Dreaming of Groundhog Day

Sleeping people as moral patients.

It has never been definitively established how much time Bill Murray’s character, local weatherman Phil Connors, spends trapped in a time loop in the film Groundhog Day. An early version of the script put it at 10,000 years. But the late director Harold Ramis estimated, at various points, that it was anywhere from 10 to 40 years. Online sleuths say it would have taken Connors between 8 years and 254 days and 33 years and 350 days to learn how to play the piano, sculpt ice, and speak French as he’s shown to do in the film.

One reason the producers have been intentionally obscure about the length of the time loop is that they wanted the movie to appeal to a larger audience:

As director Harold Ramis said in a 2009 talk, almost immediately after the film’s release it became embraced by Jewish, Buddhist, Christian and even psychiatric communities as a metaphor for their own quests for meaning and deliverance. Ironically, it’s also become one of the most serially rewatched movies in history.¹ “There’s something in (the film) where every time people see it they can reconsider where they are in life and question their own habitual behaviours,” he said.

The moral of Groundhog Day is that self-improvement takes time: In fact, it takes an indefinite amount of time, and if you try to put a number to it, you’re always going to get it wrong for a lot of people. But it’s still possible for even the lowest forms of life — say, local TV weathermen — to live up to higher values like integrity and beneficence:

By film’s end, Connors is seen rescuing a child falling from a tree, changing a troubled motorist’s flat tire, delivering the Heimlich maneuver to a choking man and counselling a nervous young couple to follow through with their imminent marriage.

But wait, why should all of that matter? If everything’s just going to repeat in another 24 hours, and everybody but Connors is going to forget it, then you might think it shouldn’t even count, morally speaking. Our protagonist might as well go build his own Groundhog Day with blackjack and hookers (in fact, forget the Groundhog Day).

This is the sort of thing that might strike you as being intuitively plausible, but upon reflection it’s just clearly wrong. Everything that happens to everyone is eventually going to be forgotten between one Planck time from now and the heat death of the universe. But no reasonable person would say that this means nothing matters. Some things that we forget sooner might matter less because we have less time to look back on them with positive or negative affect. But the primary reason that experiences matter is that they matter to the people they happen to in the moment they happen.

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Most people go through positively or negatively valenced experiences every night when they dream. Research links positive dreams to positive mood, while nightmares have been linked to physiological responses similar to those induced by waking anxiety. According to dream diary experiments — in which participants write down everything they remember dreaming as soon as they wake up — people dream an average of 81.9% of the time during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and 43.0% of the time during non-REM sleep. This equates to just over half the total amount of time people spend sleeping, or around three to four hours per night, or 10 to 13 years over the course of an 80-year lifespan.

Yet, most people forget most of their dreams. REM sleep activates the parts of the brain responsible for short-term memory, which usually lasts less than 30 seconds. This means that all but the last dream someone has in a night are typically forgotten before they wake up, and most people even forget their last dream unless they make a deliberate attempt to remember it as soon as they wake.

Most people therefore don’t tend to think the quality of dreams is morally important — or, if it is important, it’s only important insofar as it affects people’s waking lives. But this makes about as much sense as dismissing everything in Groundhog Day until the day the time loop ended. If it matters whether a child is going to hurt himself falling out of a tree, or a man is going to choke at a restaurant, even if it’s going to be forgotten 24 hours later, then the fact that dream experiences are forgotten soon after they occur doesn’t mean they don’t count in moral terms. They still mattered to the dreamer at the time they were ongoing.

Of course, if you accept that what Phil Connors did mattered, and you conclude therefrom that dreams are morally important, it leads you to some unconventional conclusions. As Adam Piovarchy argues in a recent paper in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, assuming hedonistic utilitarianism, we ought to invest a lot of resources into researching, promoting, and implementing strategies to improve dream quality:

It may not be possible to give a precise answer to [what efforts or resources we should be willing to spend] in terms of dollars, work hours or research priorities, or to find some other factor that can be a yardstick with which to calculate, for example, dollars per nightmare. However, it should be clear that, given (i) the unpleasantness of nightmares, and the extent to which we would prefer to have more pleasant dreams rather than less, (ii) the frequency with which we each have dreams and nightmares, (iii) the length of our lives and (iv) the large number of people who would stand to benefit from interventions that improve their dreams, we have considerable moral and prudential reasons to improve our dream experiences.

Philosopher

Eric Schwitzgebel

takes this as an argument against hedonism — not because we shouldn’t care about things that are forgotten, but simply because people don’t care about what happens in their dreams:

The real reason that we scoff at serious effort to improve the quality of our dream lives is this: We don’t really care that much about our hedonic states in sleep. It doesn’t seem worth compromising on the goods and projects of waking life so as to avoid the ordinary unpleasantness of dreams. We reject hedonic theories of value.

But this argument is very poor. I don’t mean to disparage Schwitzgebel, a successful academic philosopher and public intellectual, by comparing him to the one form of life lower than TV weathermen — opponents of the Shrimp Welfare Project — but the argument here reminds me of people who argue against shrimp welfare by repeating over and over again that they don’t care about shrimp. As Bentham’s Bulldog put it:

Merely reiterating that you have some ethical judgment is not, in fact, a defense of the ethical judgment. If someone gives an argument against some prejudice, simply repeating that you have the prejudice is not a response. In response to an argument against racism, it wouldn’t do for a racist to simply repeat “no, you don’t understand, I’m really racist — I have extreme prejudice on the basis of race.”

Schwitzgebel’s argument is a bit different because it gets at an irresolvable normative ethical issue. But it seems more reasonable to conclude that people don’t care about their dreams simply because they’re biased by forgetting them soon after they wake up rather than that they reject hedonism.

Besides, you can make the argument for caring about dreams under various moral frameworks. Even if hedonism is false, Schwitzgebel admits, “increasing pleasure and reducing displeasure should be a major part of living wisely and of structuring a good society.” And you might say that if someone is able to master lucid dreaming, for example, they could use their extra three to four hours of self-aware cognition per night to develop virtuous character traits and train themselves to adhere to moral rules and fulfill their duties.

It is, of course, impossible to know how much we should be spending on research to improve the quality of our dreams, but the answer is likely a lot more than we do now. In 2025, the National Institutes of Health is projected to spend $593 million on sleep research, but virtually none of that will go to dream welfare. In the United States alone, improving the quality of people’s dreams by the equivalent of 1% of their waking wellbeing could be worth between $68.1 billion and $90.8 billion per year, based on a value of statistical life of $13.2 million.² It’s no shrimp welfare, but it’s still a good return on investment.

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1. Actually, irony is supposed to subvert expectations. It is precisely the opposite of ironic that Groundhog Day, a movie about repeating the same day on a loop, would be watched over and over again. A more accurate example of irony is that the Canadian National Post, a well-regarded newspaper, would make such an elementary semantic error.

2. 180–240 minutes of dreaming per night * 0.01 welfare adjustment * 365 nights per year * 330 million people / 42 million minutes in an 80-year lifespan * $13.2 million value of statistical life = $68.1–90.8 billion per year