When the esteemed researcher asked “Does an octopus dream?,” I saw an irrelevant question that could only be explored by an over funded academic looking for an irrelevant problem. Perhaps it is a prejudice against teuthologists, but when bombs are falling in Ukraine, and COVID mutations are bringing fear everywhere, why worry if one of the more unusual creatures of the sea has dreams? I briefly encountered an octopus while snorkeling, and I ate a small one on a pizza while visiting China, finding them visually repulsive rubbery. But with further reading, I learned an octopus has three hearts, blue blood, and can change colors to camouflage. Some research suggests it constructs traps to lure prey. It also dies after mating. But what is most amazing is that some scientists think it is one of the smartest creatures in the sea, and the smartest invertebrate. And it has a brain that produces sleep patterns remarkably similar to humans.
Standing at the top of a long line of research into octopus dreams is a group of researchers from The Brain Institute of the Federal University Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. They published new research in March 2021 concluded that, “The investigation of sleep and dreaming in the octopus gives us a vantage point for the psychological and neurobiological comparison with vertebrates, since the octopus possesses several sophisticated cognitive features that are only seen in some vertebrate species but with a very different brain architecture,” said study co-author Sidarta Ribeiro, founder of the Brain Institute. (https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/octopus-research-yields-insight-into-the-evolution-of-sleep/)
A stunning dramatic video of a dreaming octopus has made the rounds on PBS (Public Broadcasting System) and YouTube. After seeing this video, David M. Peña-Guzmán, a philosopher of science at San Francisco State University, asks what we are all wondering, “Beneath this procession of color and texture, what was Heidi (the octopus) herself thinking or feeling?” he writes in his intriguing book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness.
My read of the gee whiz popular press articles, with cynicism bordering on contempt, lead me to find profound questions, but few answers about dreams. And helped me realize that we have few answers about dreams in LDS theology as well.
The Doctrine of Dreams
Dreams are highly valued as a source of revelation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but do we have a clear doctrine on dreams? References to the dreams of Joseph begin in Genesis in the Old Testament (Gen. 37:5). References to dreams continue though out the scriptures and into the New Testament (Matt. 1:20) and into the Book of Mormon. What member has not studied the dream of Lehi (1 Nephi 8) and parsed its meaning? Even recently, President Russell M. Nelson reported in the October 2017 priesthood session of General Conference about being visited in a dream by “two little girls from the other side of the veil.” President Nelson has spoken about dreams many times, as have most of the modern prophets, clarifying that dreams are a way to receive revelation, but not making it clear how we can know which of our dreams are revelation. Elder Parley P. Pratt offers one of the few explanations. He said:
In all ages and dispensations, God has revealed many important instructions and warnings to men by way of dreams. When the outward organs of thought and perception are released from their activity…it is then that the spiritual organs are at liberty, in a certain degree, to assume their wonted functions, to recall some faint outlines, some confused and half-defined recollections, of that heavenly world, and those endearing scenes of their former estate, from which they have descended in order to obtain and mature a tabernacle of flesh (Pratt, 1855).
In 2022, I had my own experience described perfectly by Elder Pratt. I have many periods in my life when I missed a night of sleep to focus on a specific task like a college test, or a drive-through-the night. But recently I underwent back surgery. In the recovery process, with voluntary and involuntary nerves jingling, and the negative effects of anesthesia and pain killing opioids racing through me, I underwent a period of dramatic insomnia. For three, almost four days, my sleep comprised minute long exhaustion educed naps where I felt like just as I approached a peaceful rest, I was jerked back by the leash of pain.
During this same period, I was food deprived, but the need for sleep quickly superseded hunger, and eventually my craving for sleep came close to an oxygen deprived panic. I was experiencing first-hand the reason sleep deprivation is a very effective means of “humane” torture. I was in panic mode. By day three, I wanted Amazon to solve my problem with a same day delivery of a new mattress and a massage chair, both beyond budget.
Solution one thousand and twelve came to me at 3 AM on day four. The “running legs over an exhausted body” was being caused by pain. Pain that was not acute, but real. With maximum doses of non-opioid pain killers, ice perfectly placed, and luck, I created a window through which slumber could finally enter. In my mattress, I found a tunnel to dream land.
I slept and slowly began to dream. It was a lucid dream, where I was dreaming but also aware that I was dreaming. In it I had the deep feeling of “welcome home,” the same deep feeling experienced after being away from my family for a two-year mission, or recently when my wife returned home from the hospital after a battle with COVID. While there were no revelations, personal or doctrinal in my dream, there was a feeling that long deceased loved ones, including my beloved grandmother and father, were almost within reach.
Drugs, Dreaming and Dream Machines
My experience with sleep deprivation helped me understand why we hunger for a dreamlike consciousness. In every culture, in every era, humans sought and sometimes found natural substances that would induce a dreamlike state. Peyote has over 5 thousand years of medicinal use by indigenous North Americans living in what we now call Northern Mexico and the southwest United States (Salak, 2013). LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is now only a street drug and has no medically accepted treatment in the United States. But it creates a violent dream like state that often includes hallucinations similar to night mares. Even though few users report dreamlike euphoria, the appeal of a dreamlike state makes some overlook the potential hazards and poison themselves to achieve the “high.” (https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/LSD-2020_0.pdf)
Dreams were largely ignored by science until Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Freud's important contribution was to postulate a connection between neuroscience and psychology (Freud, 1899). Freud suggests dreams are associated with our everyday activities and thoughts. Dreams disguise the underlying wishes and desires of the dreamer. He believed that unmasking a dream would help discover the underlying genuine desires of the dreamer. But Freud did not go so far as to claim he could better interpret dreams than the dreamer. That was Carl Jung. Jung says the psyche (mind, body, and feelings) as a self-regulating system best understood by dreams. He called a dream a ‘spontaneous self-portrait.” He suggests that every element in a dream corresponds with an element in reality, and that the dreamers is seeking to determine the symbolic meaning of each of those objects and build the link between meaning and reality. (https://www.thesap.org.uk/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/carl-gustav-jung/dreams/)
Both Freud and Jung’s theories come up short for practical therapy because they depend on the imperfect recounting of dream content from the dreamer to the interpreter. Something we all know to be problematic. That is where neuroscience comes in and takes us a step further.
In a widely read article published in 2020, Caroline Horton, defines lucid dreaming (being aware of dreaming while dreaming) and discusses the control of dreaming content. But her definition of terms tells us a lot about the breath of the dream experience. She says, “Essentially dreaming refers to the recollection of mental content from sleep. This broad definition recognizes that dreams may be fragmented, brief, non-narrative, thought-like, and/or containing basic sensory-perceptual experiences such as emotions, without comprising plots of activities.” I would also add from an LDS perspective, dreams can contain personal revelation and even, in some cases, revelation meant for others, but they can also be hollow, empty, or even erotic. Horton goes on to describe how brain wave patterns measure dream activity most commonly during periods of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. But that is not always the case. Simplifying a complex argument, she suggests dreams can occur at all levels of consciousness, and that they might even define the boundaries between the conscious and the unconscious.
Horton and the neuroscientists who study dreams once again encounter the same problematic of Freud and Jung. While we now can measure brain activity and identify when someone is dreaming, we cannot know the content of those dreams unless the dreamer a) Recalls the dream, b) Accurately reports the dream, and c) Accurately reports the significance of the dream by connecting the symbols with meaning. If you watched the compelling interpretation of the octopus dream in the YouTube video, these three conditions are never met. Until they are, and that might never happen, then it is unlikely that we will learn much of significance about the very important human function of dreaming. (see https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.00428/full)
Why Dream?
With great emphasis and few answers, neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, writers, and prophets have reported about the importance of dream content and the dreaming process. Anyone who has been sleep deprived as I was will report on the human hunger for dreams. But as a scholar, social scientist, and lay theologian, I must admit that I really know nothing about dreams. Perhaps I am convinced that the octopus dreams, but I cannot know what they dream, why they dream, and what significance their dreams may have. These are the many and broad questions I have about dreaming from an LDS perspective:
Why does Heavenly Father want our earthly experience to include occasional nocturnal visits to a realm that is in our mind? Before the modern age of shared visualization, where movies, television and video games created common sensory experiences, why were our brains created to let us journey to the fantastic and live unrestrained by natural laws for brief nocturnal periods? I am sure this is not an evolutionary state, but a deliberate part of the human creation. The “why” is speculative. There are some of my speculations:
We could not conceive of God, a Divine All-Knowing Being, without the ability to dream. Dreaming helps us see and understand the divine realm, and perhaps even the most evil realms as well. As Paul and Alma learned I their unrepentant state even an unclean being can approach and see the divine. If we were in our mortal state, we could not. a dream we seem to be Dreaming might be a kind of preview of our future existence and a way to know the difference between the voices of good and evil?
If dreaming is a preview to a forthcoming existence, then we need to learn the language. In my dreams there are rarely spoken words, yet there is compete understanding. Many of us have experienced dreams too beautifully rich, or too horribly tragic for words. Perhaps the forthcoming state one where words are forsaken, yet rich feels and complex ideas are still communicated perhaps even more efficiently than if they are spoken.
The Holy Ghost follows us into our dreams, and may also follow us from our dreams. If the Holy Ghost is “The Comforter,” then dreams may be His address. Dreams are a vehicle for comfort, personal revelation, and communication. If they are, or when they are, then the Comforter is surely present. When they are not, the Comforter may offer protection in our nightmares.
It is clear we have agency in our dreams, but not clear how much agency we have in dreams. We certainly sometimes are aware we are dreaming and therefore have a consciousness in both the real world and the dream world. Sometimes we can wake ourselves up or manipulate the plot of the dream more to our liking. But can we make actual choices within a dream, or is a dream like a video that play and is done? Are we accountable for those choices?
Dreams and reality seem closer than we can imagine. As a child I believed in a vast borderland between the dream world and the real world. But as I have watched loved ones age, and have aged some myself, I believe the borderland is much smaller. Many describe the temple as a place where the veil is thin. Some dreaming is a personal condition where the veil is thin and where we are having our own temple-like experience within the confines of our own spirit. In recent years, I have been in places when others are having the worst and perhaps the last days of their lives. Dreams might also be the shared territory between the mortal and the immortal when those on the other side can welcome you home.
Fasting, deprivation, and rituals can help us dreams, but there is no formula for spiritual dreaming. There are many rituals in other religions that try to take people into trance or dream-like states. Like hypnosis, these are inherently controversial because people may play along under social pressure. But the question persists: Can we do anything to turn on our dreams? I think not, except to say that good dreams are divine gifts that are always undeserved.
Do dreams prepare us for death? The fear of death is the driving force of every society. Every religion has an answer for what happens in death. The fear of death drives humans to protect their mortality, sometimes in extreme ways. Dreams are way our Father in Heaven is teaching us that death is something we should not fear, even as our mortal bodies have multiple survival reflexes.
Dreams are the ultimate learning tool. Dreams offer us the ability to assume a unique identity, stand in the shoes of others, live in a different time, see the future, understand the past, and know at a different level. Maker seems to want us to have a preview of that experience.
Nothing in the human experience is more personal than a dream. Dreams are so deeply drilled into our psyche, our souls, our being, that even with advanced scientific measurement techniques and the miracle of language, we cannot communicate their significances in our lives. We need to acknowledge dreams have a significance we ourselves cannot even fully see, and the connection is to something divine. In the darkest corners of our souls, or in the open market places of our minds, terror can rage, love can abound, learning can flourish, revelation can guide. And when they do, we are not alone.
NOTES:
Parley P. Pratt (1855) Key to the Science of Theology, Liverpool: F.D. Richards, p.120. See chapter 13 for Parley P. Pratt’s essay on dreams as an avenue of revelation.
Freud, Sigmund (1976 [1900]) The Interpretation of Dreams, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books.
Salak, Kira. (Retrieved 2023) "Lost Souls of the Peyote Trail (published in National Geographic Adventure)". http://www.kirasalak.com/Peyote.html
Full Citation for this Article: Hammond, Scott C. (2023) "The Octopus and the Doctrine of Dreams," SquareTwo, Vol. 16 No. 3 (Fall 2023), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleHammondDoctrineOfDreams.html, accessed <give access date>.
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