By night I
am Morpheus, God of Dreams. Some call me The Sandman.
By day, I’m
your constant companion, your Watcher, guiding by intuition.
Be still
for a moment – you’ll sense me close by ...
For you are
precious to me ... I've abided with you across Time.
I come into
your world through dream and reverie,
To
enlighten by dispensing insight and meaning.
It is I who
heals, comforts and restores; it is I who lifts
From your
bruised heart the confusion of daily existence.
What you
think of as your dream is but my shadow –
Look past
the shadow and know the real dreamer:
It is I,
Morpheus. You are my own, and – at the end of time –
It is I who will enfold you to my bosom and bring
you home.
THE
RESEARCH:
We
exist in multiple realities, and sometimes these realities are commingled, as
the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu famously wondered:
“I dreamt last night that I was a
butterfly and now I don’t know whether I am a man who dreamt he was a
butterfly, or perhaps a butterfly who dreams now that he is a man.”
This
essay is not pointed to dream interpretation, but rather is an effort in
examination of the process of dreaming itself.
Dreamworld
has always intrigued mankind, and it is no wonder, since we spend 10% of our
lives in the 5th stage of sleep alone, known as REM (rapid eye
movement), and forms of dream also pervade the other 4 stages, as well as the
often vivid borderland dream brackets called hypnogogic (sleep onset) and
hypnopompic (awakening from sleep).
All
mammals dream, including soldiers while marching and long-distance migrating
birds in flight. So central to mammalian life is dreaming, that it is likely
that this ability came from a shared ancestor of us all, and that we inherited
the ability to dream so that we could be better able to survive. Sleep is the
only time when healthy humans regularly lose consciousness. When we are in the
REM stage, we have very vivid conscious experiences, but are physically unresponsive
because inhibition by the brainstem induces muscle paralysis and deactivation
of executive brain circuits.
95% of all dreams are not remembered, since
certain brain chemicals necessary for converting short-term memories into long-term
ones are also suppressed during REM sleep. Unless a dream is particularly vivid
and awakens one, the dream content is not remembered. Perhaps, though, ‘recall’
is not necessary, if the substance of the material worked through in the dream
has implicitly affected the dreamer; if so, his core reaction to future events
after the dream would have reoriented him differently than without the
sculpting effect of the dream.
There
is considerable research outlined below, and it will be seen that – especially
following the development of EEG, PET and fMRI instrumented testing
capabilities, researchers in sleep and dream labs have progressively built upon
earlier findings to penetrate the dreaming mystery. Ironically, (and getting
right to the ‘plot’ of this essay) the reality emerging is akin to what was
outlined by the famous Russian philosopher Pyotr D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), in
his 1931 book “A New Model Of The Universe”: (1)
“At first I thought that we have dreams only in a definite
state of sleep, near awakening. Later I became convinced we have dreams all the
time, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment we awake, but remember only
the dreams near awakening. And still later I realized that we have dreams continuously,
both in sleep and in a waking state. We never cease to have dreams,
though we are not aware of this.
“As the result of the above I came to the conclusion that dreams
can be observed while awake. It is not at all necessary to be asleep in order
to observe dreams. Dreams never stop. We do not notice them in a waking state,
amidst the continuous flow of visual, auditory and other sensations, for the
same reason for which we do not see stars in the light of the sun. But just as
we can see the stars from the bottom of a deep well, so we can see the dreams
which go on in us if, even for a short time, we isolate ourselves whether
accidentally or intentionally, from the inflow of external impressions. It is
not easy to explain how this is to be done. Concentration upon one idea cannot
produce this isolation. An arrest of the current of usual thoughts and mental
images is necessary. It is necessary to achieve for a short period
"consciousness without thought". When this consciousness comes, dream
images begin slowly to emerge through the usual sensations, and with
astonishment you suddenly see yourself surrounded by a strange world of
shadows, moods, conversations, sounds, pictures. And you understand then that
this world is always in you, that it never disappears.” (Ouspensky, A New
Model Of The Universe)
·
The Mesopotamians believed that the soul, or some part of it, moves out
from the body of the sleeping person and actually visits the places and persons
the dreamer sees in his sleep.
·
The Greeks and many
others developed techniques of dream ‘incubation’, so as to better understand
themselves and the forces flowing through them, and affecting their physical health
and emotional/psychic balance.
·
Some Indigenous American tribes and Mexican civilizations believe that
dreams are a way of visiting and having contact with their distant kin and
ancestors.
·
Dreamtime aka The Dreaming is a common term within the animist creation
narrative of indigenous Australians for a personal – or group – creation and
for what may be understood as the "timeless time" of formative
creation and perpetual creating. The
Spirits of the ancestors, their deeds, and the seminal impulses flowing into
the life of the tribe in the present, are all held in the Dreamtime beyond the
uncertain arc of things happening one-after-the-other. The Dreamtime is a
return to the real, eternal existence for the aborigine. Life in time is simply
a passing phase – a gap in eternity having a beginning and an end, whereas life
in Dreamtime has no beginning and no end. Some beliefs, such as reincarnation
and the ‘Dreamtime’, are universally held amongst the various tribes, and death
is seen as part of a cycle of life in which one emerges from Dreamtime through
birth, and eventually returns to the timeless, only to re-emerge again. It is
also a common native belief that a person leaves their body during sleep, and
visits Dreamtime.
·
In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the process of
dreaming is seen as an opportunity during one’s life to prepare for death,
through becoming familiar for what awaits all in the bardo states
between each life as the spirit prepares for reincarnation into a fresh body.
Belief in the process of reincarnation carries with it the idea that the spirit
incurs countless reincarnations on the Wheel of Life prior to becoming
sufficiently whole to preclude the necessity of again suffering the
vicissitudes and suffering associated with carnal life. There are opportunities
in each life to become relatively enlightened and – if prepared for what awaits
in the bardo – shorten the whole process of serial reincarnation. States of
consciousness realized through intentional forms of meditation and dream yoga are
such process-shortening opportunities that prepare one for the bardo tests. The
late Alan Moffitt, Professor of Psychology in the Department of
Psychology and co-director of the Laboratory of Sleep and Chronopsychology at
Carleton University in Ottawa, taught and wrote about this practice, and more
information on the Tibetan form of dream ‘witnessing’ and exploration of mind
can be found in our earlier review of Soygal Rinpoche’s “The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying”, here.
·
The core agency of Christian Science and several other religious healing
practices centers on ‘absent healing’, whereby a practitioner performs remote
healing on a patient who may be thousands of miles away, with the patient being
in a deep, meditative state or, preferably, sleeping concurrently.
“In 1974, in a comprehensive analysis of telepathic/clairvoyant
experiences, Professor Michael Persinger of Laurentian University found
characteristic patterns of marked increases in such experiences appearing
between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. (local time) with a major peak between 2:00
a.m. and 4:00 a.m., that is, at a time of the night when we would likely find
many people in the second REM period. Such well-documented characteristics of
telepathic/ clairvoyant experiences may be seen as reflecting the matrix in
which they originated: the intrauterine and early extrauterine period 'of
mother-fetus/newborn communication.”
(Vigilance Theory and Psi. Part I: Ethological
and Phylogenetic Aspects by Jon Tolaas)
·
Dr. Iain R. Edgar of Durham University, England, specializing in cultural anthropology,
has researched the importance that dreams have played in the history of Islam
and in the current lives of Muslims; and he observes that Ishtikara, or
dream interpretation, is the only way through which Muslims can receive
revelations from God after the death of the last Prophet, Mohammed. (2)
·
Sigmund Freud believed that dreaming was a "safety
valve" for unconscious desires and that dreams preserve sleep by
distracting the brain with wish fulfillment reflections of the unconscious.
Dreams were seen as the “royal road” to the unconscious, that they revealed in
disguised form the deepest elements of an individual’s (often repressed) inner
life.
·
Carl Jung expanded on Freud's idea that dream content relates to the dreamer's
unconscious desires. He described dreams as messages to the dreamer and taught
that dreamers should pay attention for their own good. He came to believe that
dreams present the dreamer with insights that can uncover and help resolve
emotional or religious problems and fears. Jung wrote that recurring dreams
show up repeatedly to demand attention, suggesting that the dreamer is
neglecting an issue related to the dream. He believed that many of the symbols
or images from these dreams return with each dream, and that memories formed
throughout the day also play a role in dreaming, since such memories leave
impressions for the unconscious to deal with when the ego is at rest. The
unconscious mind tries to restore the individual’s psychic balance by re-enacting
these glimpses of the past in the form of a dream. Jung called this a day
residue, and he also argued that dreaming is not a purely individual
concern, that all dreams are part of "one great web of psychological
factors."
“The collective unconsciousness seems to be not a person, but
something like an unceasing stream or perhaps ocean of images and figures,
which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind. I
understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not
know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.”
·
Erich Fromm
(1900-1980), German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and humanistic
philosopher, wrote as follows in The
Forgotten Language: an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy
tales, and myth:
“While we sleep we are not concerned with bending the outside world
to our purposes. We are helpless and sleep therefore, has rightly been called
the 'brother of death.' But we are also free, freer that awake. We are free
from the burden of work, from the task of attack or defense, from watching and
mastering reality. We need not look at the outside world; we look at our inner
world, are concerned exclusively with ourselves. When asleep we may be likened
to a fetus or a corpse; we may also be likened to angels who are not subject to
the laws of 'reality.' In sleep the realm of necessity has given way to the
realm of freedom in which 'I am' is the only system to which thoughts
and feelings refer.”
“The dreams of ancient and modern man are written in the same
language as the myths whose authors lived in the dawn of history. I believe
that symbolic language is the one foreign language that each of us must learn.
Its understanding brings us in touch with one of the most significant sources
of wisdom. Indeed, both dreams and myths are important communications from
ourselves to ourselves.”
·
James Hillman (1926-2011) commenced as a Jungian therapist, but
– as he dealt with modern anxieties and neuroses over time – he came to see
psychotherapies as practiced in the 20th century as inadequate in
that they are too reductive, materialistic, and literal; in effect they are
psychologies without psyche, without soul. In an attempt to restore psyche
into psychology, Hillman developed Archetypal Psychology, combining
features of current psychological methods with the mythic teachings of the
Greeks, the focus being on the soul at work in imagination, fantasy, myth and
metaphor. Psyche-pathos-logos is the “speech of the suffering soul” or
the soul’s suffering to attain meaning, and a great portion of Hillman’s
technique attended to the language of the soul – and the process of soul-making
– through images, fantasies and dreams. The basic model in understanding the
psyche is the dream - which places us inside images, rather than images
inside us – and which shows us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles
and experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of our
consciousness.
Hillman taught that dreams are not simply random
residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), nor are
they compensatory for the struggles of waking life, nor invested with “secret”
meanings of how one should live. It follows that Hillman was against the
traditional interpretive methods of dream analyists.
Hillman also taught the "acorn theory"
of the soul, in that all people already hold the potential for their unique
possibilities inside themselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak
tree. A unique, individual energy of the soul is contained within each human
being, displayed throughout their lifetime and shown in their calling and
life's work when it is fully actualized.
[Some of Hillman’s writings are excerpted here]
“In the dream, we are not in ‘story-time’ but in
‘image–space’, where chicken and egg mutually require each other and are simultaneous
correlatives. Notions of origin and of causality are also invalid constructs in
an underworld perspective, for which time does not enter and the image presents
an eternal (always going on, repetitious) state of soul.”
“The primary activity of the psyche is imaging. --- What we are,
REALLY, and the reality we live, the psychic reality, is the poetic imagination
going on day and night. We really do live in dream time; we really are such
stuff as dreams are made of. --- If at the soul’s core we are images, then we
must define life as the actualization over time of that originating seed image
– and that image, not the time that actualized it, is the primary determinant
in your life.”
·
Ernest Hartmann, Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of
Medicine, with 50 years involvement in the
exploration of sleep and dreams, envisioned dreams as contextualizing the dominant
emotions, expressed through pictorial representations. This pattern is found
most clearly in dreams of people who are experiencing intense emotions, such as
being enmeshed in chronic stressful dilemmas. Even if there is no dominant
emotion, yet several lower intensity emotions are present, a pattern still
becomes recognizable. He has published numerous studies demonstrating the
importance of emotion in dreams, and demonstrating that the power of the
central image of the dream is related to the power of the underlying emotion.
He indicates that our dreams deal with
our emotions and our emotional concerns by making pictorial metaphors of them,
and dreaming cross-connects or weaves in new material that helps us adapt to
future trauma, stress, and the problems of life. Thus dreaming and
psychotherapy fulfill somewhat similar functions, in that in both cases
stressful real-life experiences can be processed essentially by ‘making
connections in a safe place’ – that is, by associating and integrating
traumatic experiences with the rest of life in order to facilitate
psychological healing. Dreaming “calms” the emotional “storm” going on in the
mind. (3)
·
J. Everett Irion (1915-1994) was a CPA who for decades was Treasurer and a Director of
The Association For Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) originally founded by
the psychic Edgar Cayce. Irion taught and wrote extensively on esoteric
matters. Concerning dreams:
·
A great
many varied activities of the physical body as well as other facets of a
person’s being, such as the ‘sixth sense’, are involved in the metaphoric
process of dreaming; to understand dreaming we must look at the total
complexity of a human being;
·
In order
to grow and evolve completely, the mind needed a portion of its total self to
express in the flesh. This enables every soul to gain knowledge of itself as a
unique being and learn about the potential of the creative energy it is
expressing;
·
Reincarnation
is true even though people don’t have conscious recall of all their past
memories. The soul carries over the essence of the spiritual aspect of the
activities and the lessons it needs to face in the current lifetime. These are
presented to the incarnated individual.
·
Each soul
has the original ‘impress’ given to it at creation, that purpose for which it
was created. This ‘impress’ stimulates dreams in order to help the soul fulfill
its destiny. (Source: Why Do
We Dream – published 1990)
[Compiler’s observation: In a materialistic context, Irion’s
references to the non-corporeal soul as a tangible construct may be very
difficult to understand or ever observe, as ‘soul’ primarily has
extremely subjective connotations, and secondly is hidden in a dimension or
sub-domain as yet unknown or unseen to us. Yet such subjective realities don’t
preclude us from recognizing when we are in the presence of a ‘good soul’, nor
grasping a poignant metaphor representing the ineffable, such as the following
from the 19th century poet Christina Rossetti:
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
·
In 1953, using
electroencephalogram recordings, two University of Chicago researchers, Eugene
Aserinski and Nathaniel Kleitman, discovered a sleep state in which the
brain is, in many ways, every bit as active as when it's awake; a state wherein
– compared with other stages of sleep – the heart beats faster, breathing
quickens, blood pressure and blood flow to the brain (and sexual organs) rise,
while the eyes move rapidly beneath their lids. Brain waves are low-voltage and
high-frequency – the opposite to the brain waves of deep sleep, more like what
goes on when a person is awake, thinking and talking. They named this state
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, and when awoken from this paradoxical state,
subjects could usually recall vivid dreams.
·
William Charles Dement (1928- ) is a
pioneering US sleep researcher and founder of the Sleep Research Center, the
world's first sleep laboratory, at Stanford University. He is a leading
authority on sleep, sleep deprivation, and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep
disorders such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy. For this pioneering work in a
previously uncharted field, he is sometimes referred to as the Father of Sleep
Medicine.
From his 1960 article entitled The Effect of
Dream Deprivation published in Science:
“Dreaming appears to be an intrinsic part of normal sleep and, as
such, although the dreams are not usually recalled, occurs every night in every
sleeping person. …There appear to be no exceptions. … Total sleep time, six
hours fifty minutes; total dream time, eighty minutes; percentage of dream
time, nineteen point five … A certain amount of dreaming each night is a
necessity. It is as though a pressure to dream builds up with accruing dream
deficit during successive dream-deprivation nights .... There is a more or less
quantitative compensation for any deficit. … It is possible that if the dream
suppression were carried on long enough, a serious disruption of personality
would result. ... Psychological disturbances such as anxiety, irritability, and
difficulty in concentrating developed during the period of dream deprivation,
but these were not catastrophic .... The most important fact was that none of
the observed changes were seen during periods of control awakenings.”
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and
safely insane every night of our lives"
·
David Foulkes, an American psychologist and dream researcher, developed the cognitive theory of
dreaming, which states that dreaming originates in diffuse, more or less random
activation of semantic and episodic memory during sleep. Foulkes believed that
dreams are so random that they serve no real adaptive functions. He argued for the
existence of dreaming in the NREM state, and against a simple “REM sleep =
dreaming” view. By simply changing the question asked of subjects awakened out
of the NREM stage from “Did you dream?” to “Did you experience any mental
content?,” Foulkes was able to show a far higher percentage of dream reports
from NREM stages than original studies had suggested. These dream reports after
NREM awakenings led Foulkes and then others to conclude that the stream of
consciousness never ceases during sleep and that the brain engages in
meaningful cognitive activity during all sleep stages.
Foulkes noted that typical REM and NREM dreams
are quite distinct, particularly with respect to episodic memory content.
Episodic memory refers to knowledge about the past that incorporates
information about where and when particular events occurred. It is typically
contrasted with semantic memory, which consists of knowledge (e.g., facts, word
meanings) that has been uncoupled from place and time, existing on its own.
When examining REM sleep dreams for memory content, one finds that episodic
memories are rare and typically emerge as disconnected fragments that are often
difficult to relate to waking life events. These fragmented REM dreams often
have bizarre content. For example, the normal rules of space and time can be
ignored or disobeyed, so that in REM dreams it is possible to walk through walls,
fly, interact with an entirely unknown person as if she was your mother, or
stroll through Paris past the Empire State Building. NREM dreams, however, are
quite different. Here, episodic memories do appear in dream content. Recent
episodes are predominant, but remote memories occasionally appear as well. This
pattern of results suggests that the memory systems needed to generate complete
episodic retrieval are functional in NREM sleep but not in REM sleep.
·
In 1977, two Harvard
neurophysiologists, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley presented
their widely noted Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis, which claimed that dreams
are nonsense created when the forebrain makes "the best of a bad job in
producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relatively noisy
signals" sent up to it from the brain stem at the onset of REM. Later
Hobson softened his ‘nonsense’ position, and indicated that dreams are not
completely meaningless but simply another form of consciousness, and scenes integrated
into one's dream plots, perhaps from personal memories, may reflect one's
emotional preoccupations, and reflection on those preoccupations might provide
insight. Hobson then allowed that dreams are transparent and the plot fits the
emotion making it unnecessary to find forbidden wishes or repressed memories.
Hobson also tracked the physiological pathways whereby motor commands are generated during REM sleep at
the cortical level but then not realized in the cortex periphery because of the
operation of an inhibitory system that blocks the activity of motor neurons in
the spinal cord, resulting in muscular atonia. The experience of
movement in dreams is created with the help of an efferent copying mechanism,
which sends copies of all cortical motor commands to the sensory system.
The brain thus receives internally generated information about issued motor
commands and computes the expected consequences of those commands. However, the
sensory system is not informed that these commands are not actually carried out
by the muscles, and therefore the dreamer has the illusion of movement.
·
Later, the "reverse learning" theory of the molecular
biologist Francis Crick (co-discoverer in the 1950s of the structure of
the DNA molecule) and theoretical biologist Graeme Mitchinson held that
dreams rid the brain of superfluous notions, and that – without this regular
flushing – brain overload would manifest as hallucinations and obsessions. In
similar vein, others have viewed
dreaming as the means by which the brain rids itself of unnecessary information
– a process of “reverse learning,” or unlearning.
·
Montague Ullman (1916-2008) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and
parapsychologist who founded the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical
Center in Brooklyn and for over three decades actively promoted public interest
in dreams and dream sharing groups. Ullman was also Clinical Professor,
Psychiatry Emeritus at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and was a president
of both the Parapsychological Association and of the American Society for
Psychical Research.
The theory of dreaming that
Ullman developed is based on the vigilance hypothesis, which proposes
that dream consciousness is an elaborate form of orienting activity designed to
attend to, process, and respond to certain aspects of our residual experience,
with an endpoint being reached in either the continuation of the sleeping state
or its interruption and consequent transformation to awakening. While dreaming,
conscious experience is organized along lines of emotional contiguity rather
than temporal and spatial contiguity. The affective or feeling residue that
makes its presence felt in the dream operates reflexively or automatically as a
scanning mechanism. Ranging over the entire longitudinal history of the person,
it exerts a polarizing influence, drawing to itself aspects of past experiences
that are related to the dream issue in emotionally meaningful ways. This
enables the sleeping organism to assess fully the meaning and implications of
the novel or disturbing stimulus and – through the development of the ensuing
dream – either allow sleep to continue or help bring about awakening.
The
affective scanning that takes place while dreaming can on occasion bridge
spatial gaps and provide us with information independent of any known
communication channel. Emotional contiguity, under conditions we know very
little about, appears capable of integrating transpersonal – as well as
personal – content into the dream. Anecdotal accounts have for a long time
pointed in this direction, and the circumstances under which they occur
strongly suggest that in matters of life and death the vigilant scanning of
one's emotional environment reaches out across spatial boundaries in a manner
that has yet to be explained.
“Our dreams are born out of a phylogenetically ancient, genetically
driven mechanism that brings dreaming consciousness into being repetitively
throughout the night, every night of our existence. This very pointedly
suggests that it is part of our survival kit, not only as individuals, but with
a greater goal in mind, namely the survival of the species to which we belong.”
“Metaphor is a frequent component
of everyday discourse. As such, it renders speech more vivid and more
expressive of the meaning to be conveyed. In the dream state the metaphor
appears to function in a similar, but also somewhat different way. It is
similar in regard to the concern with the qualities of dramatic presentation
and vividness. It is different insofar as it is not concerned with the transfer
of a meaningful statement from one person to another. In the dream state it is
an integral part of a process of self-confrontation concerned not with the
intelligibility and referential meaning of a given aspect of experience, but
rather with the felt reactions associated with that experience. This technique
does not solve the real problems at issue, but it does succeed in reducing an
intangible and unknown set of operating causes to familiar and manipulatible
quantities, and in that way creates the possibility of resolving what – in the
absence of more accurate knowledge – would be irreconcilable events. A personal
myth is created which appears analogous to the mythopoetic process as it
operates culturally.”
Other
Ullman quotes together with an extensive examination of his published findings can
be found here.
·
A fundamental problem in biological adaptation is how to integrate new experiences
with old ones in a coherent fashion.
Dr.
Jonathon Winson (1923-2008),
associate professor emeritus of the Rockefeller University suggested that the solution
to this problem for mammals is REM sleep, and that most of the integration is
done while sleeping, not while actually behaving. The result is that a single
set of neuronal structures can serve dual purposes: guiding behavior when the
person is awake, and consolidating and integrating knowledge, developing
strategies when the person is asleep. Thus we are able to get the most out of
our nervous system, since it's being used round the clock, rather than just
when we are actively doing things.
Through
studies of the rat brain in the 1990s, Dr. Winson reasoned that the key to
understanding dreams is theta rhythm, sinusoidal waveforms that occur in the
brains of all vertebrates, and which synchronize the neuronal transmissions
that occur during waking experience in order to store them in long-term memory
during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, the state of sleep then thought to be
where most dreams occur. He made two remarkable discoveries about theta rhythm:
that its elimination results in severe long-term memory deficits; and that
theta occurs during species-specific behaviors that are crucial to survival.
Winson
also showed that information flow through the hippocampus, the part of the
brain responsible for learning and memory, is at its highest rate not only
during crucial waking events but also during REM sleep. As a result, he
formulated the theory that dreams evolved as a tool for remembering information
important to survival and for consolidation of new and old memories. REM sleep provides the
evolutionary mechanism that allows ‘off-line’ memory processing to occur,
whereby recent information can be compared with and integrated with past
information to provide an ongoing strategy for behavior.
With the advent of REM sleep in marsupial and
placental mammals, less prefrontal cortex was required to process information,
and this allowed the development of advanced perceptual abilities in higher
species.
Winson argued that the processes of REM sleep are
those of the unconscious that Freud studied in people's dreams. The paths of
symbolic association inferred by Freud, stem from the fact that consolidation
is a process of following associations among mental events - even associations
that are rare and tangential. In this view, the brain is simply doing its
homework in the dreaming state, sorting the experiences of the day (and the
week) into all the categories to which they are potentially relevant. (5)
Widely considered the
founder of modern dream analysis, Dr Winson wrote:
“Dreams were never designed to be
remembered, but they are keys to who we are”
·
Mark Solms, professor of neuropsychology at the
University of Cape Town, South Africa had been a Freudian scholar and leader in the
psychoanalytic field when he began his pursuit of the neurological basis of
dreaming at London Hospital. As a result of his clinical experience, he
refuted the Hobson-McCarley
Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis on several levels; first he realized that dreaming
occurred outside periods of REM, and is also common at sleep onset and
shortly before waking in the morning. Secondly, if Hodson and McCarley were
right, then people with damage to a part of the brain stem called the pons –
the on-off switch for REM sleep – shouldn't be having dreams. Solms, however,
had had several patients with lesions in precisely that region, and while they
weren't having REM, they’d nonetheless reported dreams. Thirdly, there was a
class of patients with healthy brain stems who had damage to the part of the
brain that generates spatial imagery who said that they'd stopped dreaming. To
Solms, that made sense, because if you can't create pictures in your mind, how
are you going to dream? He also had patients who had damage to the white matter
of the ventromesial quadrant of their frontal lobes, an area linked to the
transmission of the chemical dopamine and crucially involved in motivation,
urges and cravings. While these patients still experienced REM sleep, they
reported having lost both the capacity to dream and all sense of spontaneity,
drive and love of life. It followed that dreams must be associated with driving
urges … but Solms needed more evidence in the form of people with lesions in
this particular spot. Nowadays, damage to that part of the brain is rare,
normally a result of strokes or tumors, but back in the '50s and '60s, damage
to the frontal lobes was a lot more common when some mental illnesses were
treated by an operation called prefrontal leukotomy.
Solms
waded through the literature and found hundreds of case studies in which the
effects of the prefrontal leukotomy procedure were described, and loss of
dreaming was one of them. He concluded that – although REM sleep was initiated
by the brainstem – dreaming itself was an entirely separate process initiated
by higher brain functions which have the central role in dream creation, with dreams
springing from the motivational part of our brain at a time when other
inhibiting parts are off-line.
Another study by Solms compared the sleeping ability of subjects who dream
with that of subjects who can't because of brain lesions. Solms found that our
motivational drive is always fully active, even while we're asleep, and our
brain keeps us asleep to enable bodily repair functions, by tricking us through
dreams into thinking we're up and about and pursuing our desires. It's the
neurological equivalent of putting on a DVD for the kids so the main players in
the house can get some shut-eye. "Dreams replace
the real actions that are instigated by our motivational impulses while we're
awake," Solms says. His hunch is that the non-dreamers in his study
will wake up more often during the night than the dreamers, especially during
REM sleep – "The dream is what keeps you
asleep."
·
In 1997, Tom Balkin and Allen R. Braun of the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research, Washington D.C. published their findings about the dreaming
brain in action, using an emerging technology called PET (positron-emission
tomography) scanning. What they found was that as the brain moves into the
deepest stages of non-REM (NREM) sleep, activity in nearly all parts of the
brain decreases with the prefrontal cortical regions being first and with the
greatest decrease. This region is involved in planning, organizing, problem
solving, selective attention, personality and a variety of higher cognitive
functions including behavior and emotions. It is also the last region to
activate when awakening.
Accompaning deactivation of the prefrontal cortex
are sharp drops in levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, both involved in
focus of attention and problem solving. Acetylcholine surges with the advent of
REM. Areas that had become deactivated during NREM sleep become activated with
the exception of the prefrontal cortex. Suppression of the prefrontal cortex
during REM sleep may help explain several of the cardinal features of dreaming,
such as bizarre imagery, loss of critical insight and logic, diminished
self-reflection, inability to shift attention, morphing of time, place and
identity and forgetting of dreams.
Also
deactivated during REM was the primary visual cortex (the point of entry for
visual information from the external world), but regions of the brain that
conduct higher-level visual processing remained activated, perhaps explaining
why people continue to ‘see’ while dreaming, even while the brain is cut off
from the outside world.
Ironically, areas of the brain associated with
long-term memory storage and retrieval are more active during REM sleep
than while awake. This supports research which links REM sleep to memory
consolidation and integration. The brain appears to be comparing recent experience
with long-term memory, attempting to make associations with past experience,
reenforcing some while allowing others to remain dormant or possibly atrophy.
The players of concern may have changed, in evolutionary terms, but the game
remains the same – survival.
Working memory,
however, remains inactive during REM sleep, which explains the difficulty in
recalling dreams. Unless the dream is extremely emotional or the subject is
highly motivated, the retrieval mechanism is absent. An area of the brain that
is highly activated during REM sleep is the limbic system, and in fact it is
more active than while awake. The center of one's emotions, threats, and joys
is the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system, which explains why dreams
experienced during REM sleep are so emotionally charged. (4)
·
Jaak Panksepp (1943 - )
American psychologist, psychobiologist, neuroscientist, Professor Emeritus
Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State U, Illinois specialized in 'affective
neuroscience', the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He
stressed that – in order to understand
the mind, especially the emotional mind – there’s no alternative but to take an
evolutionary perspective. “The only organ we have in the
body that is clearly evolutionarily layered is the brain. We can see hallmarks
of an ancient heritage right within the structure of the brain.” Dr. Panksepp makes an
intriguing evolutionary suggestion about the origin of dreams: “Perhaps what is now the REM state was the original form of
waking consciousness in early brain evolution, when emotionality was more
important than reason in the competition for resources. This ancient form of
waking consciousness may have come to be actively suppressed in order for
higher brain evolution to proceed efficiently.”
Dr. Panksepp's lifework revealed that – deep in
their limbic bases – all mammalian brains are composed of seven common
emotional systems:
SEEKING (anticipation, desire,
initiative – the root of all other systems)
LUST (reproduction, mating –
who and when)
RAGE (frustration, body
surface irritation, restraint, indignation)
FEAR (pain, threat,
foreboding)
PANIC/LOSS (separation distress, social loss, grief, loneliness)
PLAY (rough-and tumble
carefree play, joy in living)
CARE (maternal/ parental
sacrifice and nurturance)
It is intriguing how
often these emotional themes (the majority of which are anxiety loaded) play
though our dreamlife, as our brains rehearse ancestral life preservative
scripts offline to ensure we are reflexively tuned to deal with serious life
issues. (6)
[Compiler’s
observation: Research by neuroscientists such as Dr. Panksepp on genetics and personality
has indicated that approximately half of our abilities are due to
genetic/biological sources and half to social/environmental variables. Scientists are increasingly acknowledging
the evolutionary nature of the human mind, as they conceptualize the many
intrinsic functions of the brain provided by nature; behavior is only the tip
of the iceberg – we are controlled by many inherited brain functions that are
only later refined through nurture.]
·
In 2000, Antti Revonsuo, Department of Philosophy, Centre for Cognitive
Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland presented the Threat Simulation
Theory (TST) to explain the evolutionary importance of dreams. TST refuted
several
theories that claimed dreaming is a random by-product of REM sleep physiology
that doesn’t serve any natural function.
Revonsuo’s research indicated that phenomenal dream
content is not random but is organized and selective: during dreaming, the
brain constructs a complex model of the world in which certain types of elements,
when compared to waking life, are under-represented whereas others are over
represented, and dream content is consistently and powerfully modulated by our
waking experiences.
Revonsuo’s research indicated that the biological
function of dreaming is to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat
perception and threat avoidance. TST looks to the original evolutionary context
of dreaming and the traces that it has left in the dream content of the present
human population. For instance, in the ancestral environment, human life was
short and full of threats, and any behavioral advantage in dealing with highly
dangerous events would have increased the probability of reproductive success.
Such a dream-production mechanism as TST that
selects for threatening waking events and simulates them over and over again in
various combinations, would have been valuable for the development and
maintenance of threat-avoidance skills. Empirical evidence from normative dream
content, children’s dreams, recurrent dreams, nightmares, post-traumatic
dreams, and the dreams of hunter-gatherers indicates that our dream-production
mechanisms are in fact specialized in the simulation and solving of threatening
issues. We dream because in the
ancestral environment the constant nocturnal rehearsing of threat perception
and threat-avoidance skills increased the probability of real-life reflexivity
in successfully perceiving and avoiding real-life threats. Through dreams
mammals continually hone their survival skills and behavioral programs so as to have increased survival/reproductive success.
The
activation of an off-line model of the world in the ancestral human brain
during sleep enhanced the probability of reproductive success of that
particular iteration of life in its evolving, natural environment. Such an
off-line model of the world we now call dreaming is specialized in the
simulation of certain types of events that regularly and severely threatened
the reproductive success of our ancestors. Through dreams, the dreamer could
rehearse ways of negotiating survival tactics efficiently and successfully
while in a safe environment and in an uncritical, delusional, and isolated
state of mind that very efficiently prevents him from realizing it was all just
a vivid, hallucinatory simulation.
We
take the dream world for real while it lasts, totally lacking insight into our
true condition. Thus perceptual realism and delusional lack of insight
guarantee that the simulation is taken most seriously, and even though we may
not later remember the dream, our reflexes are continually honed.
Even
though most humans now live in environments far removed from the ancestral
ones, by association the threats we now face still activate those ancient
ancestral coping loops. Hence our reflexes are automatically honed to cope with
the most salient, emotionally charged current threats. The dream-production
system can be seen as an ancestral defense mechanism comparable to other
biological defense mechanisms whose function is to automatically elicit
efficient protective responses when the appropriate cues are encountered.
While
both daydreams and night dreams consist of mental imagery, daydreams tend to
chart the goals we would like to achieve in the future (and
we need to be reminded about), whereas night dreams tend to simulate the dangers
we (or our ancestors) encountered in the past, and which we would
not particularly like to be consciously reminded about. In light of these
differences, it is unlikely that night dreaming should be only a non-adaptive
consequence of what daydreaming was selected for. Their functions can rather be
seen as complementary to each other. (7)
·
Robert Stickgold, Associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical
School's Center for Sleep and Cognition, says:
“sleep and dreaming serve to process memories from the last day and
all the way back, that they strengthen memories, and help extract the meaning
of events by building associative networks with other memories. Dreaming is
probably a high-level version of this processing. Clearly, you don't have to remember your dreams for these
processes to work. The brain is tuning your memory circuits as you sleep, and
remembering the imagery created during this process may be fun, may be
instructive, but it’s the need to learn that prods the brain to dream …
I have no doubt that dreams can be enjoyable, informative, even
revelatory to the dreamer … but dream analysis is a more tricky question: The
more dogmatic and doctrinaire the beliefs of the analyst, the less useful and
potentially more destructive the analysis process becomes. … Dreams aren't
constructed with the goal of delivering a message; they don't have an inherent
meaning; but when you do look at your dreams after you wake up, you can often
feel the associative networks that were activated during dream construction,
and trace them back a ways, and maybe discover a new way of looking at events
in your life, of looking at yourself, at others, or at the world at
large."
Combined
animal and human studies support the concept that NREM and REM each contribute
importantly to the process of memory consolidation. The human studies support
the hypothesis that NREM is more critical for the consolidation of declarative/episodic
memories, while REM is more important for procedural/implicit memories. Thus
NREM and REM facilitate different components of the memory consolidation
process and contribute to the consolidation of given tasks based on their
nature.
Rather
than simply strengthening established memories, sleep appears to serve two
distinct functions: first, to support the transfer of memories between the
hippocampus and neocortex, and second, to foster the integration of neocortical
memories into wider associative networks. The memory transfer function serves
hippocampally dependent declarative/episodic memories. The replay of
information during the alternating REM-NREM cycles allows alternating brain
states to facilitate the fine-tuning of memory traces. The second suggested
role for sleep, that of integration into associative networks, serves to
consolidate and strengthen both declarative/episodic and procedural/implicit
memories, and facilitate greater speed and accuracy. (8)
·
In 2005, Jie Zhang
of Windsor, Canada presented his elegant Continual-Activation Theory of
Dreaming, which recognizes that all components of the brain must be continually
activated throughout one’s life time, lest the components go dormant and die.
Zhang posits a temporary working memory stage in the memory process to bridge
the gap between short-term memory and long-term memory. While awake, our
experiential memories are saved into this temporary memory, rather than going
directly to the long-term memory. The temporary memory is itself divided into
two subsidiary systems: one for processing declarative (conscious) memories,
and the other for processing procedural (emotional and non-conscious) memories.
The function of sleep itself is to
facilitate the central executive (which continually mediates attention and the
regulatory systems) as it processes, encodes, transfers and merges appropriate
data from one or the other subsidiary temporary memory banks to long-term
memory, with each of the two discrete long term memory systems being updated
separately. Both subsidiary systems have to be continually activated, and in
sleep when the activation level of either subsidiary system drops to a given
threshold, a continual-activation mechanism is triggered to randomly retrieve
memory data from the memory stores to stimulate brain activation, lest that
part of the brain go dormant and die.
Dreaming is the result of the involvement of this
continual-activation data stream as it resets a subsidiary system while the
central executive is working on the other system. Corresponding to the type of
memory been transferred, sleep has two different stages: NREM (non rapid eye
movement) sleep for processing the declarative memory – which takes up 80% of
sleep time – and REM sleep (20%) for processing the procedural memory. Type I
dreams are thought-like dreams resulting from the memory replay when the
declarative information is transferred from its temporary memory to the
long-term memory by the central executive during NREM sleep. Type II dreams are
more intense (hence muscle paralysis to avoid ‘acting out’) and occur when
procedural updates are being transferred from the temporary memory to the
long-term memory during REM sleep.
A more comprehensive description and detailed
modeling of Zhang’s continual-activation theory is at http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2005/ZhangDreams.htm?&$NMW_TRANS$=ext
·
Charles McCreery, Dphil, Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, Magdalen College, Oxford,
in his 2008 paper, Dreams
and Psychosis: A New Look at an Old Hypothesis, indicated that – based on studies
involving EEG, GSR and eye movements – there are many similarities between
people who are dreaming and those who are prone to psychosis, in that both
involve episodes of hyper-arousal
reaching dysfunctional heights, wherein the following occurs:
o
A preoccupation with
internal rather than external events.
o
Loss of autonomy in
relation to mental content.
o
Flattened or inappropriate
affect.
o
Disorders of meaning.
o
Delusional beliefs.
o
Disorders of thought
and language.
o
Lack of insight
(excepting in the case of lucid dreams).
Sleep/ dreaming
processes are ‘nearer the surface’ in some, and therefore more liable to break
into consciousness under the trigger of extreme stress. We all have relative weaknesses in our inhibitory mechanisms,
and can only
absorb a finite amount of stress, stimulation and arousal when ‘awake’. Then we
have to ‘dream’, whether within the formal sleep context, or by way of
‘micro-sleep’ sessions occurring when we think we are awake. These latter episodes
occur in descending Stage 1 sleep
(hypnogogic), rather than Stage 5 REM, and in these periods – as in normal
dreaming –
we experience cathartic hallucinations and other forms of reality-distortion. We are all susceptible to these ‘micro-sleeps’ and
while we may strongly deny having slept, EEG ‘awake’ records show short,
unambiguous sleep patterns and slowing of the heart. Unknown to us, such
dreaming processes are close ‘beneath the surface’ of normal waking
consciousness. [recall the earlier P.D. Ouspensky quote]
Hidden schizophrenic
life goes on in the healthy, in their dreams and day-dreams, in mysticism, in
autistic, archaic and magical thinking, and in the creations of artists, etc.
The schizophrenic psychosis can neither be characterized by the final loss of
any function nor the production of any new morbid process, but rather by a
simple loss of equilibrium of two different – in themselves normal – ways of
living. One can appreciate that – because of our conflicting, contradictory
human wishes and human fears – there is a tendency to form fantastic inner
worlds. This form of mentation may be more or less hidden in the supposed
healthy and only occur in them during their times of sleep and ‘micro-sleep’.
Others who are in fact oscillating, even in daylight hours, between true waking
and the dreaming state, may be overwhelmed. (9)
·
Giulio Tononi, a neurobiologist
and professor
of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin is a recognized authority on
consciousness (his earlier theory of Consciousness as Integrated Information
has garnered huge interest) and sleep. By 2006-11 his studies on sleep and
dreaming led to the Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis (co-proposed with
sleep researcher Chiara Cirelli). This hypothesis posits that sleep need is
based on the build up of overall synaptic strength in the brain through daily
learning. This extra learning makes the brain more and more
expensive to maintain. Sleep prunes back the grey matter so that, come the
morning, the brain is once again economical to run. If this pruning cannot take
place, the brain organ becomes less and less efficient, and the pressure to
sleep builds up until it becomes irresistible.
Even
at rest, the brain is costly to run, consuming 20% of the body's energy
production. Most of this energy goes towards maintaining synapses, the
junctions across which impulses jump from nerve cell to nerve cell, keeping the
brain alert even when it is not doing anything. When a person learns something
new, certain synapses are strengthened relative to others. By the end of the day, if you have many synapses that
are much stronger, the cost of running the brain is much higher, perhaps
another 20%. In addition, making synapses stronger requires
more protein and fats and they take up more space. Given that an organism has
limited supplies of all of these things, something must happen to prevent the
cost of maintaining a brain from gradually spiralling out of control.
That
something, Dr Tononi indicates, is (NREM) or slow-wave sleep, which makes up
80% of sleep time. In a paper in Nature Neuroscience, Tononi’s team showed that rats had
stronger synapses after periods of wakefulness than after periods of sleep.
They measured the number of a certain type of neuroreceptor in the brain
synapses and found that there were 50 percent fewer in rats that had been
asleep. They also measured the electrical response across neurons in brains of live
rats and found that, after sleep, the response was weaker.
As Dr. Tononi says “The
results suggest that after sleep we get a leaner brain — there’s a gain in
terms of uncommitted energy, space and supplies, and you are ready to learn
anew… Synaptic pruning is the price we pay for plasticity.”
Dreaming itself appears to be our latent awareness
‘viewing’ the actual pruning process as memory patterns are evaluated for
salience and processed. (10)
[Compiler’s observations:
Picking up on an earlier Remedy essay that in part explored Dr. Tononi’s Hypothesis of
Consciousness as Integrated Information, during sleep we may be able to
side-step our normal-state inhibitors (cultural, social, innate resistance or
preferential), and allow the emergence from gestalt of a more functional
reality than that which we can embrace in our ‘normal’ state. Hence in a dream
we are sometimes able to scope the greater scene, and with such vivid clarity
that we may even be jolted awake. Then, for a few moments, we may sense the
real and necessary truth, prior to telling ourselves that “it can’t be” and …
thus reassured, we drift back into sleep. Yet the next day there may be a
residual ‘echo’ of the dream and we force recall of the dream sequence, and
ponder on it as perhaps something we should take into critical awareness.
Perhaps this self-questioning process can be increasingly adopted into one’s
normal routines, say via intentional dream recall, daydream or reverie, whereby
one can side-step ego-self and routinely capture the needed holistic
perspectives.
It should be recognized that functional consciousness can be
adversely affected either by impairment in integration (poor connectivity),
loss of – or inadequate – information, or too low an innate drive (curiosity)
to care enough to recall and massage the partially integrated bits into a whole
having an aggregate value greater than the bits. Also, consciousness is not an all-or-none
property, but it is graded: specifically, it increases in proportion to the
size of a system’s repertoire of discriminable states. The shrinking or dimming
of the field of consciousness during anesthesia is consistent with this idea,
and the abrupt loss of consciousness under sedation suggests that the
integrated repertoire of neural states underlying consciousness and memory may
be badly weakened or even collapse during the necessary sleeptime pruning
process revealed by Tononi.
The ‘dimming’ reference above reminds one of Vipasana, or Insight
Meditation, whereby relaxed posture + dampening of emotional overlay clarifies the
signal-to-noise ratio, resulting in a capability to better access levels
wherein meanings may emerge.]
Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and
look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and
plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had
seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable
factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot?
Schopenhauer also wrote that just as your dreams are composed of an
aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so too, your whole
life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have
met apparently by mere chance become leading agents in the structuring of your
life, so too will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to
the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with
everything unconsciously structuring everything else … one great dream of a
single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream too … Everything arises
in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything.
It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always
makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or
has lived the life that he quite intended.
(Joseph
Campbell)
Dreams appear to be both projections of the
personality and a reflection of the culture, and as one goes through the history of mankind’s
interest in dreams and observes the evolution of this interest through cultural
and psychological probes and on into the current time of instrumentally based
sleep-dream labs overseen by neuroscientists, a couple of things are sensed.
Firstly, that in each stage of mankind’s progressive flowering of
consciousness, a shift in the understanding of functional reality itself
emerged in the lives within societies. Over time, each evolving understanding
about the consciousness process was superceded by a more comprehensive
understanding, and then later that understanding evolved again, and
again. It is as though reality itself evolves. The ongoing intense
interest in the function and meaning of dreams is a major window through which
we can explore the workings on our brains and minds as they probe reality.
Secondly, we cannot see beyond the consensual reality stage of our present
time, yet through research into dreams, one can wonder about the next steps in
the evolving progression of mankind’s understanding.
Each
step in understanding comes through trial and uncertainty, and when we have
found what we think is an ‘answer’, it is very painful to have to set that
hard-won answer aside and accept its successor. To quote the UC Davis
consciousness researcher Charles Tart concerning reality perception:
The reality is that we open our eyes and look out and assume
there’s a real world out there. It’s a very handy working assumption. Some
stimuli hit our sense organs. Some neural impulses are produced, and we usually
assume they just give us a sparkling clear representation in our mind – that we
just see things as they are. But there are all sorts of abstractive,
constructive, additive processes that intervene with one’s realistic perception
of the world.
We’re
constantly filtering our experiences through an automated psychological
superstructure that distorts our perceptions of reality. Moving from the known
to the new is naturally fraught with anxiety, since there’s a misguided assumption
that normal life should be free of emotional pain and trauma.
Biologically reflexive responses to danger such as pain, fear and anxiety are
neither pleasant nor there to increase our happiness, but in order to test our
adaptability, increase our reproductive success and advance the awareness
potential of our successors. The force behind natural selection – in organic
terms or consciousness constructs – cares only about utilitarian
fitness, not creature comforts. It follows that dreams – insofar as they are
biological adaptations – care not about our comfort, nor about solving our
emotional problems nor increasing our happiness or psychological well-being.
Life cares about life, not the temporary disguises assumed along the way.
From
indigenous Dreamtime through psychological Jung and Ullman to current
instrumentally-enabled scientists, one senses the perennial deep striving to
know what IT is all about, since at some deep level we understand the intrinsic
seriousness behind the lila of life. In truth for the species itself
it’s a case of “take-a-body, experientially-travel-a-body, drop-a-body, and
retake-a-body” … life at all times is an ongoing field of wonderment, and life
flows through time via regenerational means, using processes of cognitive binding to
meld sense, memory and thought into a seamless sense of reality complete with a
personal “I” selfhood narrative for each creature … in a sense “I” will always be there in any future
‘now’, and eternally wondering about the meaning of the life process in each of
its forms. To understand that, it helps if one appreciates that an I is
not simply an entity but is a process that can know, and any
moment of time is just a particular flux of phenomena.
This world is a passing dream which
the sleeper is convinced is real … until unexpectedly the dawn of death frees
him from this fantasy. (Rumi)
Mankind
will always probably attempt to divine the marvelous process of life incarnate
through entering and exploring dreamtime. After all, dreams are a relatively
‘safe environment’ in which to examine deeply hidden feelings that – if
outwardly expressed – might jeopardize one’s niche in society, yet which
subjectively have to be privately acknowledged and integrated lest one lose
one’s faculty for discriminatory introspection altogether. The study of dreams
not only provides insights into the dream process itself, but also provides a
window into understanding how the inherited, evolving brain bio-computer guides
its host creatures in the present and prepares them for the future when they
find themselves there.
If
one were to look for a metaprogram as to what is going on and who-what is
behind it all running the show, one might wonder if reality itself is a gestalt
– an implicate cloud of unknowing – out of which – depending on the capacity of
our evolving minds at any time – we construe and integrate a reality
sufficiently functional to transport sentient life through the demands of that
temporal existence and – through reproductive posterity – prepare for its
succeeding iteration.
There is every reason, total
evidence, to suppose that we are in fact lived – entirely and absolutely
lived. Like all dreamed figures in every sort and degree of dream, there cannot
be any such factor as volition in the serial development of our lives. (Wei Wu Wei)
If
one were to meld the cultural message implicit in the Dreamtime lore, to the
soulwork of Hillman and Irion, and then blend in the neuroscientific findings
of Solms, Revonsuo and Tononi … and then pondered anon, one might
wonder if these bodies and minds that we think of as being so real in
themselves, are actually marvelous illusions projected from something itself really
real, elsewhere. And while only our imaginative faculty may be able to catch a
glimpse of the real Projector, it is comforting that we – the illusions – are
sufficiently valuable in our own right that Morpheus and the Watcher have been sent to attend us by night and
by day.
Ah
… but then one should tread carefully when pursing this line of thought, noting
a caution from the venerable Taoist whose conjecture about dreams and
butterflies led off this essay:
“To let understanding stop
at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.
Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe
of heaven”. (Chang Tzu)
(1) For several years Ouspensky understudied the
Armenian Master Teacher of Consciousness – Georges Gurdjieff. See our review of
Ouspensky’s book “In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of An Unknown Teaching” for
his findings from that period.
(2) Modern
Muslims use dreams to make major life decisions http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-09/du-mmu091410.php
(3) Ernest
Hartmann - The
Contemporary Theory of Dreaming 2006 to 2007 Powerpoint.ppt from http://web.me.com/ernesthartmann/ERNEST_HARTMANN_MD/HOME.html
(4) Science
of the Mind: Dream Theory http://introspectional.com/section2/page9.php
(5)
The Meaning of Dreams
by Jonathan Winson (Scientific American Inc 2002) http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/dreams.pdf
(6) Jaak
Panksepp interviewed An Evolutionary
Brain-Mind Development Perspective
(7) Revonsuo
- The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of
dreaming -
http://www.unil.ch/webdav/site/ln/shared/Revonsuo_1.pdf
(8)
Robert Stickgold -
Sleep: off-line memory
reprocessing
http://119.93.223.179/ScienceDirect/Cognitive%20Sciences/02-12/sdarticle_007.pdf
(9) For Dr. McCreery’s full
paper, see http://www.celiagreen.com/charlesmccreery/dreams-and-psychosis.pdf
(10) “Memory Formation: The Big Sleep” - Dr. Giulio Tononi - http://www.economist.com/node/7138780?story_id=7138780&fsrc=RSS
And http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEbyITI13zg
(Oct-2011
Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium -Youtube Video 19 min)
Posted April 11th, 2012
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