Every summer there is that one Hollywood blockbuster that gains so much hype everyone seems to be talking about it through the end of the year. This summer was no exception. Christopher Nolan's ""Inception"" had movie critics, the blogosphere and moviegoers a buzz with the idea of controlling our dreams—a topic everyone can relate to.
People experience dreams throughout their life, and yet they are still one of the biggest mysteries in human behavior, particularly when they evolve into nightmares.
Sleep specialist Dr. Ruth Benca, a psychiatry professor and director of the Center of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research at UW-Madison, has spent much of her career researching the topic of sleep and dreams.
""Dreaming is basically something your brain does when it is not interacting with the environment,"" Benca said.
Although ""Inception"" has brought the idea of manipulating dreams to the mainstream, the idea of controlling the content of our dreams through lucid dreaming has been a topic of conversation with sleep researchers and students alike.
Benca said lucid dreaming is when ""people have the ability to be conscious or awake while they are dreaming.""
David Plante, an assistant professor of psychiatry at UW-Madison, said lucid dreaming also consists of having input on what the dream is about.
""The individual is aware that they are dreaming but they also have the ability to manipulate their dream content to varying degrees,"" Plante said.
Nolan's science-fiction film reflects this idea, as well as the confusion that most people feel when they are asleep and don't know what is real and what is just their imagination.
""Dreaming is really interesting from the standpoint of how there is this quality of whatever we are dreaming is absolutely real to us,"" Benca said.
This false sense of reality in a dream state can be unpleasant when the emotional content of our dreams become negative and turn into nightmares.
In fact, negative emotions are more common in dreams than positive ones, according to Benca. This can contribute to people wanting to control their dreams so they may rid themselves of scary thoughts and sleepless nights.
In a New York Times article from August 2010 titled, ""Preparation for Aggression,"" author Allan Hobson, who is a New York Times contributor and professor at Harvard Medical School, states that negative dreams actually function as an evolutionary tool for survival.
""REM sleep, the brain state most highly correlated with anxious, angry dreams, occurs late in evolution and early in the lives of those creatures which have REM,"" Hobson writes. ""These two facts suggest that REM (and its necessarily bad-feeling dreams) is important to development and survival.""
For humans, negative dreams are not only an evolutionary means of survival against other species but also a means of survival in our social world, according to Hobson.
""Via rehearsal, bad feelings in dreams can prepare us for bad feelings in our social lives,"" Hobson said.
Although UW-Madison senior Devin Mckee understands Hobson's theory, he would prefer not to experience nightmares if it was technologically possible.
""I personally would replace nightmares with better dreams,"" Mckee said. ""[After] waking up from a bad dream I feel stressed out which makes it hard for me to fall back asleep.""
It is not uncommon for nightmares to have a negative effect on sleep, according to Plante.
""Nightmares can cause specific problems for people such as having difficulty falling back to sleep or [the] fear [of] falling back to sleep because of the nightmares."" Plante said.
Yet these kinds of dreams may have a significant impact on people's subconscious thoughts and behaviors.
In a research study conducted at the university, rats were used as models to test the importance of REM sleep.
For several nights each rat was able to fall asleep but was never allowed to fall into REM sleep. The rats were then given tests that simulated a threatening situation that a rat would experience in the wild. The animals acted without using the instinctual behaviors that rats normally display when in danger.
If the rats would have displayed this behavior in the wild, their survival would have been in jeopardy.
Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo, who was quoted in a Psychology Today article that featured the experiment, believes negative dreams can function as practice for frightening situations.
""The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events,"" Revonsuo said. ""So that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations.""
This theory reflects UW-Madison senior Sasha Gasparian's nightmares.
""Sometimes I am being chased by someone or that an intruder is breaking into my house,"" Gasparian said.
Research suggests that if Gasparian didn't have these types of dreams, she may not be as well prepared to handle a similar real- life situation.
Fellow UW-Madison senior Sarah Bewitz believes that Hobson's and Revonsuo's theories are valid, adding that she wouldn't want to get rid of her mind's capacity to work things out on its own.
""I believe when you dream your mind is free from your ability to control it,"" Bewitz said.
If nightmares are getting in the way of sleep, Benca says lucid dreaming is one way people can control their dreams on their own.
The ability to perform lucid dreaming varies widely among people. However, an individual can always improve their ability to lucid dream, according to Benca.
""Just like most things in life, the more you practice [lucid dreaming] the better you will become."" she said.
In the end, Benca says the importance of dreams and nightmares, and the effects of controlling them depends on the function of sleep. ""And the short answer to that is, we don't know,"" she said.
