Down the Rabbit Hole

Decoding, Directing, and Harnessing the Power of Dreams

Words by Deirdre Barrett, PhD — a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, author of  The Committee of Sleep and Pandemic Dreams, and President of The International Association for the Study of Dreams.

What is the function of dreaming? Freud said wish fulfillment; others have answered threat simulation, memory consolidation, or emotional processing. But I think there’s a problem with the question. We would never ask, “What is the function of thinking?” and expect a one-function answer. Waking thought is for everything. Dreaming is simply our brain thinking in a very different neurophysiologic state, but still about all the same topics.

Our Brain at Night

We enter Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep about every 90 minutes through the night, and this is the stage in which most dreams occur. In REM, the visual areas of our brain are even more active than during waking hours, and our emotional centers are somewhat more active too. This produces the nature of dreams: intensely visual, emotionally charged, and free from waking logic's constraints. The wild narratives and vivid images sweeping around us are not questioned because the region responsible for linear reasoning lowers its activity.

While most dreams reflect our current concerns, a special type — recurring dreams — are dreamed again and again across months or years. Psychologists believe these address longer-term characterological issues rather than just that day's events. They occur on nights when something triggers that core concern, but the concern itself is an enduring one. Studies find that 30 percent to 60 percent of people report recurring dreams, and the majority of these are negative: being chased, falling, exam anxiety, losing teeth.

A Brief History of Interpreting Dreams

Dream interpretation is as old as human history — the Sumerian Gilgamesh epic features dreams foretelling death. But in terms of what modern psychology means by interpretation, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus may have been the first to maintain that dreams were not supernatural but part of an individual’s psyche.

Sigmund Freud believed dreams happened when ungratified instincts were triggered during sleep, disguised by a “dream censor.” He asked patients to free associate with dream elements. Yet despite emphasizing individual associations, Freud often interpreted in terms he considered universal symbolism — most frequently sexual. When a young woman dreamed of wearing an unusually shaped hat, Freud told her directly, “The hat is really a male genital,” — not in her associations.

Carl Jung believed the unconscious contained collective as well as personal elements. He favored staying closer to specific dream images and sometimes interpreted them using myths from cultures patients hadn’t encountered, representing universal archetypes. Alfred Adler thought dream imagery existed to express underlying thoughts, not disguise them — dreaming as “dress-rehearsal for life.”

Modern research hasn’t supported Freud’s concept of disguise or Jung’s compensatory theory. Instead, research confirms the “continuity hypothesis”: Our waking and dreaming concerns are basically the same. For my book, Pandemic Dreams, I collected thousands of dreams from people in 73 countries — and people certainly weren’t dreaming the opposite of their fears; they were dreaming about them.

In Your Dreams: The Dreamer as Authority

The most common misconception is that dreams have universal symbolic meanings — that you can look up “dog” in a dream dictionary and be told what your dream means. In reality, symbols are personal.

The most effective approach involves non-leading questions about key elements. The therapist, or even just a close friend or a dialogue with yourself, can ask, “Pretend I’m from another planet. Tell me, what is a…?” This playful framing helps metaphors emerge naturally. Do this for each element of the dream and then ask: “Is there anything in your waking life that is like…?”

For example, If you ask three people who have dreamed of a dog what dogs mean to them, they could say anything from “they’re like a baby — cute and we need to take care of them,” to “a large animal with sharp teeth — I have scars from when a dog bit me when I was 12,” to “man’s best friend — they are more loyal to you as any person would ever be.” You hear three entirely different metaphors there.

It can also be useful to focus on the emotional or body sensation aspect of the dream: “Is there anything in my waking life recently that has given me that awful knot in my stomach that I felt when the big dog was chasing me through the woods?” 

Useful dream interpretation isn’t about imposing outside formulas; it’s about helping the dreamer explore their own reactions to the dream’s elements — what those figures, places, and actions evoke for them.

Nightmares — Two Types

Garden-variety nightmares are metaphoric in nature — they benefit from interpretation. What does the tsunami represent? The attacking tiger? Asking what in your waking life gives you that same feeling often reveals the connection.

Post-traumatic nightmares are distinctive — more realistic reenactments that occur across all sleep stages, not just REM. They may be similar to daytime flashbacks: intrusive memories intruding on any state of consciousness. The treatment, Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, or "dream rescripting," involves visualizing the dream while awake but altering the ending. If you're being chased, imagine whether you'd rather have someone rescue you, vanquish the pursuer, engage them in dialogue, or fly away. This proves remarkably effective at reducing both nightmare frequency and daytime PTSD symptoms.

Dreams and Creative Problem-Solving

Dreams have produced art, music, novels, mathematical proofs, and designs for telescopes and computers.

August Kekulé dreamed the structure of benzene. Trying to visualize it as a straight line, he dreamed of a snake taking its tail in its mouth, revealing the molecule was a closed ring. Dmitri Mendeleev dreamed up the periodic table’s arrangement. Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for an experiment he saw in a dream, conducting it the next day.

Mary Shelley dreamed the scenes that became Frankenstein. Robert Louis Stevenson crafted Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from a dream. Paul McCartney dreamed “Yesterday” — the most played song in radio history — and went around asking people whether it was a known piece of music because he couldn’t believe he’d written it.

Controlling Your Dreams: The Art of Incubation

The examples above happened to their dreamers spontaneously. However, I’ve developed a technique that makes it much more likely your nighttime dreams will focus on a specific topic, question, or problem. The technique is called “dream incubation.” In my research with college students focusing on problems of their choosing for a week, half had dreams addressing their target problem, and a quarter dreamed of a solution.

Here’s the technique:

1. Write down your problem as a brief phrase and place it by your bed.
   
2. Visualize it as a concrete image. As you drift off, tell yourself you want to dream about it — a quiet request to your dreaming mind.
   
3. Keep recording materials (like a pen and paper) nearby.
4. Upon waking, don’t move — stay in the same position, eyes closed, and let the dream float back.
   
5. Write down everything, even strange fragments.
   

If images don’t come easily, place a photograph related to the topic on your nightstand as the last thing you see. The dreaming brain is extremely visual.

The technique works best for problems requiring visualization and those requiring “thinking outside the box” when conventional wisdom is wrong. In dreams, we hallucinate objects vividly, and when pondering a question, we’re not as quick to censor with “That’s not the way to approach it.”

For example, one of my research subjects couldn’t arrange furniture in her smaller apartment. After incubation, she dreamed of coming home to find her chest of drawers in the living room like a sideboard. “It actually fit there really well when I tried it,” she reported.

Another student, torn between clinical and industrial psychology programs, dreamed of flying over the United States; the pilot announced engine trouble and said Massachusetts was “very dangerous” — safety lights were further west. He woke, realizing both clinical programs were in Massachusetts, where he’d always lived, while industrial programs were far away. “Getting away is probably more important than which program I go into.”

Lucid Dreaming

A lucid dream is one where you’re aware you’re dreaming. Most people report at least one, often in childhood or at a nightmare’s end.

You can increase lucid dream frequency through daytime reality testing. Make a habit, a few times a day, of checking text twice (it changes in dreams), digital clocks (time jumps randomly), light switches (lights rarely change), or mirrors (reflections are often distorted). Anything you practice regularly is likely to show up in dreams: You’ll eventually flip that light switch, and it doesn’t dim... or it emits a funny noise. Dream incubation works too: Tell yourself at bedtime, “Tonight I want to realize I’m dreaming.”

But lucid dreaming is harder and less reliable than simple incubation. For most practical purposes, like solving problems and reducing nightmares, the incubation approach is more achievable.

Collaborating With Our Dreams

Dreams facilitate creative problem-solving by bypassing logical constraints. The power of dream thinking lies precisely in how different it is from waking thought, so when we’re stuck, dreams can supply the breakthrough.

Our dreaming mind offers guidance to those who cultivate attention to it. By practicing dream recall, maintaining a journal, and engaging in directed incubation, we can access this remarkable reservoir, continuing the legacy of dreamers throughout history who have shaped science, art, and human achievement through visions that arrived in the night.

Illustrations by William Penhallow Henderon from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll | Raw Pixel