THE NIGHT SHIFT                                     Richard J B Willis

Have you made any good resolutions lately?  The chances are that you have not!  Psychologists tell us that, on the whole, people do not make resolutions because they know full well they will not keep them.  So that just leaves dreaming of change.

Or does it?  Dreaming does not have a very good record of fulfilment either.  In fact people usually cannot make head or tail of their dreams either.  For most people dreams are, well, dreamy and lacking in any recognisable meaning.  All of which poses the question 'What are dreams for?'

In truth there is no consensus among those who study such matters.  The renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his colleague Carl Gustaf Jung thought that all dreams had deep significant meanings, but they differed in the meanings that they placed on dream material.

Others believe that dreams are just a dialogue between different parts of the brain exercised during the sleeping hours.  During our waking experiences information is taken in too fast to process, it is merely recorded.  When we are asleep the mind preoccupies itself with all the detail and tries to make sense of it, and attempts to post relevant information to the appropriate part of the brain.

The recorded material is scanned for similarities and patterns matching new information with what is already known and recorded.  In trying to link disparate pieces of information new patterns and order are laid down in the brain.  Since there is often no real link between say item A and item B the mind creates its own, and if the link is bizarre enough then a nightmare follows.

Many of the traditional views of sleep and dreaming have been challenged by recent research.  Now sleep researchers Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell say that all dreams can be understood, perhaps not initially but with practice.  They believe that the experiences that come to us daily have an emotional component.  If the emotional material is resolved during the waking hours – no matter how powerful – it will not turn up in sleep.  Only the unresolved emotional issues continue the resolution process as we sleep, hence the old idea of sleeping on a problem holds true.  However, even the resolving undergoes change, and we dream in metaphors (that is something like the original but hidden by pictures that are not quite like the real issue).

The trick of interpretation is to understand these shifts in pictures and to identify the emotion that caused the dreaming activity.  So if you are contemplating changes, you may be best advised to sleep on it!