The Last Word On Nothing

This is my last regular post for LWON. Thank you, readers, for indulging my ramblings about mushroom ice cream, eyeless crustaceans, and transit-chasing Frenchmen (not to mention my Canadian spelling habits). And thank you, fellow LaWONians, for letting me be part of your wonderful writing community. I’ll miss you guys.

Lately, my dreams have been incredibly boring. A couple weeks ago, I dreamed that I drove my father to the airport so he could catch a midnight flight to Austria. But after wandering through a blurry maze of corridors, I realized that I’d gotten the date wrong, and he missed his plane. (Those midnight flights—they’ll mess you up every time.) In another recent dream, I was enrolled in a cooking class that required the students to prepare a three-course meal for the final exam. However, I had neglected to buy enough ingredients, and all I had was a pie crust and an odd tube of some kind of mashed root vegetable. I squeezed the mush into the pie crust while our teacher warned us that there was no excuse for not making a salad.

Have my dreams always been so tedious? I can’t remember what I dreamed about as a kid, but I do recall reading about other children’s dreams in The Story Girl, a novel by L.M. Montgomery (who also wrote Anne of Green Gables). In one chapter, a group of friends begins keeping “dream books” to record their nocturnal visions. These include reports of seeing “an enormous and hideous lizard… crawl across the roof of the house” and “being chased around the parlour by an ottoman, which made faces”.

I started to wonder if dreams become more dull as people age. A quick look at a few studies initially suggested this might be the case. For instance, in two papers on children’s dreams published in 1967 and 1994, some of the reports are enviably bizarre:

a lily in the park, when picked by the subject, was transformed into a monster that killed a man… there was a woman with a powerful mirror who could make things disappear… a magical kangaroo could, by touching people, ‘conk them out’.

When I opened the door and I was going to play outside with my Mommy, a foot was at the door. I picked it up, and my Mommy touched it… the blood that was on my Mommy [came off]… but mine didn’t… I painted with red—with green and red and blue paint and it comed off.

Or touchingly playful:

[My brother and I] were on a big ship and had been sailing for about 200 miles. Then we came to land and got off, climbed around, climbing trees and eating coconuts. We had lots of fun.

It was snowing, and I threw a snowball… [then] I was sleeping somewhere—outside—and it wasn’t snowing anymore. It was summer… and we could see a rainbow.

I saw these monsters. They were all colours. They were friendly, and we made friends… Then we played baseball. I was pitching to [a big monster] and he batted it, clean out, and then a monster caught it and it was an out.

Compare those to the sad, mundane reports from two studies of elderly people’s dreams in the 1960s:

I was getting lost and couldn’t find my way home. I don’t know where my home is. I go up and down the hill and see little houses. I ask people and they aren’t able to help.

I want to go to the toilet. Tried a dozen toilets. All were locked up. I wasn’t going to make it.

I’m in my friend’s house, but with bigger rooms, and I lost my coat. I keep finding my coat and losing it.

But the kids had some dull dreams too. One boy couldn’t land a fish because the pole was too big; he was doing tricks on his bike but was forced to stop for an errand; he lost a game of marbles. Another kid dreamed about watching a football game, sitting in a rocking chair, a dog tugging his pants. And the elderly people with anxiety-ridden dreams tended to be infirm or showed symptoms of declining mental faculties, so perhaps retirees in better health would have more pleasant dreams.

When researchers explicitly compare the dreams of the young and old, they do find subtle differences. In one study, 122 women from three age groups kept journals of their dreams for two weeks. Older women dreamed more frequently of unidentified people and family members than teenagers or young adults did, suggesting “a declining inner population that is nearly dichotomized into strangers and relatives,” the study author writes. The older women also were less likely to see themselves as the most important figure or to experience aggression in their dreams. And—in an unnerving echo of my imagined cooking class—they often dreamed of “preparing food but interfered with or disrupted by others… for example, with the dreamer ‘running out of ingredients’ or ‘facing a lineup for food’”. The younger women in the study didn’t report any dreams of that nature.

Part of the blame for my boring dreams may also lie with my gender. In a study published in 2003, researchers surveyed 1,181 Canadian university students about recurring dreams. The most common dreams revolved around being chased, falling, and having sexual experiences. But men were more likely than women to dream about magical or alien themes, such as possessing special powers or visiting another planet. Women more frequently reported dreams about failure and lack of control, such as flunking a test, losing teeth, or missing a train.

Maybe I need to follow the example of The Story Girl characters, who began gorging on rich food before bed to provoke more thrilling dreams. The children fueled their nightly fantasies with mince pie, pickles, grape jelly tarts, fat pork, and cold plum pudding. A good dream is worth a little indigestion, right?