Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The biasing effects of previous information about the dreamers’ surgery can be most clearly seen when that information is absent. If there really is a relationship between the symbolic dream content and the nature of the surgery, it should be possible to determine what type of surgery the patient is going to have from the dream itself, without any previous knowledge. Unfortunately, Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) made no attempt to find out whether such determinations could be made. Nor did they bother to assess objectively whether it was possible to distinguish between the dreams of stressed and nonstressed individuals if one did not already know which group the dreamer fell into.

The importance of the biasing effect of information about the dreamer can be most clearly seen when such information is absent. As an example, read the following dream report from Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971, p. 118–119), as edited by Antrobus (1978, p. 570–71), and try to determine the type of surgery this patient will undergo:

We was working on a train… a work train… this Oregon crew came over on account of some washout or something…. So we saw them come down to that last station and do some switching. We figures… also they came across the bridge up there someplace and hooked over onto our railroad. We was… looking at this other engine and… we lined the switch, it seemed like our switch… it was a funny thing. They had to come off this private [rail] road onto ours and them switches weren’t a standard switch. We had to dig some rocks out of the ground… and throw this switch over. And I was doing that, I was helping… I can’t tell you what a switch is, instead of them being flapped over and locked down to the padlock they was flapped over, the ends of two pipes together and there was a piece of this crooked zigzag piece of iron that was run first in one pipe and then the other so you couldn’t lift the one out… and we was digging them things out of them pipes so we could throw the switch for them guys so they wouldn’t have to stop… they hadn’t used that switch it seemed like for years and naturally the sand and dust had blowed into these pipes and it was rusty. It took quite a while…. (p. 570–71)

The salient features of the above dream, as far as its symbolic interpretation by Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) and Antrobus (1978) is concerned, are the train and train tracks, the switch, and the rocks and dust that seem to block the switch. Even knowing which “symbols” in the dream are considered important by those with knowledge of the dreamer’s surgery does not at all constrain the possible interpretations if one does not have such knowledge. In fact, it is almost impossible to think of an operation that is not consistent, after the fact, with the dream if symbolic interpretation of the dream content is permitted.

Perhaps the dreamer will have a brain tumor removed. In that case, the rocks and dust would symbolically reflect the tumor mass. The train and its tracks would represent the normal flow of cognition that was interrupted by the tumor. The switch could further represent the ability to change (“switch”) from one type of cognitive process to another, an ability lost in many types of brain damage. Or perhaps the fellow had a kidney stone. Here the train would symbolically represent the fluid in the kidney that is blocked by the kidney stones. The stones and dust in the switch would, of course, represent the kidney stone itself. The train tracks would no doubt be interpreted as symbolic representations of the actual nephrons of the kidney, the tubular structures through which fluid actually moves. In the case of a gallstone, interpretation is almost identical except that, if the gallstone was at the junction of the cystic duct, which originates in the gall bladder, and the common hepatic duct, which originates in the liver, the blocked switch would almost certainly be interpreted as an elegant symbolic representation of the dreamer’s particular anatomical problem. The dream could also be symbolically interpreted to represent a tumor of the intestinal tract; blockage of one of the major arteries of the brain; a stroke in which a blood vessel in the brain had burst; or atherosclerosis, a buildup of fatty materials in the blood vessels that, when it occurs in the arteries of the heart, can lead to coronary bypass surgery.

All of the possibilities given above could be seen as symbolically represented in the dream. But the dreamer was suffering from none of those conditions. Instead, he suffered from “vascular blockages in his legs” (Breger, Hunter, and Lane 1971, p. 106), and the surgery was to remove a portion of the blood vessel that was blocked. Naturally, Breger, Hunter, and Lane interpret this dream only in terms of the operation they know the patient is going to have, stating that the railroad tracks and switch represent the patient’s “clogged blood vessels” (p. 122). Antrobus (1978) gives an even more detailed symbolic interpretation, contending that “there is a double representation in this report of some features of the impending surgery. The veins are similar to the railroad track. Blood moving through the veins is similar to the train moving along the tracks” (p. 571). Certainly one must agree that some of the images in the dream are “similar,” in one way or another, to certain features of the patient’s disease. But they are also “similar,” given a little creative interpretation, to some features of almost any other conceivable type of surgery. In summary, symbolic interpretation of dreams, whether the intepretation is explicitly Freudian or not, meets one of the major criteria for being considered a pseudoscience: the interpretations are unfalsifiable.

It is appropriate to inquire here a bit further into the nature of the content of dreams. If the contents are not symbolic, what are they? Studies of the neurobiological basis of dreaming sleep have shown that the dreams contain semirandom collections of images, thoughts, and feelings thrown together in a hodgepodge that seems particularly bizarre and incoherent (Hobson and McCarley 1977; Hobson 2001; Lydic and Baghdoyan 1986). Dreams are generated only during certain phases of the sleep cycle, when structures in the midbrain randomly activate groups of neurons in the cortex. Since most memories are stored in the cortex, this pattern of activation of cortical neuronal groups results in a bizarre, at least semirandom, sequence of images that are experienced as a dream. The dream content is not totally random because activities during the day can influence dream content. However, such influence is rather direct and not symbolic. Thus, one’s dreams are likely to have rather different characteristics if one has just seen a Walt Disney film as opposed to a horror movie. Similarly, studies have shown that personal problems and anxieties do show up in dream content, but in a fairly straightforward way (Hobson 2001; McCarley 1977); thus, if one is worried about an important exam, one might dream about being in the examination room but not being given a copy of the exam and being unable to attract the instructor’s attention so as to obtain a copy. Similarly, if one has spent a good portion of the day working on one’s stamp collection, a stamp-related theme is somewhat more likely to appear during the night’s sleep. This is probably because those areas of the cortex corresponding to the activity engaged in during the day are somewhat more easily activated by lower brain center stimulation during dreaming sleep.

The process of dream generation, at least as far as content is concerned, can perhaps best be compared to taking one hundred feature-length films, cutting them all up into two-foot-long segments, and mixing all the tens of thousands of segments together. One would then draw out about fifteen or twenty minutes’ worth of these segments and splice them together. When the result was shown, one would have a bizarre and incoherent set of images, most of which would still be recognizable to some degree. The film would, of course, have no “meaning” whatsoever, but this would certainly not prevent those inclined to find hidden, symbolic messages everywhere from interpreting the film symbolically in any way they wished. Any such interpretation would have no validity, in spite of the fact that it might be highly creative.