Alice Robb > Quotes

“As sleep comes on and mental activity winds down, what neuroscientists call the default-mode network kicks in. “This is a network of brain regions that becomes active whenever you’re not actively engaged in some task,” Harvard researcher Robert Stickgold explained.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“We dream in order to work through our anxieties and prepare for our days; we rehearse for trials and tests, making their real-world counterparts feel more familiar.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“On apps like DreamSphere, Dreamboard, and Dreamwall, users log on to share their dreams with strangers and friends, “liking” and commenting on one another’s dreams as though they were status updates on Facebook. An interest that can seem supremely individual, even solipsistic, becomes social, life-affirming—a reminder that even the oddness of dreams is universal. Something that made you laugh alone in the morning can make others laugh too.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“When a team of Harvard neurophysiologists compared descriptions of their students’ dreams and waking fantasies, they found that both were bizarre but that dreams had about twice as many bizarre elements, like inexplicable appearances of new characters or abrupt shifts in the story line. On a neural level, dreaming and mind-wandering rely on many of the same mechanisms.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“When we dream—as when we brainstorm or free-associate—we withhold judgment, allowing ourselves to consider ideas we might otherwise dismiss and to confront emotional truths we would rather resist.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Romanian psychologist Ioana Cosman interviewed twenty-two Holocaust survivors and found a sharp contrast in their dream lives during and after the war. While they were in the camps, their dreams “presented . . . brighter and happier scenes.” It was only after they had been released—physically if not mentally—that their dreams took on “a darker and horrific form,” replaying gruesome scenes from the war or tormenting them with visions of family members who had been killed. Their dreams were adaptive, colluding in their self-preservation—postponing the nightmares until they were ready to confront their worst memories.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Why would our minds subject us to something so consistently unpleasant? If our ancestors could practice dealing with dangerous situations as they slept, he reasoned, they might have an advantage when it came time to confront them in the day.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Except in the case of PTSD, dreams almost never replay real memories exactly—but they draw heavily from our waking lives, spinning the threads of personal experience into a tangled web of present and past.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Dream diaries are among the oldest examples of literature; they have been found in the remains of ancient Greece and medieval Japan.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“(Hill suggested that “the verbal sharing that was requested in the couples dream interpretation session may have appealed more to the women than the men.”)”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“teeth”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Another study, this one by doctors at Imperial College in London, found a neurological anomaly: the area of the cerebellum that receives signals from the 'balance organs" in the inner ear and converts them into feelings of dizziness was visibly smaller in ballet dancers. Through years of practicing turns, they had trained their brains to suppress the sensation of dizziness.”
― Alice Robb, Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet – A Powerful Memoir from the School of American Ballet and the Women Who Survived It

“The psychic studies of dreams were better publicized than they were backed up. The link between pseudoscience, dreams, and outdated psychoanalytic theories took hold of the cultural imagination, making it even harder for those few, renegade researchers to pursue the unpopular science of dreams.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“According to the threat-simulation hypothesis, dreams evolved to serve an important psychological function: they let us work through our anxieties in a low-risk environment, helping us practice for stressful events and cope with grief and trauma. Most of the emotions we experience in dreams, as Finnish scientist Antti Revonsuo noted in the 1990s, are negative; the most common ones are fear, helplessness, anxiety, and guilt.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“dreams that seem precognitive can typically be explained by statistics. We have so many dreams—about four a night—that it’s hardly surprising to occasionally spot a similarity between dreams and life. In his book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There, British psychologist Richard Wiseman estimated that from age fifteen to seventy-five, the average person will have about 87,600 dreams over the course of 21,900 nights. But even people with excellent dream recall forget many of their dreams unless they encounter something in the daytime to jog their memory. So, Wiseman explained, “You have lots of dreams and encounter lots of events. Most of the time the dreams are unrelated to the events, and so you forget about them. However, once in a while one of the dreams will correspond to one of the events. Once this happens, it is suddenly easy to remember the dream and convince yourself that it has magically predicted the future. In reality, it is just the laws of probability at work.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“therapy is predicated on honesty: on confessing weird symptoms and self-destructive habits, dredging up distant memories and old traumas. The expensive, time-consuming irony is that patients lie. In a survey of more than five hundred people undergoing therapy, almost everyone—an astonishing 93 percent—admitted to having lied in session. (They most often hid suicidal thoughts, drug use, and disappointment in the therapeutic process.) No matter how much patients trust therapists to suspend judgment, to keep their secrets, to take their side, they can’t help but lie to elicit the response that they want; to elude censure or punishment; to save face or shield the doctor from discomfort.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“The dreamer, like the daydreamer, lacks “meta-awareness”; she is ignorant of the state she’s in and succumbs to the illusion that the fictive world is the only one. Tennyson put it well in “The Higher Pantheism”: “Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Dreams, by their nature, are difficult to hold on to. They often lack any kind of cohesion or narrative structure, and a chaotic series of images will always be harder to reconstruct than a tidy story (just as it’s harder to remember a string of random letters than a word). Memories tend to be encoded through repetition, but each dream is unique.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“When we dream, we integrate new pieces of information into our preexisting web of knowledge; the brain sifts through the jumble of recent experience, marking off the most important memories for long-term storage. Dreaming about a new skill helps us master it; practicing a task or a new language in our sleep may be as effective as grinding away in real life.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“it’s hard to feel invested in another person’s dream. You don’t have any stake in it—you know from the outset that the story ends with the dreamer waking up in bed, unscathed.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“As sleep science has blossomed from a niche specialty into a well-funded industry, dream scientists have found homes in growing sleep clinics. By the early 2000s, the stage was set for a renaissance in dream science and a reconsideration of older, forgotten research.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Both dreams and daydreams are emotionally and visually intense but only occasionally incorporate senses like taste, smell, and physical pain and pleasure. Both reflect present concerns and anxieties about the future and plunge us into circumstances that are impossible or bizarre. The dreamer, like the daydreamer, lacks “meta-awareness”;”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Both dreaming and imaginative thinking involve a kind of abandon, a letting-go.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“because dreams were thought to contain prophecies pertinent not only to the dreamer but to other prisoners and the community at large, dissecting them was a legitimate group activity. Throughout the day, people could look for signs that an omen from another inmate’s dream had been fulfilled. “When the dream did not come true for the dreamer, it came true for his friend,” one prisoner said.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Dreams are invaluable in diagnostic terms because they let patients off the hook. It can be easier to admit to something that happened in a dream, which can always be sourced to the murky pits of the unconscious or even blamed on a random physical stimulus, than to broach an embarrassing fear or voice an irrational anxiety.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Whether story-like or absurd, whether obviously relevant or not, dreams remind artists that, even when they feel blocked, the ability to create fictional worlds still resides within them.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Beethoven and Paul McCartney cited dreams as the spark behind some of their musical compositions (including McCartney’s famous “Yesterday”). Some of the most recognizable sequences in film—sections of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Fellini’s 8 ½, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—are translations of the directors’ dreams. Mary Shelley credited dreams with inspiring Frankenstein; E. B. White with Stuart Little.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Every morning we would start the day by sharing and interpreting the dreams we had during the night,” one Auschwitz survivor wrote years after liberation. Dreams were a source of distraction in an environment sorely lacking in it; the dreaming mind was a self-reliant fount of entertainment.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“In dreams, as in creation or free association, we indulge irrational thinking and briefly transcend the logic we follow in the day.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“People are obsessed with hearing the latest research on sleep, even if scientists haven’t yet reached a consensus on why we pass out every night.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey