The biology of dreaming http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-3.4/bree...

A long-simmering debate over the purpose

of dreaming takes a surprising turn with a
Columbia ocular physiologist's hypothesis.
Whether or not REM sleep exists to stir the
eye, David Maurice has stirred up several
disciplines

The biology of
dreaming:
a controversy
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that won't go
to sleep
Maury M. Breecher

N o one would normally consider David Maurice, Ph.D., professor of

ocular physiology in the Department of Ophthalmology at Columbia-
Presbyterian Medical Center, a revolutionary. Nevertheless, he has
reignited a decades-long controversy that could spark a revolutionary
re-evaluation of an entire field of behavioral research. Dr. Maurice has
developed a startling new line of scientific inquiry that, when added to
other findings, could change our understanding of rapid eye movement
(REM) sleep and the nature of dreams.

What Maurice has done is to suggest an

alternative explanation for the phenomenon
known as REM sleep, the stage in which the eyes
rapidly move and most dreams occur. Dr.
Maurice isn't convinced by currently accepted
theories about why REM occurs, including the
widespread belief that REM exists mainly to
process memories of the preceding day's events
during dreams. Instead, he hypothesizes that while they sleep humans

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experience REM to supply much-needed oxygen to the cornea of the eye.

In a recent issue of Experimental Eye Research, Maurice suggests that the
aqueous humor--the clear watery liquid in the anterior chamber just
behind the cornea--needs to be "stirred" to bring oxygen to the cornea.1

"Without REM," Maurice told 21stC, "our corneas would starve and
suffocate while we are asleep with our eyes closed."

Maurice's interest in REM began a few years ago. "I wondered why
animals born with sealed eyelids needed REM or why fetuses in the womb
experience great amounts of REM. The processing-of-cognitive-signals
theory doesn't seem to explain those occurrences." He developed his
hypothesis after learning of a young man whose eyes had been
immobilized by an accident and whose corneas had become laced with
blood vessels, presumably to supply the corneas with oxygen. The
Columbia eye expert knew that when the eyes are closed during non-REM
sleep, oxygen can reach the cornea from the iris only by diffusion across
the stagnant aqueous humor. Using a mathematical model, he established
that oxygen supplied under those conditions would be insufficient. That
realization led to his proposal that REM exists to bring oxygen to the
cornea.

Often an idea from one scientific realm has important consequences to

another, and Maurice's hypothesis has ramifications for a cross-
disciplinary controversy in the fields of cognitive neurobiology and dream
research. The debate concerns the relation between physiologic events
(such as REM) and dream creation. Neurobiologists and
neuropsychiatrists tend to think of dreaming sleep as "physiologically
determined" and shaped by the activation of brain neurons, according to J.
Allan Hobson, M.D., a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who directs
the Neurophysiology Laboratory of the Massachusetts Mental Health
Center. The implications of this activation hypothesis contrast sharply
with the psychoanalytic view of the dreaming process.

"What is at stake here is a theory of dreams that is scientifically valid," Dr.

Hobson told 21stC. "If psychoanalytic dream theory is not scientifically
valid, then psychoanalytic dream interpretation is not scientifically valid. I
believe it is not."

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Interpretation vs. observation

Dreams, Sigmund Freud famously stated, are

"the royal road to the unconscious."
Psychoanalysts still believe that dream contents
are unconscious manifestations of subconscious
mental turmoil and that the examination and
understanding of that content can help dreamers
rid themselves of inner conflicts. Many of today's psychoanalysts take a
more pluralistic approach than the field's founder did: "Modern
psychoanalytic thought now holds that dreams are just one of several
roads to the unconscious," according to Arnold Richards, M.D., editor of
the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Still, these
practitioners separate the psychological from the physiological and view
dreams primarily as grist for interpretation. Observations in the biological
sciences, on the other hand, have given their discipline a bracing challenge.

In 1953, roughly a half century after Freud posited his theories, sleep
researchers Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that
dreaming was associated with REM sleep. They foun d that sleepers could
recall dreams most frequently if they were awakened when their eyes
appeared to be moving rapidly beneath their eyelids. This discovery gave
researchers a tool with which to monitor dreams. Over the years, findings
of those studies caused several scientists to challenge Freudian dream
interpretation theory. A landmark 1977 scientific paper by Hobson and his
Harvard colleague Robert W. McCarley, M.D., boldly called for "important
revisions" in psychoanalytic dream theory. Drs. Hobson and McCarley
proposed what they called "the activation-synthesis model of dream
production," explaining,

The primary motivating force for dreaming is not psychological

but physiological since the time of occurrence and duration of
dreaming sleep are quite constant, suggesting a
preprogrammed, neurally determined genesis . . . [I]t casts
serious doubt upon the exclusively psychological significance
attached to both the occurrence and quality of dreams.2

To Hobson, dreams are reactions to random nervous system stimuli,

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which the brain "interprets" as bizarre images and other sensory

hallucinations. "The activation-synthesis hypothesis," he asserts, "assumes
that dreams are as meaningful as they ca n be under the adverse working
conditions of the brain in REM sleep. The reason that dream content often
seems disoriented or bizarre is because the activated brain-mind does its
best to attribute meaning to the internally generated signals of the brain."

Adding fuel to the controversy, in 1983, Nobel laureate Francis Crick and
his Salk Institute colleague Graeme Mitchison argued in a Nature article3
that the brain's neural memory systems are easily overloaded and that
humans experience dream-laden REM to eliminate cognitive debris. In
other words, dreams are nothing more than a mechanism for the nervous
system to clear the brain of unnecessary, even harmful memories.

Drs. Crick and Mitchison called their theory "reverse learning" and
quipped in their 1983 Nature article that "We dream to forget." In essence,
they described dreams as garbage to be discarded from memory. In a later
article in Behavioural Brain Research, Crick and
Mitchison stated, "There is no evidence to
suggest that remembered dreams are anything
more than an accidental by-product of this
(REM) function"; furthermore, they directly
attacked psychoanalytic theory by writing, "To a
modern neuroscientist Freud's theories, in spite
of their appeal to the contemporary imagination,
seem little better than the common belief in earlier times that dreams
foretold the future, a belief which also held strong intuitive appeal."4 Their
views left little room for the idea that it is psychologically valuable to
analyze dreams.

Hobson adds, "Psychoanalysts want people to believe that they can

interpret dreams and discover deep-seated meanings that are at the root of
the dream process. I just don't think there is any scientific reason to believe
that."

No final answer in sight

Freudians and their allies have responded to such attacks robustly. For

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instance, discussing Maurice's ophthalmologic hypothesis, Dr. Richards

retorts that "A scientist can develop an understanding of the physiological
function of dreaming and still not know anything about the meaning of
dreams, because one is a physiological phenomenon and the other is a
psychological phenomenon. It may be that REM dreaming does something
to the cornea, but that doesn't say anything about the nature of dreams
and their m eaning and use in psychoanalysis. One hundred years of
psychoanalytic research and experience show that there is much that can
be learned about the mental and emotional lives of people by dream
interpretation and other psychoanalytic methods."

Neil B. Kavey, M.D., director of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center's

Sleep Disorders Center, is one of the few psychiatrists in the world who is
board-certified in both psychoanalysis and sleep medicine. He points out
that proponents on each side of the controversy draw on support from
research in their respective fields.

"We know that REM is associated with many physiological processes and
effects such as changes in breathing, changes in blood flow to the brain,
and changes in brain activity," explains Dr. Kavey. "If Dr. Maurice's
hypothesis is proven, it would add to our knowledge about another
function of REM sleep, but it wouldn't invalidate the principles of
psychoanalysis. "Although Dr. Hobson and others correctly observe that
REM is strongly associated with physiological causes and effects," Kavey
continues, "it doesn't follow that it is useless for psychoanalysts to treat
patients by helping them interpret their dreams."

Experts on both sides of the issue agree that more research is needed to
better understand REM and the functions of dreams. Some commentators,
indeed, come close to contending that "function" is not always what
dreaming is about, liberating some dreams from goals and causality
altogether. "Neither the classical psychoanalytic approach nor the
physiologic attacks on it have been, in our opinion, been able to explain
fully the purpose or function of dreaming," wrote Harvard Medical School
psychiatrist Ramon Greenberg and three of his colleagues in a recent issue
of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.5

So the controversy about what dreams are for--if they are "for" anything--

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continues. David Maurice, however, is opting out of this debate. "My

interests are in the physiological mechanisms, the plumbing of the eye. I
am happy to leave the subject of dreams to others."

1. Maurice DM. An ophthalmological explanation of REM sleep. Exp Eye Res 66 (1998):
139-145.

2. Hobson JA, McCarley RW. The brain as a dream state generator: an activation-synthesis
hypothesis of the dream process. Am J Psychiatry 134 (1977):1335-1348.

3. Crick F, Mitchison G. The function of dream sleep. Nature 304 (1983): 111-114.

4. Crick F, Mitchison G. REM sleep and neural nets. Behav Brain Res 69 (1995): 147-155.

5. Greenberg R, Katz H, Schwartz W, Pearlman C. A research-based reconsideration of

the psychoanalytic theory of dreaming. J Amer Psychoanal Assn 40 (1992):531-550.

Related links...

Columbia Record article on David Maurice's studies

Sleep Home Pages, UCLA Medical School

Association for the Study of Dreams

The Stages of Sleep and Shift Work, Shiftworker Online

Stephen LaBerge, "Lucid Dreaming: Psychophysiological

Studies of Consciousness during REM Sleep," in Bootzen, R. R.,
Kihlstrom, J.F. & Schacter, D.L. (eds.), Sleep and Cognition
(Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1990),
pp. 109-126.

Centre for Sleep Research, University of South Australia

J. Allan Hobson's sleep-studies laboratory, Massachusetts

Mental Health Center

Neuroscience Information Resources, Society for the Neural

Control of Movement, University of Massachusetts

Milestones in Neuroscience Research, Eric H. Chudler,

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University of Washington

Neurologist William Calvin's meditations on brains, evolution,

and the future

"The second state of consciousness: Sweet dreams," from New

Scientist symposium "Toward a science of consciousness"

MAURY M. BREECHER, M.P.H., Ph.D., author of Healthy Homes in a

Toxic World (NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1992), is a member of the American
Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Association of
Science Writers.

Art Credits: Illustrations: Howard R. Roberts

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