Biologists on Farollones islands dream the same dreams

The following article appeared in today's San Francisco Chronicle. I am not up on dream research, so it was interesting to me to see how they (the dream researchers) interpret the similarity in the field biologists' dreams as seen in their dream logs.  I guess---the following assumptions are current ideas of dream researchers.  Fun article; url is at the bottom. (This site, the Farollones Islands is about 27 miles west of San Francisco.)

It's a tranquil day on the Farallon Islands, one of the planet's most environmentally fragile ecosystems. Endangered birds and sea lions are busy feeding, mating and wading, totally undisturbed by humans.
Suddenly, a crazed mob of wild dogs and squawking children bombards the island, smashing eggs and running over nests, burrows and dens. Mothers abandon their young. Babies are crushed.
A biologist howls for the attackers to stop. But in nightmares, no one can hear you scream.
"We call those 'island invasion' dreams," said Russ Bradley, manager of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory's Farallon research program. "They're a combination of anxiety and extreme ridiculousness. We all have them."
For the past 20 years, scientists at the Farallones have been documenting more than just puffin nests and shark breeding around the windswept archipelago 27 miles west of the Golden Gate. They've been keeping a daily log of their dreams, which tend to be eerily similar.
Whether scientists are on the island for a few weeks or, like Bradley, stationed there on and off for a decade, their dreams are filled with marauding kids, terrified shorebirds, forest fires, shark attacks and a healthy dose of the absurd.
One scientist dreamed the biologists played the cormorants in a game of hockey on West End Island, cheered on by a crowd of drunken elephant seals. Another dreamed that interns were thrown to the great white sharks that circle the islands during seal breeding season.
Biologist Pete Warzybok once dreamed he saw a flamingo on the island, and then he was suddenly riding in his father's old 1961 Buick. Next a bum began cleaning the windshield with spit and a dirty rag.
"It was about things that don't belong here," said Warzybok, who's been working on the island, with periodic breaks, for a decade. "This is a pretty unique place. I think a lot of these dreams are driven by concerns about protecting it."

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At various times of the year, the Farallones are home to up to 500,000 birds and thousands of seals, sea lions, elephant seals, sharks and whales, making it the largest seabird and marine mammal colony in the continental United States. The name "Farallon" - Spanish for "rocky sea islands" - comes from the early European explorers, who stumbled across the islands in the 1500s and 1600s.
The island's first permanent residents arrived in the 1850s when the Coast Guard built a lighthouse on the largest of the islands, 200-acre Southeast Farallon, plus a pair of Victorian homes for the lighthouse keepers and their families.
When the Coast Guard automated the lighthouse in the late 1960s, the islands became part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since then, biologists from the Point Reyes Bird Observatory have been researching every aspect of life on the dozen or so islands, from the weather (usually cold) to the number of shark bites on female Steller's sea lions.
For the scientists, life on the Farallones can be disorienting, vivid and mystical, whether they're awake or asleep, they said. Researchers work up to 17 hours a day, often in isolation, in a place where humans are greatly outnumbered by critters. The six or so scientists stationed there at any given time always meet for dinner in one of the Victorians, but otherwise have little contact with people for their entire stint, which can last up to 10 weeks.
"After 10 weeks, the birds start getting to you," Warzybok said. "It's really not good to stay here longer than that. People start getting cranky, crying, having breakdowns."

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Dream experts are not surprised that the Farallon biologists share the same dreams, nor at the content of those dreams.
"You have a bunch of people doing the same thing all day, seeing the same things, with limited outside stimuli," said Eleanor Rosch, a psychology professor and dream researcher at UC Berkeley. "That's called 'day residue,' when the events of your day appear in our dreams. It's wonderful they're keeping records of this."
One purpose of dreams, she said, is to help our brains remember and make connections between events, emotions and information we experience while awake. By repeating the experiences in our sleep, we're learning from them and imprinting them on our long-term memories, she said.
The meaning of dreams is more debatable, she said. Some scientists believe dreams are set off by random firings of our brain stem, while others follow a more Freudian interpretation, that dreams originate in our deep subconscious as a way to express and resolve conflicts, she said.
On the Farallones, scientists are often intensely worried about the fragility of the island, a concern that's heightened when, on the clearest of days, they can see bustling San Francisco just across the water.
"We are the stewards of this refuge," Bradley said. "There's a long history of negative human impacts here. It's such a sensitive place. We want to protect it."

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Liza Solomonova, a psychology and neuroscience graduate student at the University of Montreal who has studied dreams extensively, called the Farallon "invasion dreams" typical of field scientists.
"They are working with procedures, rules, schedules," she said. "But what they're studying is chaos. Nature is unpredictable. So it makes sense this causes anxiety."
By discussing and keeping a log of their nocturnal imaginings, the scientists are probably encouraging the dreams' recurrence, she said. It's not difficult to consciously influence or control dreams, and in many cultures it's common practice, she said.
For scientists in particular, dreams can be a way for new ideas and breakthroughs to form, she said. While asleep, the brain can sort information in new ways, giving the dreamer new understanding upon waking, she said.
But whatever the content, dreaming is "profoundly important," she said.
"When we're dreaming we have access to thoughts and emotions we might not have while awake," she said. "It's essential to our sanity."
Warzybok, the biologist, doesn't know what to make of his dreams, but he knows they're vivid, weird, sometimes funny and sometimes disturbing.
"It can get very intense out here. I hope the dreams are keeping me sane," he said, adding with a laugh, "although, at this point, I'm not sure I am."

E-mail Carolyn Jones at carolynjones@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/28/MN7B1EIJIS.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle