Dreaming of Science - Science of Dreaming
What is dreaming? What happens to our brain when we sleep?
In the beginning there were witches. Not so much as Disney witches, more classic ones, strange looking medieval women, grotesque and out of their mind. Later, there was airplanes. I saw them fall nearby, huge, defeated by the force of gravity. Everything had something to do with an impossible parallelism, unbelievable. With an nonexistent reality. Senseless scenarios, neither from the past or future. And, sometimes, harmless horrors.
As years passed by, everything turned out to become more "real". The episodes, even when fictitious and hypothetical, became plausible. Now Freddy has metamorphosed into an Ex; some planes fall, others crash... And that horror that haunts is called "end of the month". A collage of the real and possible. Embedded in the past, present and future. Every night, now, is more visceral and less naive, less imaginative.
Luckily, all were dreams. Lucky and sadly, because there were also nice dreams. Yet, very few times we are happy with the movie that is displayed in that trip we take, every time that our heads touch the pillow: we lose all jurisdiction; especially over everything that happens inside there. From time to time, ghosts that were hiding under the carpet raise and shake that dirt we thought gone, waking us up with a tachycardia back to the reality of our rooms. Agony, takes place for a moment, but we chose to submerge again into those oniric adventures every time; and enjoy them. With some luck, the next trip will treat us a bit better... And waking up will become a punishment instead of a relief.
Ha! Poetic weekend starting!
I just gave you a mumbo jumbo of random thoughts about one of the most random things we've: our mind resting. We spend one third of our lives sleeping and we've no idea of what happens during that time. We also don't have a solid idea of "the rest", but If I start talking about all that we do not know... You'd rather go to sleep to dream of witches and airplanes.
What is it?
Sleeping, along with eating, is one of the things we could not abstain to do since we'd die in a few days. We are talking about "resting" as the opposite state of being awake, not the "resting face" some women have.
Sleeping -as in snoring and drooling the pillow- is a very complex process that still possess some voids in the knowledge we have of it, but we know "some things". Thanks to techniques such as the electroencephalogram (EEG), that allows us to measure the electric activity in our brain, we know that sleeping is divided in two big stages, each one of them with its sub-stages, mess and pretty rough book's chapters each. The matter starts with a stage called light sleep, or "Non-REM". REM comes from "Rapid Eye Movement", this is, "VERY" fast ocular movements (something that you may have seen if you've siblings that you adored to annoy in the middle of the night), and that is precisely what does NOT happen in this 5 sub-stages stage. In this stage brain cortex activity diminishes, one may see at the EEG waves progressively more marked and slowing down... and we stop perceiving consciously the stimuli; until the alarm clock interrupts us, that is not very stimulating but is able to return us to an awaken state (or sort of... for a while), so that you may notice that it's Monday, and you've no coffee... Top that off, It'll rain all day long.
The second sleep stage is the famous "REM". Here is where we actually dream, the dreams: the dog with your aunt Mary's face, the park, Clinton and your 2nd grade teacher... all those things that would make Freud happy. Not for a random reason it is also called paradoxical sleep -that should actually be called "Ironic", but lets not go grammar Nazis about a topic as complicated as dreaming-. During this stage motor neurons are inactive -ideal adaptive advantage to not go to jail when you dream that you murder your noisy neighbor-, but brain activity increases nearly as much as if the brain was awake; we move our eyes under our eyelids "wanting" to see and there's plenty of activity at the visual cortex, in the back of the head. As a matter of fact, it seems like that's precisely the place dreams dwell at. People that suffered damage at that specific area lose their ability to dream. The crazy thing is that these people do not have any issue to actually sleep, this means that not all the REM is "Freudable". Anyways it is true that dreams are produced during the REM stage, that occupies 1/4th of the time we spend sleeping. It is totally understandable why, we we wake during this stage, we tend to remember what we were dreaming about. Every full no-REM to REM lasts around one hour and a half and we have around four to six cycles per night; except when you've a baby, those critters that work like a real life dreamcatchers.
Yeah, cool... That is dreaming. Now: what is it for?
The real function of this "sleeping" thing is not very well defined and is actually a pretty sadistic field of investigation. Thanks to the cruelty applied to the test subjects sometimes (animals and people) keeping them awake. Researches show that suffering from sleep disorders affects memory and learning capability, among other things. The impact lack of sleep has over mood is a nearly philanthropic experiment that almost everyone of us performs daily, of which the results are in plain sight.
Do they "mean" something?
We cannot leave aside that Freud, from time to time, released some outstanding and revolutionary works. He searched for a way to explain what does that recurrent dream you had meant. The one where your female boss stops you in your car and asks you for your driver's license and insurance paperwork, the Pokemon vaccination certificates and a braid of green hair in your head. All that; dressed as an astronaut, of course. Freud proposes that, somehow, our dreams reveal our desires and explains that there's a method to reach the "literal" dream -the real content, along with significance and interpretation. Anyways... Your boss dressed as an astronaut is weird, watch out with that.
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Outstanding post. Great pic too!
Agreed!
Dreams are so confusing, we may never know what they mean. It's pretty crazy because sometimes dreams can tell the future. At least a lot of my dreams do. I feel they have a lot of hidden meanings in them that we simply cannot understand. But of course, I believe that our own individual dreams have meaning hidden meanings for the individual.
I concur alongside your optimism and enthusiasm for the end-thought we call "dreams". Although, I would differentiate between your comment in two ways..
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Over a lot of dreams you constantly have, it is natural that you remember only the ones that by random chance: fit with reality. A process very similar to a "dejavu".
Take a rather large book of predictions, you will also find "matches". Of course, to qualify that as fortune-telling we would need to totally ignore an overwhelming amount of "misses".