This American Life - 71: Defying Sickness

Broadcast on: 01 Aug 1997

"There's the part of you that's healthy, and there's the part of you that's sick. And sometimes, the healthy part doesn't want to admit there's a sick part." Well, back in 1945, Walt Stromer was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. He was permanently blinded, sent home. "In the next year or so, when I was back home going to college, I would dream that I was driving a car, and then in the dream I would think, 'You shouldn't be doing this, you're blind.'" In fact, he realized in his dream he was always able to see. And even to this day, over 50 years later, he still has these dreams from time to time. "Sometimes I will dream of myself as I was a teenager, and those dreams are almost completely as I would have been then seeing. Or occasionally I will still, in dreams, see a page of a book and read it. And absolutely clearly, and I may even remember a sentence or two when I wake up." Mr. Stromer says he took 10 or 15 years of blindness before he showed up in his own dreams as a blind person. At some point he started to wonder, "Why the delay?" He wrote a letter to a publication called "Parapleeche News," asking if anybody else had the same experience. He got a handful of letters for people who had. Some of them started seeing themselves as in wheelchairs or paralyzed, whatever. Within a few months, others, it was years before it was incorporated. And I think almost all of them say it's inconsistent. Sometimes they will see themselves as in a wheelchair the next time not. I think one of the more amusing ones was the man who said he would go along in his wheelchair and he gets to a curb that the chair won't get up on. So he gets out of the chair, lifts it up on the curb, and then he gets back in and goes on his way. Or one woman wrote about she will dream that she's walking with her husband and he's pushing her wheelchair. And then he sees somebody coming and he says, "Quick, get back in your wheelchair. People are coming." Here's a letter that you were sent and older man writes, "I've been in a wheelchair since October 6, 1966, and during the dream state I've never visualized myself in a wheelchair. I've been impotent since 1962, but in dreams I see myself as a stud that can go out with any of the cute young things." Yes, that comes through in a couple of the letters. And as I recall, one of the people wrote, I guess I had raised the question, "Why doesn't the dreaming brain catch up and show you the reality?" And she said, "Why should it? Why should it be in a hurry to show us the unpleasant side of life?" Maybe part of the function of dreams is to give us a few minutes of rest-button happiness so we can come out of it and say, "Hey, that felt pretty good." One man, the wheelchair user wrote, "This is better than just a harmless fantasy. It means I can re-experience walking and running temporarily. I wake up mentally refreshed, at ease." Mr. Strummer was a college professor and he spent some time researching why our subconscious minds would take so long to absorb the new facts about our lives, why his brain took a decade to admit to itself in dreams that he was blind. He says nobody really knows why. It might be chemical, or it might simply be that it's common for us all to see ourselves

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