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The subject shows an increase in REM sleep as if he were trying to make up for what had been missing. According to William C. Dement, schizophrenics in remission show a particular need for REM sleep. After only two nights of dream deprivation they showed an excessive REM rebound. When not in remission, that is, when experiencing overt symptoms of schizophrenia like hallucinations and delusions, or when exhibiting types of bizarre behaviour characteristic of the illness, schizophrenics do not show REM rebound after two nights of deprivation.⁷ If further experiments confirm that the overtly psychotic do not need dreams to the same extent as normal people, the old idea that schizophrenic illness is ‘dreaming whilst being awake’ becomes even more convincing. Conversely, although normal mortals do not become psychotic even if totally deprived of REM sleep, entering the mad world of dreams each night probably promotes mental health in ways we do not fully understand.

      It seems clear that some kind of scanning or re-programming takes place in dreams which has a beneficial effect upon ordinary mental functioning. Dreaming seems to be biologically adaptive. Stanley Palombo suggests that dreams are concerned with matching past and present experience. He thinks that

      the dream compares the representation of an emotionally significant event of the past with the representation of an emotionally significant aspect of the previous day’s experience.⁸

      This information-processing function of the dream is concerned with allotting the new experience to the right slot in the permanent memory. Whether this model accounts for all dreams is dubious; but it goes some way to explaining why it is that in dreams, time is so often out of joint. If past and present are being compared, it is not surprising that, in the dream, they so often appear to be confused.

      Another example of some kind of re-ordering process taking place in the brain can be discerned in the stage of the creative process which Graham Wallas called incubation. Wallas’s first stage is preparation. The creative person develops some preliminary interest in a particular subject, collects material, and reads everything he can find about it. Next, a period of time intervenes during which the accumulated material simmers, or is unconsciously scanned, compared with other mental contents, organized, or elaborated. We do not understand what goes on during this period of incubation, but it is a necessary prelude to the next stage, that of illumination. This is the time at which the creative person has a new insight, discovers a solution to his problem, or in some other way finds that he can order the material which he has accumulated by employing an overriding principle or an all-embracing conception.

      The time taken for incubation can vary from a few minutes to months or even years. Brahms said that, when a new idea occurred to him, he would turn to something else and perhaps think no more of the new idea for several months. When he took it up again, he would find that the idea had unconsciously assumed a different form at which he would begin working.

      It would be absurd to suggest that the new idea was reverberating through the networks of the brain for several months to the exclusion of all else. The brain is highly complicated, and capable of carrying out a great many operations simultaneously. But the parallel with the scanning or sorting process which occurs spontaneously in dreams, or which is deliberately encouraged by prayer or meditation, is striking. What takes place in the circuitry of the brain is a mystery; but it can be confidently asserted that these processes require time, passivity, and preferably solitude. Creative people may or may not need the peace of being physically alone. Schubert and Mozart, for example, could concentrate on their ideas in circumstances which others would find distracting. But observers have generally noted that such people are greatly absorbed with their own thoughts even when in company. Winnicott’s paradoxical description of ‘being alone in the presence of’ may be relevant not only to the infant with its mother, but also to those who are capable of intense concentration and preoccupation with their own inner processes even when surrounded by other people.

      The fact that mental processes of the kind discussed above require time, and that incubation resulting in new insights may need long periods of gestation, may also be related to one factor which some researchers have singled out as characteristic of human intelligence. Intelligent behaviour has been defined as ‘behaviour that is adaptively variable within the lifetime of the individual’.⁹ It is the opposite of the kind of behaviour governed by pre-programmed patterns which is characteristic of many species further down the evolutionary scale. Behaviour determined by built-in responses to environmental stimuli is both automatic and immediate. Human behaviour, which is in most circumstances much more flexible, not only depends upon learning, and hence upon memory, but also upon the capacity not to respond immediately and automatically to a given stimulus. Stenhouse suggests that, if intelligent behaviour is to evolve from instinctive behaviour, three basic factors must be developed.

      The most important factor is that which gives the individual animal the power not to respond in the usual way to the stimulus situation which previously initiated an instinctive sequence culminating in a consummately act. This power not to respond may be absolute, or may be merely the ability to delay the response – withhold it provisionally, as it were – but its absence would negate the very possibility of adaptive variability in behaviour.¹⁰

      If the individual is to produce a new response to a given situation, he must be capable of learning and also of storing what he has learned. Stenhouse’s second factor is the development of a central memory store in which items which are functionally related can be filed, and against which new experiences can be measured. We have already encountered Palombo’s idea that dreams may be concerned with the process of sorting and comparing new experiences with past experiences.

      Stenhouse’s third factor is the development of some capacity to abstract or to generalize.

      There must be an ability for seeing similarities and differences, if some memory items rather than others are to be selected to act as modifiers of present behaviour.¹¹

      This capacity is present to some degree in all animals capable of learning from experience, but is particularly highly developed in man.

      The idea that intelligent behaviour is dependent upon not responding immediately to any given situation can also be linked with the phenomena of dreaming. In dreams we may picture ourselves travelling, walking, running, fighting, or, in any number of other ways, being physically active. Yet in reality dreamers show little movement other than rapid eye movements and a few twitches of their limbs. There is an inhibition of the motor centres of the brain at the same time that the cortex shows increased electrical activity. Experiments in cats have shown that, if the part of the brain responsible for inhibiting the motor centres is destroyed, the animal will act out its dreams by showing aggressive or playful behaviour even whilst asleep. The inhibition of motor activity which occurs in dreams can be seen as one way of delaying immediate responses so that some kind of sorting activity can occur in the brain.

      A comparable inhibition of motor activity occurs when we are awake and engaged in thinking. Thinking can be regarded as a preliminary to action; a scanning of possibilities, a linking of concepts, a reviewing of possible strategies. Eventually, thinking results in some sort of physical action, even if this is no more energetic than pressing the keys of a typewriter. Whilst thinking is going on, this eventual action must be postponed. Many people find this postponement difficult, and engage in some kind of displacement activity whilst thinking, like walking up and down, smoking, or playing with a pencil. Thinking is predominantly a solitary activity, although others may be present when an individual is concentrating upon his own thoughts.

      Another analogy to Winnicott’s concept of the capacity to be alone is prayer. Prayer goes far beyond merely asking for benefits for oneself or for others. Prayer can be a public act of worship; but the person who prays in private feels himself to be alone in the presence of God. This is another way of putting the individual in touch with his deepest feelings. In some religions, no response to prayer from any supernatural being is even expected. Prayer is undertaken, not with the intention of influencing a deity,

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