What can we learn from our dreams? | Dylan Selterman | TEDxUMD

Every night we have a dream. We often don't remember having them or simply dismiss their contents. In this talk, Dr. Selterman provides evidences that suggest our dreams might be more valuable than we currently think. He draws on his experience as an expert on dream research, providing numerous examples of what they reveal about our inner selves. He shares ways we can analyze our own dreams to better understand who we are.

Dr. Selterman is a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Maryland. He runs the DREAM Lab at Maryland, with research interests including romantic attraction or dating, emotions, attachment in interpersonal relationships, patterns of dreaming, sexual behavior, and morality and ethics.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Hi, everyone.

So, when people ask me about my research,

and I tell them I study dreams,
they ask questions like:

"Where do dreams come from?"
and "Why do we dream?"

and "What does it means if I have a dream
where my teeth are falling out?"

Then I have to become an ad hoc
dream interpreter right there,

which is okay,

but one of the prevailing
scientific perspectives on dreams

is the "continuity hypothesis,"

the idea that we dream about things
that we experience while we're awake.

So last night, I had a dream
about basketball.

Guess what I was doing
before I went to sleep?

Watching the NBA playoffs.

Or, as cleverly illustrated
in this cartoon, the guy says,

"I think my dream catcher
needs some sort of filter.

I'm getting a lot of dreams
about hot stock investments,

low-cost air fares, and products promising
to enhance my sexual performance."

(Laughter)

But my research actually examines
the opposite question:

"How are our dreams associated
with behavior after we wake up?"

So let me ask you a question.

How many of you have ever had a dream
about someone that you know?

All right.

Keep your hand up
if you've ever had a dream,

and then you were upset
at the person in your dream

for something they did
to you in that dream,

or if someone was upset at you

for something you did
to them in their dream.

Keep your hands up.
Take a look around.

This was also captured
in an episode of Friends

where Phoebe was mad
at Ross for something

that she couldn't figure out
what it was at first.

She was mad at him the all day
and then finally realized

it was because of something mean
that he said about her in a dream.

My colleagues and I
wanted to investigate this.

This is when I was working
on my PhD at Stony Brook.

In our study,
we asked 61 participants

to keep track of their dreams
each night for a two-week period.

We also asked them to keep track

of their daily activity
with their romantic partners,

their significant others.

In this study, we collected
almost 850 total dream reports.

Out of that sample, about one-quarter
contains their romantic partners.

So people are dreaming
about their romantic partners

about 25% of the time.

Of those dreams,
a little bit less than half

have some kind
of positive interaction in them,

and about one-quarter of those
have some kind of conflicts in them.

People are also having dreams
about other people,

what I would call "infidelity dreams"

or dreams with romantic
cheating behavior in them.

Let's take a look
at some of these dreams.

I'll show you two happy ones first,
with positive interaction in them.

This dream goes: "I dreamt I was
at a carnival with my girlfriend.

She likes them, so we decided to go
to one that stopped in our town.

We were having fun running around,
kissing, tickling each other.

She kept beating me
at the whack-a-mole game

even though I thought
I was winning by a lot...

In the end, she won
a big teddy bear as a prize

which is apparently what
she wanted, so I was happy."

That's cute.

(Laughter)

"This dream was a memory.

It was our first date, and we were
watching Saw II around November.

I was so scared of the movie,
I kept ducking my head into his shoulder

and squeaking when some
gory part appeared.

He laughed and comforted me.

In the middle of the movie
I rested my head on his shoulder,

and he put his arm
around me and kissed me.

He was very sweet,
and I remember feeling tingly.

We continued to kiss and hug each other."

Aw!

(Laughter)

So what we're seeing in these dreams
is a lot of the same kinds of behaviors

that people would exhibit
with their romantic partners

in their waking lives.

They're going on dates,
to the carnival, to the movies.

There's kissing, affectionate behaviour,
there's comforting.

If I showed you these dreams
in some regular diary reports,

you probably wouldn't be able
to tell the difference.

So that shows evidence
for the continuity hypothesis.

That being said, not all dreams
are sunshine and roses.

I'm going to show you some negative
dreams now, so fair warning:

if you're sensitive to conflicts,
these get a little rough.

"A girl left a message
on my boyfriend's Facebook page,

saying that she loved him.

I find out he called her,
they were talking,

even though he knows
how I feel about her.

On top of that,
he tells her that he loves her.

After badgering him
about what they talked about,

he finally says that he told her
he loved her without meaning it.

I become even more upset
and start smacking him across the face,

yelling and crying
how could he do this to me.

He just says 'I don't know'
and I keep yelling and crying

until finally waking myself
out of the dream."

Ouch!

So, think about if you
have this type of dream,

and you wake up and your partner
is sleeping right next to you,

what might you say
and do in that situation?

Also, this shows how ubiquitous
Facebook has become:

now it even infiltrates our dreams.

Let's do another one.
This involves a little bit of jealousy.

"In this dream, I was friends
with my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend.

We were hanging out at my house,
having fun, singing karaoke.

Every time I looked at her,

I thought very few girls
are as beautiful as she is.

Then my boyfriend comes over.
He wanted a picture with her.

Then I got all jealous
and pulled him aside

to ask him if he thought
she was prettier than me.

I was giving him
a lot of attitude, I knew it,

but I didn't care
because of our situation.

I had every right
to be jealous and bitchy.

He ignored both my question
and me for the night.

I confronted him again,
he told me he was very turned off

by my attitude and behavior.

I questioned my behavior
and wondered if maybe I overreacted."

There we're seeing more evidence
that a dream like this

might prompt someone when they
wake up to reconsider their actions,

to reconsider their
interpersonal relationships.

Let's do an example
of infidelity in dreams.

"I had met this wonderful,
cute affectionate guy.

He gave me attention, gifts,
and wanted to meet my parents.

He even said he wanted
to marry me some day.

One particular part I remember best.

He took me to this extravagant
store, all gold and silver.

He gave me jewelry to try on
with this beautiful champagne dress.

I felt so happy the entire dream
that I didn't want to wake up."

It's important to keep in mind

this person is in a relationship
with somebody else -

a completely different person
who she's not having a dream about.

I'll do one more infidelity dream.

"I was at a party
with my fraternity brothers

with a bunch of sorority girls
I know from school.

I remember being called constantly
from my girlfriend checking up on me.

It got to the point
where we got into a fight

because I told her she didn't trust me.

I got beyond drunk and hooked up
with some random girl.

I brought her to my house
and we had sex.

I remember feeling guilty
before it went down, but satisfied after."

I know some of these dreams look like

they're from deleted episodes
of the Jersey Shore,

(Laughter)

but what we're seeing

is that when people
have these types of dreams

with arguments or conflict
or betrayal or jealousy,

they have more conflict
with their partners the next day,

and that's controlling
for the previous day's conflict.

So it is not part of some
day-to-day mechanism,

there's something unique about the dream.

When people have an infidelity dream,

cheating on their partner,
hooking up with someone else,

they feel significantly less love
and closeness the next day.

What about sex dreams?

In case you're curious, we do have some.
I'll show you two examples.

"I guess to write my dream
is embarrassing,

but I'll try to describe it.

It was a sexual dream where me
and my loved one had sex.

Oddly, it was in my bathroom
on the counter sink top.

I felt happy and excited in my dream,

and with the look on his face,
I'd say he felt the same."

So this is a relatively good sex dream.

Here's one that's a little bit, crazy.

"I was having sex with my girlfriend,

and my ex-girlfriend
kept calling my phone.

I picked up, told her to leave
me alone and to go on with her life.

I went to my girl,

and we started to have
an intense Kama Sutra kind of sex.

She kept asking why I'm so mad,

and I told her that my ex-girl
kept harassing me.

She took my phone, called her,
and they started to curse each other.

We were still naked, she hung up,

and we went back to bed,
still making love.

And then I woke up."

Sex dreams are associated
with the next day's behavior,

but it depends on whether
the relationship is going well.

So if the relationship is good
and everyone's happy,

then having a sex dream

is associated with more love
and intimacy and closeness the next day.

But if the relationship is
not going well and they're unhappy,

then sex dreams are associated
with less love and closeness the next day.

So I want to pause here
and just reflect

because I'm sure some of you
might be thinking,

"Okay, dreams are associated
with the behavior the next day, why?

Why do dreams have this association?
Why do they have this effect?"

The short answer is we still don't know.

Dreams are one of the big,
unsolved mysteries of science.

There are several competing theories
that might explain what's going on here.

Patrick McNamara proposed the theory

that dreams evolved in order
to facilitate social attachment bonds,

especially between parents
and children and romantic partners,

and we do see some
limited evidence for that here,

especially with sex dreams
associated with more love and intimacy.

What about conflict dreams
that would suggest the opposite,

that it is almost hurting
the attachment bonds?

And there is another theory
that might address this,

which is more along the lines

that dreams evolved
in order to help us solve problems,

in order to see difficult issues
from a new perspective

and maybe come to conclusions
or have solutions

that we wouldn't otherwise be able to see

to adapt to emotionally
difficult situations.

I want to show you a few
examples from other studies

that might support this theory.

A lot of this research
is summarized by Deidre Barrett

in a chapter she wrote
for "The New Science of Dreaming."

This is a study from William Dement,
published in the early 1970s.

He gave 500 students a brainteaser,

and he told them to think about it
for 15 min before they went to sleep.

How many of you have seen
this brainteaser before?

" The letters O, T, T, F, F form
the beginning of an infinite sequence.

Find a simple rule for determining
any or all successive letters.

According to your rule,
what would the next two letters be?"

Now out of the 500 students,

there were 87 dreams that were actually
about the brainteaser,

and a handful of them solved it.

Here's one example of that dream.

"I was walking down
the hall of an art gallery.

I began to count the paintings:
one, two, three, four, five,

but as I came to the sixth and seventh,

the paintings had been
ripped from their frames.

I stared at the empty frame...

Suddenly I realized
the sixth and seventh spaces

were the solution to the problem.

O, T, T, F, F stands for
One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.

Six and seven are the next two
in the sequence.

So S and S would be
the two letters that follow."

Here's another study, from
Erin Wamsley and Bob Stickgold

in their lab at the Harvard Med School
Division of Sleep Research.

They gave participants
in their study this maze,

trained them on it, then tested their
ability to navigate it five hours later.

They let some of the participants sleep
in between during that five hours.

And the sleep did help
performance a little bit,

but not nearly as much as if they reported
having a dream about the maze.

Having a dream about the maze

improved their performance
on the retest tenfold

compared to the people
who did not have a dream.

It's almost as if the dream
allows our minds

to examine different kinds
of solutions in a creative way,

and then we wake up, and we've something
to work with we didn't have before.

Here's some research
by Rosalind Cartwright

that shows when you look at women

who are suffering from depression
after going through a divorce.

They are actually less depressed,

more mentally healthy
in the future at a follow-up

if they dream about their ex-partner,
about their former spouse.

This might seem counterintuitive,
you might be thinking

"How can you get over someone
if you're dreaming about them?"

Rosalind Cartwright
calls these "dreams that work:"

those people who incorporated
the thing that stressed them out

into their dream were better off,
even if the dream content was negative.

Another example of this.

Former smokers who were trying
to quit were less likely to relapse,

less likely to start smoking again
if they dreamt about smoking.

Again, we are seeing this evidence

that dreams help us to navigate
emotionally difficult situations

and to adapt and solve problems in a way
that we would not otherwise be able to do.

So dreams have this incredible
power to help us heal.

As Bob Stickgold said,

"When you sleep,
your brain is figuring it out

and holding on to relevant information
and throwing out the rest."

Dreams might also allow
for a creative spark.

They're responsible for some of the
greatest innovations ever known to man.

Remember the periodic table
of the elements,

from high school chemistry class
perhaps for some of you.

Dmitri Mendeleev
dreamt the periodic table.

He had a dream that the elements
appeared before him

and organized themselves
according to their atomic mass,

and he woke up and drew that,

and that became what we now know
as the periodic table.

Paul McCartney famously
dreamt the song "Yesterday."

Everybody knows that song?
♫ Yesterday ...

Okay, I won't sing.

But he dreamt the song,
woke up, went to his piano,

thought "Great tune!
Let me see if I can figure it out,"

and he found the chords,
and that became

one of the most beautiful
songs ever written.

Now, I think it's unfortunate

most of us probably won't have
one of these deep, profound dreams

that lead us to these insights.

And I don't think
it's because we're not capable.

I think it's because most of the time,

we're not really
paying attention to our dreams.

We don't take them seriously.

People think that dreams are just
a bunch of nonsense and garbage.

We wake up, we shrug it off,

we go about our day
as if it never happens.

There's a great quote
from my favorite film,

"Waking Life" by Richard Linklater:

"Most people are either
sleep walking through their waking life

or wake walking
through their sleeping life.

Either way, they're not
going to get that much out of it."

If I asked you right now to tell me

whether or not you're dreaming
in this very moment,

most of you probably say,
"Of course not. I'm obviously awake."

My response would be:
"How do you know?"

How do you know
this is not a dream right now?

Most of us can't tell the difference.

Can you tell when you're dreaming

or only when you wake up
and realize that it was a dream

do you understand what was going on?

So I want to conclude

if you get anything from this talk,
I want you to take this home:

dreams are worth your time.

They're an important piece of your life
and worth paying attention to.

Dreams represent this great, untapped
reservoir of information and insight

that you can gain about yourself,

your relationships, your work,
your physical health.

So start tonight,
keep a dream journal.

Put a pad of paper and a pen
next to your bed,

and when you wake up,

write down whatever was
in your head while you were asleep.

You might be surprised at what you find.

And your dreams might be trying
to tell you something really important.

All right, thank you.

(Applause)