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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Even when my cats were still alive, I dreamed of them. Mostly I had “bad” dreams about them (they were lost, or they were sick, or they had died—and more than once I dreamed that I had accidentally killed one of them, spraying her with roach poison I’d misaimed )—but then most dreams are bad dreams, according to Hobson (whose research suggests that two-thirds of our dreams are “negative ”) and other scientists (the research team of Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle reported a figure of eighty percent, of more than five hundred “dream reports” they collected in 1966 for their book, The Content Analysis of Dreams). It makes sense to me that most of our dreams would be bad (full of “negative emotions,” as Hall and Van de Castle put it), though not necessarily for the reasons offered by the sleep scientists. They believe that having bad dreams is good for evolutionary fitness: if our dreams serve the purpose of allowing us to rehearse threatening scenarios , then those of us who have more (and more vivid) bad dreams would be better prepared for trouble when it comes—and thus would be more likely to survive those real-life threats to become “the progenitors of offspring,” as the psychologists Michael Franklin and Michael Zyphur explain in a 2005 article, “The Role of Dreams in the Evolution of the Human Mind,” in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. Franklin and Zyphur drew on the work of Hall and Van de Castle as well as Hobson and others to conclude that the ability to have vividly bad dreams, plus a propensity toward such dreams, is probably “differentially passed on to future generations.” And perhaps it is. But it also seems plain to me that the things that are troubling us—or the kinds of things that are troubling us—tend to preoccupy us. We may be able to suppress that preoccupation when we’re awake, by dint of sheer effort (though I suppose the most con- 30 Dream Life genitally upbeat of us can keep our minds on the good news without trying, and the most congenitally downbeat can’t do it no matter how hard they try), but once we’re asleep, all bets are off: the bad news comes pouring in for all of us. There’s no reason to assume that the evolutionary fitness explanation and this one are mutually exclusive. There may well be an adaptive advantage to being inclined toward worry and stress; it may be that bad news always makes the front page because that’s what’s important in the evolutionary scheme of things (so that even if we hold the paper open to the sports pages or the comics, in repose the paper flutters closed again, and there are those grim headlines, however scrambled). But then the function of our dreams would only be an extension of our overall bad news-processing apparatus—which I believe is more likely to be true than not, and which is just another way of saying that I’d rather not hold dreams separate from everything else about ourselves, which, it strikes me, is what the sleep scientists insist on doing (for what other activity do we engage in regularly that a scientist would discount as “trash”?). In any case, it doesn’t seem strange to me that my dreams about my cats when they were still alive were usually bad ones, or that so many of the bad dreams I had, when my cats were still with me, featured them. The cats were excellent stand-ins for aspects of myself (or to make concrete in some other way whatever it was I was struggling with) because I was so deeply attached to them, as people who live alone with their pets for a long time often are. (Of course, I have been married and a mother for many years now, and I am still deeply attached—pathologically attached, my husband will sometimes say—to the pets we live with, Molly the dog and Cody the bird. And I dream about them, too, just as I used to—and continue to, so many years after their deaths—dream about Cadence and Lizzy.) My sleeping mind, in fact, is a veritable bestiary. Aside from the pets, contemporary and past, the caged animals, the starving animals, I have dreamed about ducks, about cats other than my own, about domesticated birds other than Cody, about infestations—both of...
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