You bring up many interesting points, and the rat story is fascinating, but one should also mention the important aspect of dreaming as a way to resolve more general problems and questions rather than immediate ones. Dreaming may be related to the problems of the day, but one should be careful not to reduce it to a puzzle solving session and to understand that it is also a time for a more general reflection on our life, which many times is something we don't want to do during our waking hours. An interesting discussion on dreams and how the importance the greeks assigned to them:
http://www.pandalous.com...

Freud never said that all dreams were about unfulfilled sexual desires. He said that all neuroses were sexual in origin, but not dreams. He said that a dream was a wish fulfilled -- it could be any kind of wish.

But what about nightmares? For the better part of my life a majority of my dreams have tended to be less than pleasant, and often disturbingly haunt subsequent waking hours. What is my brain trying to learn in these dreams? I prefer to think of them as useless melodrama, frankly, so that I can get beyond them.

What about DMT and its role in dreaming? I've been looking into it recently trying to understand some things that I could not explain (blue light bliss experience; vision that downloaded information at blazingly fast speed. Both were hyper real.) I think both were DMT related. I learned that DMT is normally constrained in our brain, but there can be spillover. I read Rick Strassman, MD's book and Jeremy Narby PhD this year and from them and others, what I gleaned is that dreams could be small releases of DMT.

I started using low dose naltrexone this year (about 3 mg) for some autoimmune issue and the first 2 weeks gave me dreams of such intensity that I had to psych myself for going to bed. I actually missed them though when they stopped. It was like a never ending carnival in my brain every night.

I am a chronic insomniac also. I sorely miss GHB which allowed me to be normal for as long as I had an Rx for it. Asleep at 11 and up at 7 with enormous good cheer. I felt light and happy and so enjoyed the rhythm of that life. Alas, it has been demonized, renamed and what I bought for $60 per month is now $1700.00 per month. Gotta love the govt and the drug companies and the havoc they create. I am a guardian of the night now on permanent sentry duty.

BTW - dmt has something to do with serotonin so I made the connection between my taking tryptophan and my vision. I think I am correct. The bliss light happened when I was meditating - I think it changed my neural patterns somehow and this might have changed balance of neurotransmitters. Just thinking out loud here.

DREAMS !
We are Limitless
as we believe in our dreams
they are frozen images
brought to life in sleep
They are beautiful as
we don't think, while we dream
they may be true or false
may occur or may not occur
But they take us to a fantasy world
a world of make-belief
as long as they last
Let's hold on to them Fast !

Speaking of dreams, Jonah Lehrer writes: "For the most part, they don’t reflect the unleashed id, full of unfulfilled sexual desires. Instead, we dream about what we think about: the mazes and mysteries of everyday life."
So we don't think about sex? Give me a break.

"For the most part, they don’t reflect the unleashed id, full of unfulfilled sexual desires. Instead, we dream about what we think about.." Since mst fit people think a lot about sex all day, Freud may be right anyway

I think the brain is doing something more than simply cutting, splicing, remixing and running memories during REM. Over the decades I have been awed by the ability of my sleeping unconscious mind to do incredibly more than my waking mind ever could. It can create pictures, images, landscapes and lengthy intricate narrative thousands of times faster and in much greater detail than I ever could right now as I type this. It can create new music and verses I have never heard before instantaneously, something I cannot do at all while awake. It can create rich landscapes and cityscapes in places I have never visited, to say nothing of intricate geometric forms. It can place me in different historical contexts (past or future), different geographical contexts, often as someone other than myself, and even as an objective observer of myself. It properly ages individuals I have not seen since grade school days to what they might look like now in their 60's. This is not just cutting and pasting memories, not just a rehash of recent events to establish neural traces. I propose the possibility that it may represent the perception of real or potential alternate realities at some quantum level. (Remember, Schroedinger's cat realises both possible outcomes in the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory.) The brain is not creating this stuff, it is detecting it, perhaps from some inchoate mishmash of sources, since a lot of dream content is honestly too bizarre or fluid to represent a single stable reality. If my brain is, in fact, creating all this stuff rather than passively detecting it, why is it so miserably slow and inefficient when awake than when asleep? Truly, we'd be much more accomplished as sleepwalkers.

I'd like to know what dreams the rats had before their first exposure to their mazes. After they had learned the mazes, and then dreamt of their experiences, were those rats then set off into the mazes again, the next day?

An interesting summary, thanks. I'm sorry to hear about your trouble sleeping. I'm not actually an insomniac, but I sleep very lightly. I wake up many times every night, but usually fall asleep again. One of the side effects is that I know quite well what my brain is chewing on, and it's mostly a (weirdly distorted) repetition of daily events, so it goes well with what you're saying.

"Obviously, my old consolation — dreams are nothing but useless melodramas — is clearly false."

Or maybe what you do during the day just isn't important.

my scary dreams include this oft repeated one. I am going to college and i have no idea what they are teaching, I am missing in classes and teachers do not recognize me. Fellow students frown on me. I have books in my arms and do not understand much of what is in them. After I wake up, i feel so depressed. O my dear, I am a retired from my profession and my student days were a very long time ago.

It's unnerving and a bit frustrating how stubborn, denial-driven, and blind we humans can be, and how long it takes us "to get ideas"...Freud and Jung both determined that we dream to "make links between the apparent dissimiliar." You echo this with "an attempt to search for associations between seemingly unrelated experiences...".
Thank you for the fine article, and perhaps this will bring more people to work and play with their dreams, something I have done for myself and with others for a couple of decades now.

Matthew

In fact, many shark species are known to cease swimming at times to "rest". It is a myth that they have to keep moving to avoid death. Sorry for what that does to your analogy.....

Sleep must be really important since we sacrifice a third of our lives to it, and it places us in an extremely vulnerable state (essentially, brainless). Presumably it has to do with the most basic operations of the unusual machinery that make up the neocortex, the substrate of mind. However, we still do not understand what those circuits do, so speculating about dreaming is like speculating about the color of the horse inside the horseless carriage.

Thank you for a great - and I dare say creative - column; you must have slept well, if not long, last night. I will point out, as hope for those of us tending toward wakefulness, that even a brief sprint of REM was sufficient in the Mednick research. Furthermore, increased sleepiness (narcoleptics are forever falling into REM) doesn't inevitably result in excessive creativity. It appears there is value in being able to both sleep soundly and wake fully - maybe the amount of time in REM is less essential.

The untamed mind is always swimming because that is how it likes it-- constantly leading the narrative. Meditators can slow down the charge and bring awareness into focus without the mind's commentary. It can be practiced before or in between sleeping stages and, for me, it usually does the trick, quiets the mind.

Our subconscious presumably has individual tastes, which might be ascertained by various noninvasive tests, like magnetic imaging. TV fare is probably a universal bore.

Although it would be mistaken to try to put the stream of unconsciousness in a penstock, scientists will someday catalogue its methods of "problem solving" -- such as mathematical discovery. Under some circumstances, do our minds, for example, carry out a systematic search, or do they fall back on random searching and massive "brainpower"? But it might take Science forever to get on top of mentation.

The role of dreaming in learning and processing the day's experiences is indeed fascinating, but recent scientific research is revealing that there are many other surprising and crucially important things happening in the brain when we assume it's basically offline. The best overview I've seen on this is "The Mind At NIght: The New Science of How and Why We Dream," an enjoyable book that presents the science clearly without dumbing it down. The information that's being uncovered about what the brain is really up while we sleep changes how you view waking consciousness too.

I've just finished reading Lehrer's “Proust Was A Neuroscientist”, and just like this article, it's as much a treatise on torturing non-human animals (it's rats in this) as it is an exploration of the human mind.
Perhaps we should investigate why some human brains can inflict cruelty and suffering with a clear conscience? I, for one, couldn't sleep at night if I was party to that.

3 or 4 pieces of advice from a dreamer:
1) When watching a scary movie, at the scene which is most likely to repeat like a radish, during a dream, repeat the mantra "Don't have a night mare about that." This simple autosuggestion has worked for me for decades.
2) Be aware that using the television as an Ambien tablet affects can affect dream content and perhaps REM. Read yourself to sleep. Boring or interesting, a book puts you out better every time. Avoid page turners.
3) Be aware that using Lunesta as prescribed, that is to say, as late-night television, can affect dream content. DO NOT fall asleep during CNN. That's not going to refresh you. Of course the Big Pharms are going to tell you these "irregular diazepam" sleeping pills do not affect sleep architecture. But, I have a friend who takes both a new age prescription sleep-aid and a newer age one to combat Excessive Daytime Sleepiness. No, he doesn't take them simultaneously. But he thinks daily, as-prescribed use of the two produces weird dreams that are more like talk shows. Or Glen Beck on grass. During these talk shows, combined with the blare of a television and the comfort of the couch, he is trying to talk to his know it all daughter, his co-worker, his ex-wife, and Freud has trouble getting a word in edgewise. Meanwhile, the Greeks have to wait backstage with their talking statues. He rarely catches a glimpse of people like Alfred Hitchcock, Thelonious Monk, or, in one case, the goddess Columbia herself. (She actually gave him a kiss.) I will shut up after the next tip.
4) I used to keep a dream log. But I used to have fantastic dreams. Not talk shows. About a piece of gold the size and shape of a Laughing Cow grueyre wedge with strange symbols. A repetitive one about a trip to the near future in which I ask someone what year this is. Trying to read. (During a lucid dream, try to read something. That is the clincher for me. Maybe I can read one word. The words are a tossing salad on the page, or in foreign symbols.) I think the "read only " lobe is disconnected during the dream. Dreaming is writing. Real writing (not graphomania) though, is a nightmare. Too much perspiration.

By the way, I would rather be eating alfalfa sprouts and drinking brewer's yeast. And I have eaten and drunk those things. But my nervous system is so discontented with itself and the rest of civilization right now I can't exactly dump the Lunesta and Nuvigil in the trash. I mean my friend can't.

A very interesting and informative column. My comment will be more trivial: Perhaps one reason reason for your inability to sleep is the same reason that you can see your wife's eyelids and the ceiling of your bedroom at 2:00 a.m.: Your room isn't dark enough. We've found room darkening blinds to be a big help.

As a chronic insomniac who normally spends very little time dreaming, when I do dream I feel much more rested when I wake up. So I think dreaming is very physiologically restorative. This sense of physiological rest holds true even when the dream is emotionally challenging or frightening.

A friend and colleague, Richard Jones, did some fascinating research with the dreams of college students many years ago. His last book, The Dream Poet, captures a number of his findings. One such is that dreams occurring in the middle of the night are more likely to involve older and earlier issue s in a person's life, while dreams that take place shortly before awakening in the morning are likely to be problem-solving efforts related to the events in the upcoming day.

My own pseudo-explanation of what dreams are seems similar to the findings you report. I've always thought that the brain's limited short-term memory space had to be emptied during sleep, and the experiences stored there had to be incorporated into the brain's larger associative memory store. The brain takes each element of the day's experience and rummages through similar experiences that it has previously stored, trying to find a place to put it. It's like opening a lot of closet doors, each crammed full of similar concepts, looking for the place to cram the current one. As each door is opened, a flood of related images are accessed. So the office building you walked into earlier that day suddently becomes the house you grew up in, and one of your co-workers is sitting at your kitchen table, etc. Your brain makes a narrative of these jumbled but related images, much as it makes a narrative of your experiences during waking life.