they alone or with companions? Were they chasing prey? Running for the fun of it? What does prey even look like to Canis lupus familiaris who may never met anything particularly prey-like in their modern suburban existence?
Once one of them barked so loud in her dream that she startled herself and woke up with a jump. I’d never seen a Labrador look more sheep-like when her eyes met mine. Unfortunately there was no way to ask her what she had been seeing in her dreams.
But it seems that remarkably a team of scientists has had a glimpse at what rats dream about.
Not an actual lab rat
Kiona Smith-Strickland over at Discover Magazine writes about a new study where a team looked at rats and determined remarkably that they dreamed about going places they were aware of but had not yet explored. She explains the process:
First, researchers let rats explore a T-shaped track. The rats could run along the center of the T, but the arms were blocked by clear barriers. While the rats watched, researchers put food at the end of one arm. The rats could see the food and the route to it, but they couldn’t get there.
Then, when the rats were curled up in their cages afterwards, scientists measured their neuron firing. Their brain activity seemed to show them imagining a route through a place they hadn’t explored before. To confirm this, researchers then put the rats back into the maze, but this time without the barriers. As they explored the arm where they had previously seen the food, the rats’ place cells fired in the same pattern as they had during sleep.
Neuroscientist Hugo Spiers, who co-authored the study, notes:
People have talked in the past about these kind of replay and pre-play events as possibly being the substrates of dreams, but you can’t ask rats what they’re thinking or dreaming. There is that really interesting sense that we’re getting at the stuff of dreams, the stuff that goes on when you’re sleeping.
This is a weird one, and I remember the details (which are slowly growing hazier) only because I had it right before I awoke this morning. At the beginning, I was sitting on the grass with a girlfriend (nobody I know in my waking life), and then another girlfriend came by and sat down beside me: and this one happened to be Geena Davis (the star of Thelma and Louis), who put her arm around me. And then I immediately found myself in a courtroom with a group of friends, all of whom happened to be “professional jury people.” That is, all of us had permanent jobs as members of a jury whose job was to judge a people on trial, one after another. We were also members of a golf club, where we would repair to play golf, drink, and eat after our day on the jury. On the day of my dream, we were going to the clubhouse to commemorate the death of one of our members who had just passed away.
It turned out that this member was known as a “Belty” for his girth. “Belty” status was determined by everyone being issued sweaters with knitted vertical ribs in them, with the ribs very far apart: several feet, in fact. A “Belty” was designated as someone who, when he was wearing that sweater, would show more than one vertical rib when you faced him. In other words, Belties were people of considerable girth.
That’s when the dream ended. What does it mean? The only thing I can add is that I am not amorously drawn to Geena Davis, nor do I ever think about her.
Anybody else have weird dreams last night? At least mine wasn’t about having a final exam and not having studied, or not being able to find the exam room.
