托福閱讀材料之馴服噩夢

　　In the new movie, 'Inception,' a master thief is able to infiltrate peoples' dreams and steal their subconscious secrets -- even plant a dream idea they'll think is their own.As fantastical as that seems, an evolving area of sleep research holds that it is possible for people to direct their own dreams, in a limited way.For example, people who suffer from recurring nightmares can learn to substitute happier endings. Practitioners of lucid dreaming -- who train themselves to be aware that they are dreaming -- say they can try out fantasies like flying.

　　在新電影《盜夢空間》(Inception)中，大盜能夠潛入人們的夢中，偷走他們潛意識中的秘密──甚至還能植入夢的構思，讓人們以為那是自己的夢。正如它所展現的奇妙想象一樣，一個發(fā)展之中的睡眠研究領域認為，人們可以有限地指揮自己的夢。例如，反復做噩夢的人可以學會用更快樂的夢境結局取而代之。清醒夢境的實踐者──訓練自己意識到在做什么夢的人──說，他們可以在夢中嘗試像飛行這樣的幻想。

　　Ordering up a dream about a nagging personal problem is difficult, but possible, says Robert Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. 'As you go to bed tonight, really think about some of those emotional issues that you haven't wanted to deal with. You've got about a 10% to 20% shot.'

　　哈佛醫(yī)學院(Harvard Medical School)的精神病學副教授羅伯特 斯蒂克戈爾德(Robert Stickgold)說，控制關于煩人的個人問題的夢很難，但卻是可能的。“如果你今晚上床時考慮過某些你不想處理的感情問題，那么你夢到這些問題的幾率約為10%至20%。”

　　That fits with the current understanding of what dreams are and why we have them. Once thought to represent repressed sexual urges, or simply neurons firing randomly, dreams are now believed to be mash-ups created by the unconscious mind as it processes, sorts and stores emotions from the day.'We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night,' says Rosalind Cartwright, an emeritus professor of at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has spent nearly 50 years studying sleep and dreams.

　　這與目前人們對夢是什么以及我們?yōu)楹螘鰤舻睦斫庀喾?。人們曾經認為夢表示被壓抑的性沖動，或只是隨機的神經元放電，但現在人們認為，夢是由潛意識處理、分類和儲存白天的情感時產生的混合產物。“我們帶著問題入睡，在夜里處理這些問題，”位于芝加哥的拉什大學醫(yī)學中心(Rush University Medical Center)的神經學榮譽退休教授羅莎琳德 卡特賴特(Rosalind Cartwright)說。她曾花了近50年的時間研究睡眠和夢。

　　Her new book, 'The Twenty-Four Hour Mind,' explains that the mind latches onto some thread of unfinished emotional business from the day. Then, in REM sleep (the rapid eye movement period when most dreaming occurs), it calls up bits of older memories that are somehow related, and melds them together. 'That's why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and new memories Scotch-plaided into each other,' she says. 'They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.'

　　她的新書《24小時思維》(The Twenty-Four Hour Mind)解釋說，思想依附于某些白天未完成的情感事務的線索。然后，在快速眼動睡眠(多數夢產生時的快速眼球運動時期)中，它將喚起一些有關系的舊記憶，并將其糅合起來。“這就是為什么夢看來如此奇特。你的舊記憶和新記憶相互交織著”，她說。“這種聯系是情感聯系，而不是邏輯聯系。”

　　Usually, people work through the most negative emotions first, and their dreams become more positive as the night goes on. (How do researchers know that? 'The old-fashioned way. We wake them up and ask them,' Dr. Cartwright says.)But nightmares interrupt that process; people usually wake up before the frightening emotion is resolved, so the dream keeps repeating.

　　通常，人們首先解決最負面的情感，當夜?jié)u深時，夢就會變得更積極。(研究人員是如何知道這個的?“最老套的方法。我們把他們叫醒，然后問他們，”卡特賴特說。)但是噩夢打斷了這個過程;人們通常在恐懼情緒抒解之前醒來，因此夢一直重復。

　　'Your brain seems to think that it's helping you to prepare, but you don't allow yourself to finish it so it becomes a broken record,' says Shelby Freedman Harris, director of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at Montefiore Medical Center in Bronx, N.Y.Dr. Harris's program is one of a small number around the country that helps nightmare sufferers and people with post-traumatic stress disorder learn to rewrite the script of their recurring dreams using a technique called Image Rehearsal Therapy.

　　“大腦似乎認為這有助于幫助你做好準備，但你不允許自己做完這個夢，因此它會反復出現，”位于紐約州布朗克斯(Bronx)的孟特菲爾醫(yī)療中心(Montefiore Medical Center)的行為睡眠醫(yī)療項目總監(jiān)謝爾比 弗里德曼 哈里斯(Shelby Freedman Harris)說。哈里斯負責的項目是美國為數不多的項目之一，這些項目幫助噩夢患者和創(chuàng)傷后壓力心理障礙癥患者利用被稱為“意象排演治療”的方法去改變他們反復出現的夢境。

　　After recalling the nightmare in detail, the dreamer writes out the new script and envisions it several times a day. Dr. Harris says one of her patients had recurring nightmares of being surrounded by sharks. She imagined they were dolphins instead and rehearsed the scene during five sessions, and the nightmares vanished. A young patient having nightmares of being chased turned the pursuer into chocolate and ate him.

　　在回想起噩夢的細節(jié)后，做夢的人寫出新的劇本，并在一天中想象幾遍。哈里斯說，她的一個病人總是反復做被鯊魚包圍的噩夢。她想像它們是海豚而不是鯊魚，并在五個療程中排演這一幕，于是噩夢消失了。一位年輕病人做的噩夢是被人追逐，他把追他的人想象成巧克力，一口吃掉。

　　'It gives the patient control over the nightmare,' says Dr. Harris. Studies have found that after several sessions practicing with a therapist, some patients dream the new ending just as they envision it, some dream another version of it, and some stop having the nightmare altogether. Can you order up a dream on a specific topic, or can somebody else influence your dreams? Numerous experiments with so-called dream incubation have tried, with mixed results.

　　“這讓病人可以控制噩夢，”哈里斯說。研究發(fā)現，由治療師治療數個療程后，有些病人夢到了正如他們所想象的新結局，有些人做了另一個版本的夢，有些人則完全停止做噩夢。你能按意愿做一個特定主題的夢嗎?或者，其他人能影響你的夢嗎?人們嘗試過無數所謂的夢境孵化實驗，并得到了不同結論。

　　'I can control people's dreams. I can get them to dream about videogames by having them play intensely,' says Dr. Stickgold. His studies at Harvard found that when volunteers played the game Tetris for hours a day, 60% reported dreaming about it at least once as they were falling asleep.

　　“我能控制人們的夢。通過讓他們密集地玩視頻游戲，我就能使他們夢到視頻游戲，”斯蒂克戈爾德說。他在哈佛進行的研究發(fā)現，當志愿者一天玩數小時俄羅斯方塊時，60%的志愿者報告說他們在睡著時至少夢到過一次俄羅斯方塊。

　　In a follow-up study with the virtual-skiing game Alpine Racer, 14 of 16 students reported seeing skiing images at sleep onset (as did three people who were merely observing the experiment.)

　　在一項用虛擬滑雪游戲《高山滑雪》(Alpine Racer)進行的后續(xù)研究中，16名學生中的14名報告說，他們在剛開始入睡時見到了滑雪的圖像(3位只是觀察了這個實驗的人也是如此)。

　　It's unclear how far into the night's dreams those images persisted. Dr. Stickgold and colleagues are now repeating the study having subjects play 'Dance, Dance Revolution' and waking them later in the night to ask about their dreams.

　　至于這些圖像在夜晚的夢中持續(xù)了多久，仍然不清楚。現在，斯蒂克戈爾德和他的同事重復了這一研究，他們讓實驗對象玩《勁舞革命》(Dance, Dance Revolution)，然后在夜里叫醒他們，問他們關于夢的問題。