2009 Momentum - Glashütte Original

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Photos: Getty (2) 40 Momentum 1· 2009 Tendence Time and dream Dreamtime How do we experience time while we are sleeping? Does it move more quickly or more slowly – does it even exist at all? And how often do we spend our nights travelling back to the past or forward to the future? We lift the veil on sleep
FB y Maike Zürcher ive hours in just ten seconds, a whole day in twelve minutes, a century in the blink of an eye... Some times when we dream we feel that we have lived through a whole lifetime, but when we wake up a glance at the clock reveals that just a few minutes have passed. French physician Alfred Maury, who was researching dreams before Sigmund Freud became famous, had personal experience of this sensation: while asleep in 1861 he dreamt himself into the turmoil of the French Revolution. He was to be executed, but just as the blade of the guillotine was plunging towards his exposed neck, he awoke to discover that a piece of his bed had fallen onto the back of his head. Maury concluded that at the moment of impact his brain must have formulated an appropriate story to explain the physical sensation, and thus created the French Revo - lution dream as a kind of flashback. So it would seem that we do not experience time in the same way in our sleeping and our waking lives – as Maury’s days of revolution must actually have taken place in just seconds. Since then, however, other scientists researching the phenomenon of dreaming have dismissed Maury’s theory as a subjective impression, submitting evidence that they say proves the contrary. Almost a century later, in 1951, researchers at the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep. During REM phases, when the sleeper’s eyes move rapidly, the brain is much more active than during deep sleep. This is the time when dreams occur. Although the brain is actually about as active as it is when the person is awake, the body remains still, the muscles do not move – thankfully, as this means we can move around in our dreams without bashing into all the bedroom furniture back in the real world. Scientists now distinguish between five different phases of sleep, which are repeated several times throughout the night. Shortly after the groundbreaking discovery of REM, two researchers at the University of Chicago, William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman, attempted to prove that time as we dream it and time as we experience it when awake do correspond after all. Test subjects in their sleep laboratory were asked, upon being awakened from REM sleep, how long they thought they had been dreaming. Their answers were pretty much correct – if they had been REMing for 15 minutes, they usually felt their dream had lasted about that long. Yet research into dreams represents a particular challenge for scientists. What the data available to dream researchers, or oneirologists, lacks is immediacy. Michael Wiegand, psychiatry professor in Munich, explains: “When we remember a dream, the simple act of recalling it becomes a reconstruction. Our brain goes through the story of our dream in a very different way when it is awake – the conditions are utterly different to the moment at which we were actually having the dream. When we dream, our brains are in a third state between deep sleep and waking.” Women tend to remember their dreams better than men do – but this is probably for sociological reasons, as women are encouraged to pay more attention to their feelings and impressions. So oneriologists have to depend on what their test subjects tell them about their dreams once they have woken up – when they are on an entirely different plain of consciousness. And so far no one has come up with a nifty little device to record our dreams, so this group of scientists have nothing to work with but subjective impressions that cannot be measured. And anyone who has tried “Life is made up of two parts: the past – a dream; the future – a wish” Arab proverb Momentum 1· 2009 41
Page 1 and 2: Momentum MAGAZINE FOR CONTEMPORARIE
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Page 5 and 6: 34 WALLPAPER Designers from all ove
Page 8 and 9: Photos: Imago, Getty, Picture-Allia
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Page 18 and 19: Time Zones Norway 18 Momentum 1· 2
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Page 26 and 27: Time to Time News Finding something
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Page 48 and 49: Sources: brand eins, extrawissen.de
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2009 Momentum - Glashütte Original

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