IN HIS new book Dream Life: An experimental memoir, psychiatrist and dream researcher J. Allan Hobson looks back on his life and puts forward his dream theory of protoconsciousness.
Why did you choose to write an āexperimental memoirā?
I think itās interesting to consider both autobiographical details and biological phenomena. Since my lifeās work has been of that nature, I wanted to emphasise the importance of both.
What is your dream theory of protoconsciousness?
In 2008 I was preparing a lecture and I realised I was still thinking of dreaming as an unconscious mental process, and that that was wrong. The minute I threw out the Freudian idea that dreaming is derivative of waking experience was when I could see it for what it probably is ā a prediction about waking experience.
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REM sleep is antecedent to waking. It occurs in utero. Now, you canāt tell me thatās because youāre trying to get rid of infantile wishes. It means that dreaming has a developmental function. It is also something that occurs relatively late in evolution: if you donāt have a thalamus and cortex, you donāt have REM sleep, despite the fact that itās a brainstem function.
REM sleep is in the service of brain function that will ultimately lead to waking consciousness. My theory is that dreaming is not a replay of memory. It is a āpreplayā of perception.
Why did you abandon the idea that dreaming is unconscious?
I had to ask myself, why do I say itās an unconscious mental process? The answer was because Iām still a Freudian, even though Iāve been trying to get over it. The philosopher Willard Quine once told me I belong to Freudians Anonymous. Itās true, and itās not just me: I think everyone is addicted to Freudian misconceptions. Weāve got to take all of these received ideas more seriously, and then take them apart.
āEveryone is addicted to Freudian misconceptions. We have to take apart all these received ideasā
How did you become disillusioned with psychoanalysis?
In the first two weeks of my psychiatry residency in 1960, I thought Iād see that my doubts about psychoanalysis had been mistaken. But it was just the opposite. I was told, āThere must be something wrong with you if youāre asking all of these questions.ā My chief suggested I really believed in science. I said, āThatās ridiculous. I donāt believe in science; science is our defence against belief.ā Science is institutional scepticism. We need to ask these questions.
Yet some people still hold to psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalytic theory is popular because itās easy to understand, but I think itās wrong. I donāt think dreams are caused by the release of repressed infantile wishes. Thereās nothing scientific about psychoanalysis, thereās nothing scientific about Sigmund Freud. He didnāt do a single experiment, he didnāt do any direct observation, he used no controls. The guy was out to lunch.
You argue we should move toward a āscience of subjectivityā. What is that and what makes it worthwhile?
Subjective experience is a methodological approach to studying the brain: look, keep accurate records and then analyse them. Thatās how we discovered ādream bizarrenessā. Everyone said that dreams were bizarre, but nobody really knew what that meant. It doesnāt mean you see monsters or that you can fly, but that times, places and persons change without notice in dreams. I think there are other ways this will play out when people take the science of subjectivity seriously.
Where should research into dreams go from here?
One of the main problems is in understanding the brain imaging data in terms of cellular and molecular activity ā thereās a big gap there.
Profile
J. Allan Hobson is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a prominent researcher in the field of REM sleep. He is the author of nine books on dreaming and consciousness, the latest of which is Dream Life: An experimental memoir, published by The MIT Press