Working in our sleep

Dreams can be an outlet for job anxieties, some researchers say.
By JANE M. VON BERGEN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
HAOS REIGNS WHEN JOY Biletz dreams about her job.
"I can't find something, or can't remember what I was doing or where I was going," said Biletz, who balances several projects and constant deadlines in her work in publishing production.
"I could be on the phone and can't get through," she said, describing her dream. "I could be at the printer, and there is no toner and no paper."
Most people dream about their jobs, and Biletz, 48, of Lansdale, Pa., is no exception.
"Work stirs up our conflicts and anxieties," said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider College in Lawrenceville, N.J., who has taught a course about dreams for more than a decade. "Our worries are about our self-esteem and our abilities to succeed."
Sometimes on-the-job stress replays itself during anxious nights in bed, experts say. That's particularly true in this period of downsizing, when employees worry about losing their jobs. Other times, dreams lead people to solutions to perplexing work problems.
Everyone dreams, even people who can't remember their dreams. Scientists now think part of the function of the dream period of sleep is to allow the brain to organize some of the information it receives during the day.
New insight
That sorting might explain how a dream helped Marianne Chisesi make a hard career decision.
A little more than a year ago, Chisesi, 53, a special education administrator, had a job she loved. She enjoyed the work, the people and the growth potential. But she hated her hour-plus commute from her home in Southampton, Pa.
When she was offered a similar job closer to home, she found herself torn, unable to decide.
In her dream, Chisesi became an architect who had to build an enormous power plant on top of a distant peak, fogged over by snow and high winds.
She and her crew remained at base camp, "a lovely springlike place of green grasses and yellow wildflowers," as huge modular pieces of the power plant began to arrive.
"In the dream, I was feeling anxious. If the decision came that the power plant would not be built, what on earth would we do with these huge pieces of building that had been delivered?
"Suddenly, I had an insight that immediately calmed me," she wrote in an e-mail to The Philadelphia Inquirer. "We would construct the building right here at base camp as a community and art center for the locals.
"With that, I found peace in my dream," she wrote. "As I awoke, the peaceful assurance followed me."
Talking it over with her husband at breakfast the next morning, Chisesi saw the distant plant as a metaphor for the faraway job she held and the base-camp art center as a symbol for the job closer to home -- one that acknowledged her need for a better balance of family, community and career.
"I chose to take the job closer to home," she wrote. "It has been almost a year. I have no regrets."
The biology of sleep
Drexel University's Eric A. Zillmer, co-author of "Principles of Neuropsychology" and a sleep-disorder expert, said humans go through two sleep cycles.
In one cycle, the brain falls into a deep slumber, even though the body might twitch.
In the other cycle, which is characterized by rapid eye movement and is known as the REM phase, the body falls still, but the brain is active.
Early researchers saw so much brain activity in the REM phase that they thought their sleeping subjects were actually awake, Zillmer said. Even though most of the brain is busy in REM, the portion of the brain that orchestrates and organizes the remainder of the brain rests during REM sleep.
That allows the thoughts and emotions generated by other parts of the brain to rise and fall, without logical organization, he said. The illogic, which pieces thoughts together randomly, might produce solutions to problems by allowing the dreamer to make connections that might not emerge any other way.
"I think dreams have a meaning," Zillmer said. "But I think you have to ask the person who is the owner of a dream."
Unpleasant thoughts
He said 80 percent of recalled dreams -- work or otherwise -- are stressful, scary or unpleasant.
John Rooney, director of LaSalle University's graduate management program, has a recurring dream every August. First, he can't find his classroom. Then, he can't find his notes in his briefcase, and the students are wild.
For decades, Rooney never told anyone about the dream. "I was embarrassed. I should be confident. I should be prepared," he said. When he did confess, he discovered that many teachers have similar August dreams.
"Your dream might show your anxiety at work," he said.
These days, a lot of job anxiety turns up in dreams -- perhaps because there's no other outlet for it, said Gail Porter, associate professor of management at Rutgers University in Camden.
"People may feel a little less able to express things on the job or to work through things in a way that can be observed by other people," she said.
"A lot of people are worried about losing their jobs. If they are having difficulty at work, they may be less inclined to talk about it with other people -- for fear that they may seem incompetent -- because in the next round of layoffs, they'll be the next to let go," she said.
Pay attention
Zillmer, the Drexel sleep-disorder expert, and Suler, the Rider professor, both suggest that people pay attention to recurring dreams, including work dreams, because the dreams might point to problems that can be addressed. Suler runs a Web site through Rider that includes pointers on dream analysis.
Suler suggests keeping a dream journal and talking over dreams with friends. To help in analyzing a dream, Suler's Web site suggests exaggerating certain parts or thinking about the dream and the emotions in reverse, keeping in mind that dreams aren't always logical.
Both men caution that people should stop if their dream analysis becomes uncomfortable.
Biletz, the Lansdale resident who works in publishing production, doesn't need much self-analysis to figure out what's behind her anxious dreams about missed phone calls and missing chemicals for the printer.
"It means that sometimes I am so overwhelmed that I am not getting anything done, no matter how I try to keep up my pace," she wrote in an e-mail to The Inquirer.
Biletz said she had the same kind of dreams when she was a waitress while attending college. "Back then, I dreamt that I could not find the coffee station, or my serving tray, or even a pen with which to write a customer's order down on my pad.
"So I guess the song has changed, but the feeling remains the same."