The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health

Chapter One

THE FREUD EFFECT

When I lived in London some years ago, I used to pass a blackened bronze statue on my daily walk to Finchley Road, a busy, dismal, yet useful thoroughfare teeming with shops and amenities in northwest London. On overcast days, the statue was dull and mute. When it poured, rained, or drizzled, in typical London fashion, heavy raindrops accumulated on the tip of the figure's nose, plopping into a puddle in his lap. On those magical sunny days when the ceiling of clouds was lifted from the city, revealing a big blue sky, the statue shone. But I was oblivious to all of this. I'd just had a baby, and I bumped my stroller along the cobblestone streets of my new neighbourhood, navigating my way through the dense and disorienting fog of sleeplessness.

One day my husband joined me on my trek to the shops. We took the shortcut to Waitrose, meandering along narrow backstreets, past the local wine store, pharmacy, and café. Rounding the corner toward Finchley Road, Dimitri stopped and looked up. Staring down at us was the statue of a balding, bearded man with raised, inquisitive eyebrows, clad in a distinguished three-piece suit. He sat with his hands perched on his hips, leaning forward toward the road, casting a watchful gaze on the passing crowd.

"Hey, it's Freud," said Dimitri.

Staring down at me was the father of psychoanalysis, the Austrian neurologist who popularized dream interpretation and the man forever known to proclaim that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of our repressed wishes. I stood there, wide-eyed, as if waking up to this new sight. With my line of vision raised from the stroller, I noticed a sign pointing to the Freud Museum around the next corner. For almost half a year, I'd been living only a few blocks away from the house where Freud had spent his last days.

How, you might wonder, could I have been so unaware? For starters, I was a new mother living thousands of miles away from family and friends. When Alexander was eight weeks old, Dimitri and I packed up our worldly belongings, which at the time consisted mostly of Ikea furniture and bright, loud baby toys, along with boxes of research for this book, which began many years ago. We moved from Toronto to north London's Belsize Park, a leafy neighbourhood with a charming village vibe, teeming with buggies, dogs, and local shops along winding cobblestone streets. I soon found that I was living a cruel irony. My dad is a sleep doctor who opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada when I was a kid. Let's just say that we talked about the importance of sleep. A lot. My newborn son decided that he didn't like to sleep at night. And then there was the kicker: I was writing a book on dreams. I'm sure Freud would've had something to say about this.

The world around me was dreamlike, seeming both unknown and familiar. I'd visited London over the years, so there was a familiarity to the city. I had memories of long walks through Hyde Park, going treasure hunting among the stalls of Camden Market, and cheering on street performers doing magic tricks, acrobatics, and singing opera from the cobblestones of Covent Garden. Yet I was so sleep-deprived that I was seeing things through a different lens. I was operating in another mode, much like a dream, which shaped how I experienced the world around me. I remembered only snippets of a day's worth of memories. No wonder I'd gone months without noticing Freud staring down at me.

But I didn't need a statue to feel Freud's presence. He was one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. He remains engrained in our culture and collective psyche. While Freud was not the first to study dreams, his work propelled dream research into the next century. To this day, the mere mention of his name can spark heated debate. Some would say that dream research is still weighed down by psychoanalytic baggage. And while some of Freud's ideas are outdated and have been debunked by scientists, several of his theories laid the groundwork for research that continues to this day. It's been more than 125 years since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and this great, controversial figure continues to be quoted by students, scientists, and avid dreamers. Even grade-schoolers know who Freud is. He laid down the royal road to the enigmatic unconscious mind. So I decided that I'd better pay a visit to Freud's last home and refuge, the epicenter of dream analysis.

Twenty Maresfield Gardens is a stately, red brick house with three floors of white framed windows, impeccably trimmed hedges, and a blossoming almond tree that Freud used to admire. The gloriously sunny spring day I was there many years ago, Bobby, the museum's elderly guard dog, dozed underneath its canopy of white flowers, ignoring me as I walked along the stone path and through the front door. Inside, the foyer was spacious and elegant, with a spiral staircase and polished wooden floors. To my right I found a narrow doorway leading to a dark, still room that smelled of old books, having lost the scent of Freud's beloved cigars.

This was Freud's study where he wrote and saw patients between 1938 and 1939 during the last year of his life. In the late thirties, as the Nazis overtook Austria, Freud knew he was in grave danger. He was among the Jewish writers whose books were burned by the Germans. So he took refuge in London, living his final year in exile. Comparing his family's living conditions in Vienna to London, Freud wrote in his diary that they went from "poverty to white bread."1