Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind by Michelle Carr; Henry Holt, 272 pp., $29.99
In 1897, Russian physician and scientist Marie de Manacéïne made a startling but necessary observation: “If we pay no attention to sleep, we thereby admit that a third part of our lives is unworthy of investigation.” The quality and content of our dreams and our sleep, she believed, could reveal an immense amount of information about our worries, our memories, the things we learn, and the condition of our bodies. Dreams should never be washed away with the morning splash of water to the face.
More than 100 years after de Manacéïne, sleep scientist Michelle Carr, based at the University of Montreal, is shining a light on our sleeping minds. Her new book, Nightmare Obscura, is a thorough and engaging tour through the science and philosophy of our dreaming lives. Needless to say, there is still much work to be done in transferring the discoveries of sleep scientists to general clinical practice. Take nightmares, for example. “A nightmare is a real experience,” Carr writes, and indeed, multiple large-population studies have shown that up to 40 percent of adults experience a nightmare every month. But upsetting dreams are sometimes dismissed, especially in childhood, when our parents may encourage us to shrug them off.
My sleep has always been peculiar, and I suffer a number of parasomnias. I know what it’s like to wake up from a nightmare in a cold sweat, or to feel my heart pound in abject horror as I hallucinate a phantom at the foot of my bed. In that moment, the vision is intensely real. Nightmares can affect the dreamer for days afterward, leading to rumination over past trauma or even anxiety about or hyperfixation on sleep. Indeed, it was Carr’s own experience of sleep paralysis that led her to become a sleep scientist.
Nightmare Obscura is a look at how dream science has developed over the past century, from the discovery of REM sleep in the early 1950s to modern sleep laboratories and pioneering experiments in lucid dreaming (a remarkable phenomenon in which dreamers are aware they are dreaming while still asleep). Carr writes with optimism, particularly in relation to the latter. She contends that dreams have more of a free-flowing nature than previously realized, and that they can be influenced, diverted, and even completely rewritten with simple techniques, such as playing sounds or issuing scents that penetrate the sleeper’s mind. Techniques like these, which belong to the field of “dream engineering,” offer a range of benefits: Creative people can use dreams as platforms for inspiration, athletes can practice their skills even when they’re asleep, and for those of us with recurring nightmares, it can be a way to escape the loop of reliving our worst moments. Carr writes about nightmares in a way that diminishes their power, with reassurance that although they do affect sufferers on an emotional and physiological level, they don’t have to be suffered forever.
Studies have shown that sleep and dreams can help us gain emotional distance from a negative memory; the more dreams we have about it, the less emotional room it occupies in our waking lives. This is why something that seems catastrophic during the day becomes less troublesome after a night of sleep; our dreams (even those we cannot recall) preserve the memory but wash away the feelings we’d attached to it. In addition, bad dreams may also be a way for us to rehearse threatening situations in a “safe” space: When we have a dream about being unprepared for an exam, for example, we could actually be figuring out how, in real life, we would deal with a similar situation. Carr separates bad dreams from nightmares, which are more emotionally distressing and often result in awakening at the peak of the perceived threat. But Carr and her colleagues around the world are beginning to dissect nightmares in the hope of mitigating the terrors they bring. For instance, studies have shown that a longer “presleep cognitive arousal” (i.e., a loop of worrying) frequently indicates that a nightmare will occur.
Carr also writes that during overnight observations, the clinical setting and occasional performance anxiety would cause participants to dream about the experiments. While reading her book—despite purposely not doing so right before bed—I had a couple of these dreams myself, in which I was in a hospital participating in a sleep study. Carr goes into great detail about how association works in the dreaming mind: “It seems like, rather than starting with a predetermined map, the dreamworld is continually created wherever the dreamer ventures, unlocking new spaces along the way and encouraging further exploration.”
At times, scientific terminology dominates Carr’s prose; the clinical discussion of dreams feels detached from the lived experience. The most memorable and lively parts of Nightmare Obscura are those in which Carr applies the neuroscience to real-life examples, either by relating her own dreams or including snippets of dreams from study participants. Our sleep is such a subjective and, occasionally, lonely part of our lives: We need to know that we’re not alone in the bad dreams that plague us.
