TV Reviews : Discovery Enters the World of ‘Dreams’

Just as a dreamer can be too much in love with his dreams, the three-hour “The Power of Dreams” on the Discovery Channel is too much in love with its subject.

While it emerges as a wonderful look inside the minds of certain artists who have used their dreams as creative fuel, it also seems afraid of being too scientific.

Mark up another soft science program for the channel that was supposed to be the science outlet on cable.

Because producer Katherine Carpenter’s study of dreams has a clear bias toward the view that dreams do have content with specific meaning for the dreamer, any alternative views in the scientific community receive short shrift.

Dr. Allan Hobson is briefly on screen in the first hour, explaining that our dreams are probably no more than the result of the brain’s cortex trying to make sense of the random firings of neurons in the brain’s upper section during sleep. He calls efforts to make sense of it all “a fool’s errand”; renowned physicist and brain researcher Francis Crick says that dreams are “the brain’s waste bin” that allow it to function the next day.

But the overwhelming number of those interviewed and profiled here strongly insist that dreams are more than neurons going off. The program gives a gloss on the dream research of both Freud and Jung, without detailing the two psychoanalysts’ severe conflicts with each other and the recent debunking of Freudian analysis. Jungian Robert Bosnak, however, makes a very good case for dream interpretation, citing several cases (including one of an AIDS patient whose story has been turned into a play) of mental and physical healing through dreams.

The Greeks practiced this, and today, writers such as William Styron (who says he doesn’t put a lot of weight in his dreams) experience powerful dreams that can trigger key ideas or, in Styron’s case, break a bout of depression.

The second hour serves up an interesting sampling of how such different artists as video maker Bill Viola, writer Isabel Allende and songwriter Billy Joel revive their dreams and put them on the page or screen. For once in this show (especially in Viola’s brilliant installations), dreams do have meaning. The third hour, on dreams and religion, was not available for review.

* “The Power of Dreams” airs at 8 p.m. and again at 11 p.m. Sunday on the Discovery Channel.