Paging Dr. Freud, as Boring Dreams Traced to Widespread Overuse of Mobile Phones

Our dreams are getting more boring, and believe it or not, the reason is … phones.So suggests a dream researcher, Adam Haar Horowitz, with a whole lot of academic heft behind him, including a PhD from MIT and Harvard. Now he’s living at Sitka, Alaska, to be closer to indigenous Americans who have long set more store in their dreams than many of the rest of us do.To the tribes at Sitka, says Mr. Horowitz, a dream is more than just what happens in your mind when you sleep. It can also mean “original instructions” — from the beginning of the world, perhaps — “and story, and myth, and something like a hallucination that moves you across a border to someplace you can ‘visit’ via dreams,” he says.Sigmund Freud. Via Wikimedia CommonsLike many of the locals he’s learning from, Mr. Horowitz believes dreams can tell us things our conscious thoughts can’t. He’s researching them to learn, among other things: what they may tell us about our inner lives, what our interpretations of them may tell us about our outer lives and times, how we might be able to harness their power — or even program them — to better ourselves, and how they might be changing due to technology.That last one is what I wanted to hear more about: how phones are changing dreams. Here’s Mr. Horowitz’s two-part theory.Part one is kind of intuitive. Even before phones, researchers — and anyone over age 10 — knew that if you’re worrying about something right before you go to bed, chances are pretty good that you’ll dream about it in a kind of hit-you-over-the-head, unhappy way and quite possibly enjoy a terrible night of sleep as well. Lucky you.But now: If you’re looking at your phone right before going to sleep (which you may have done once or twice, yes?), you are almost begging for that miserable dream state to happen. You are bringing the worries, comparisons and ruminations of the day right there into bed with you. They’re actually glowing.“The result can be dreams that don’t reframe your problem, or offer you strange, subtle insights, because they are too concrete,” says Mr. Horowitz. “They’re like another day at work.”The other way phones are changing dreams is more surprising. Think about how your mind wanders when you’re in the shower. It comes up with new ideas, connections. It’s creative. And the reason is simple: It has nothing else to do in there. The thoughts (and water) flow.That’s daydreaming. That’s something we used to do outside of the shower too, sometimes for entire semesters. (Though Mr. Horowitz probably didn’t.) Now, though, the phone is preventing those freeform interludes. Instead of our minds wandering while we’re walking the dog, or waiting on hold, or listening to the history of the Russian Revolution, we whip out our phones. Boredom is banished … but so is daydreaming. It has been replaced by the phone check.Getting bad at daydreaming is making us bad at night dreaming. That’s what Mr. Horowitz contends.“Dreams, under normal conditions, tend to operate metaphorically,” he says. “They loosely recombine recent memories with past experiences and imaginative distortions.” When they do all that mixing and mashing, they help us with “emotion regulation and memory consolidation.”Yet when our brains spend all day on the phone, instead of stretching to fill the time, they get out of shape. We’re getting flabby at the fantastical. Our dreams are growing dumpy.Phones have not been having a great year, reputation-wise. Until chatting with Mr. Horowitz, though, I only thought they were screwing up our waking lives. Little did I dream.Creators.com

Paging Dr. Freud, as Boring Dreams Traced to Widespread Overuse of Mobile Phones

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