[edit 1/10/09 -- The original post is now clarified and expanded in my article "Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness"]

Every few months a psychologist—or now, more often, it is a neuroscientist—aggressively promotes their new theory of why we dream, and it gets picked up in the press as the latest scientific explanation, the final answer. The New York Times this week is reporting on the latest theory by J. Allen Hobson, that dreams prepare us for emotional experiences during the day, like a kind of early-morning workout.

Usually the journalist gets lots of facts wrong—in this case, he misleadingly summarizes Freud’s now-supposedly-discredited “wish fulfillment” theory as the notion that dreaming was “a playground for the unconscious mind.” Actually, Freud thought dreams were more like a totalitarian regime than a playground: Repressed wishes, like revolutionary communiqués, had to be smuggled to the outside world in code. But I’ve recorded and studied thousands of my own dreams and I know from experience that Freud was, at the very least, on the right track. Hobson isn’t.

Of all modern views of dreaming, the soundest hypothesis is that dreams have to do with memory-building. It is well-known that during REM sleep new neural connections are formed, and it is known that recently learned stuff is remembered better after being “slept on.” Yet researchers like Hobson refuse to admit the possibility that dream images are memories, simply because dream content is absurd—on their surface, dreams don’t look anything like an accurate representation of our waking experiences. The Nobel laureate Francis Crick argued that dreams are just the discharging of mental static, random and meaningless associations, essentially the brain farting. Hobson’s view, although slightly more nuanced, is just as dismissive of the notion that dream content might be interpretable. Hobson has devoted his career, in fact, to debunking any notion that dream content might be meaningful in any interesting way.

I call the latter the “literalist” view–if it ain’t literal, it ain’t meaningful. “Hard” scientists, true to the stereotype, often do lack imagination and feel uncomfortable with things that are nonliteral or irrational (like symbolism). But if they would step outside of their laboratories and stroll through the humanities stacks in their library, they might detect that there is method in dream madness. They might find ample circumstantial evidence for the real essence and function of dreaming in other fields like art and history and philosophy. I’ve come to believe that the very “absurdity” that causes scientists to often regard dreams as meaningless is precisely the clue to their very sensible, even rational, function.

To understand what dreams really are (he says oh-so-confidently, certain that future research will vindicate him), it’s useful to approach the problem of dreams from the side of memory, specifically the method used by people in nonliterate societies and in the pre-Gutenberg world to remember things they have learned: Use free association, puns, and vivid, bizarre images and situations to help latch new material onto what we already know–a method that has been called simply the Art of Memory. Dreaming, I suggest, is simply the Art of Memory operating automatically during sleep.

To read the complete argument, see “Dreams and the Art of Memory: A New Hypothesis About Dream Bizarreness.”

Lately I’m obsessed with Peter of Ravenna. All the histories on the art of memory mention him as the first profit-minded memory wizard to actually write a popular manual on the subject (late in the 15th century) — a book aimed at regular people trying to get ahead in business, law, or whatever. His book, The Phoenix, was a down-to-earth, practical guide, in plain language, one that didn’t assume the reader was going to be trying to memorize the Psalms or the Virtues or whatever theological nonsense. Although based on the classical principles (places, vivid images, etc.), he knew the memory art could be a useful tool for people in whatever walk of life — not just monks and scholars.

What’s cool about Peter of Ravenna is that he was, as far as I know, the first to speak completely frankly about the use of sex in creating vivid memory images. If you’ve tried these techniques yourself, you may have discovered that sexy images work particularly well. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the Dominican monks who honed their memory skills during the Middle Ages figured this out, and kept silent about it. But here, in 1491, is Peter’s frank description:

I usually fill my memory-places with the images of beautiful women, which excite my memory … and believe me: when I used beautiful women as memory images, I find it much easier to arrange and repeat the notions which I have entrusted to those places. You now have a most useful secret of artificial memory, a secret which I have (through modesty) long remained silent about: if you wish to remember quickly, dispose the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places; the memory is marvellously excited by images of women … This precept is useless to those who dislike women and they will find it very difficult to gather the fruits of this art. I hope chaste and religious men will pardon me: I cannot pass over in silence a rule which has earned me much praise and honour on account of my abilities in the art, because I wish, with all my heart, to leave excellent successors behind me.

I just came across the above quote in Paolo Rossi’s Logic and the Art of Memory (it’s on p. 22), and I was so delighted. One of the little details in Yates’ The Art of Memory that had left an indelible mark on me years ago was her note about the same fellow (p. 120):

On images, Peter makes use of the classical principle that memory images should if possible resemble people we know. He gives the name of a lady, Juniper of Pistoia, who was dear to him when young and whose image he finds stimulates his memory!

I can totally see Dame Yates blushing at this. Apart from this one tiny mention, Peter’s old flame Juniper is lost to history, but to me this 15th century hottie from Pistoia burns as bright as Bruno, Lull, Simonides, or any of the other stars in the Ars Memoria firmament.