When Rowan Hooper went to Arizona to explore the purpose of dreams, he found himself among “experts” in using dreams to talk to dead people and diagnose cancer
Jack Dykinga/naturepl.com
There’s still so much we don’t know about dreams. What shapes them? What is their true purpose? Wanting to understand such questions, I headed to the Arizona desert for the 35th annual International Dream Conference in Phoenix, last month, only to find myself having lunch with a psychoanalyst scheduled to give a talk on using dreams to predict the future. I was lucky not to choke on my burrito.
The International Association for the Study of Dreams, which runs the conference, is “multidisciplinary”: it embraces both scientific and other modes of enquiry …