2009 Momentum - Glashütte Original

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
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