CREATIVITY AND MADNESSworld into the brain is blocked. This freedom allows dopamine circuits
to generate the bizarre connections that are the hallmark of dreams.
The trivial, the unnoticed, and the odd can be elevated to positions of
prominence, supplying us with new ideas that otherwise would have
been impossible to discover.
The similarity between dreaming and psychosis has fascinated
many researchers, and has spawned a rich scientific literature. A group
from the University of Milan in Italy looked at the presence of bizarre
thought content in the dreams of healthy people, and compared
them to waking fantasies of both healthy participants and those with
schizophrenia.
Scientists stimulated waking fantasies^3 using the Thematic Apper-
ception Test (TAT), a series of cards showing ambiguous, sometimes
emotionally charged pictures of people in various situations. Themes
include success and failure, competition and jealousy, aggression, and
sexuality. The participant is asked to study the picture, then make a
story explaining the scene.
The Italian researchers compared the TAT stories and the descrip-
tions of dreams of patients with schizophrenia to those of healthy com-
parison participants using a scale called the Bizarreness Density Index.
The results of the tests confirmed that dreams are very much like psy-
chosis. The Bizarreness Density Index was almost exactly the same for
three categories of mental activity: (1) the descriptions of dreams of
people with schizophrenia, (2) the waking TAT stories of people with
schizophrenia, and (3) the descriptions of dreams of healthy people. On
the other hand, the fourth category, waking TAT stories of healthy peo-
ple, scored much lower on the index. This study supports Schopenhau-
er’s conception that living with schizophrenia is like living in a dream.
3 In this context, fantasy refers broadly to the products of the imagination, rather
than the more common use to signify daydreams of things like unlimited wealth.