ESCONDIDO -- David Goodman studies the brain like a scientist
from another century. In this age of multi-million dollar
taxpayer-funded institutional research, he sticks out. He holds a
doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California,
Irvine, but works alone surrounded by avocado and lime trees in the
hills above Escondido.
"He's a bona-fide genius," said his friend David Plotner, an eye
surgeon in Escondido. "But he's a little hard to keep up with."
Goodman has kept detailed records of his dreams for more than 25
years and has identified cycles in their themes. In the modest
converted trailer he calls home, Goodman has stacks of hundreds of
spiral-bound notebooks with records of his last 22,000 dreams. He's
trained himself to wake up three to five times per night and to
record the exact time.
Goodman combines aspects of research from the 19th century and
the 21st. He has the lone-wolf approach of a 19th century
independent investigator, like Gregor Mendel cultivating peas at a
secluded monastery. But to ultimately validate his ideas about how
the brain works, he depends on the hope that other scientists could
back up his theories with sophisticated brain imaging and computer
"Is there still a definitive role for the tinkerer driven by
curiosity for personal satisfaction?" he asked rhetorically last
Dreams fall into four categories, Goodman theorizes. Categories
of dreams -- intellect, power/influence, danger/self-doubt and
adventure/tension -- follow each other in separate dreams that come
in phases of equal duration and unvarying order. A dream from 2001
in which Goodman is a star athlete falls into the power/influence
category, for example, but one in which he is teased for having a
squeaky voice falls into the third, danger/self-doubt. He has
spotted similar patterns in the recorded dream journals of others
that he's downloaded from the Internet.
In his case, the cycles lasted about 28 days when he started his
self-recording experiment in 1977, but they've sped up over time,
to about 18 days per cycle in the 1980s and then more dramatically
to 1.25 days in the 1990s. He's also detected other daily and
weekly cycles embedded in his dream journals.
"If there are principles to this oscillation, maybe I could
create a standard that other neuroscientists can refer to," he
Goodman thinks that the cycles of dream theme correspond to
cycles of chemical activity in the brain, and that studying the
cycles would open up a treasure of information about the brain's
inner machinery. For example, the cycles could explain why some
anti-depressant drugs take weeks to take effect, Goodman said. They
could also provide a glimpse into a question debated by Freud, Jung
and today's neuroscientists: What purpose do dreams serve?
"We can view dreams as manifestations of four ways of previewing
problems," Goodman wrote in a paper presenting his work.
Dream research has evolved from the turn of the last century,
when Freud postulated that dreams represent an unfulfilled wish,
frequently sexual. The late Francis Crick, the DNA pioneer who
later studied vision and consciousness at the Salk Institute,
suggested in the 1980s that dreams represent "garbage collection,"
getting rid of inessential facts. More recently, Matthew Wilson, a
researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has argued
based on his 2001 animal research that dream activity helps the
brain sort through recent memories and cement them into place.