DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES:
THE NEW THEORY ON THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF DREAMS
Ernest Hartmann, MD
New York: Plenum Trade, 1998
315 pages, hardback, $27.95
ISBN 0-306-45996-5

Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg

Tidal waves show up in the dreams of a woman who has been raped and a man who has narrowly escaped a house fire. In both instances, the image reflects feelings of terror, fear, and vulnerability.

Women start to dream about small animals midway through pregnancy and increasingly larger animals as delivery nears. These images express their worries about what the baby will be like and how well they will be able to care for it.

Dreams arise as metaphors for our emotional concerns, Ernest Hartmann says. The dream pictures make our feelings more accessible to our waking minds. Dreams do their work even if we don't remember them, he says, although remembering may enhance their value to us.

A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Hartmann directs the sleep disorders center at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts. He is the author of seven previous books on sleep and dreams. In developing his theories, he drew on a huge data base: 5,000 of his own dreams, 10,000 dreams from long dream series given to him by the dreamers, several thousand dreams from his patients, and dreams he and others collected in research studies.

Dreams connect what Hartmann calls the "nets of the mind," linking together the 100 billion neurons that make up the cortex of the brain. While they tie the present to the past, he says, they do more than simply consolidate memory. They also produce new and broader connections, thus fostering problem-solving. In this way, Hartmann says, dreams help us adapt not only to dilemmas of daily life, but also to future stress.

Dreams zero in on what is most important to us, he says, bypassing regions of the mind concerned with mundane daily matters, We seldom dream of reading, typing, writing, or calculating, he notes, even if we spend many hours a day on such tasks. Because dreams are guided by emotions, they often seem more exciting or wilder than waking life.

That's particularly true for dreams that follow traumatic events, ones that occur while the event is resolving, when emotions are still high and focused. What is on a person's mind in waking hours often is readily apparent in his or her dreams.

Ordinary dreams may seem confused, Hartmann says, because no single emotional concern dominates. Most dreams, he suggests, reflect multiple emotions. Striving to arrive at the dream's meaning, translating the imagery, teasing out the different emotions, may uncover concerns of which we previously were not fully aware.

Hartmann discusses recurrent dreams and includes findings from his extensive studies of persons who suffer frequent nightmares. He reviews theories of dreaming from those of Freud, who asserted that dreams fulfilled a disguised wish, to those of some contemporary biologists, who say dreams are random, merely "junk" generated by brainstem activity in sleep. Hartmann contends both these theories are wrong, and tells why he thinks they fall short. He also tells how to capture and examine dreams.

The book is written in jargon-free and accessible prose, with numerous examples of dreams. The book will be useful to students and others interested in further reading, as it contains both endnotes and a comprehensive bibliography.