The Function of Dream

Patients deprived of rem sleep through disruption of the sleep cycle at the end of every deep sleep stage (just before rem sleep), began to dream during the day. They reported seeing images coming between them and the scene in front at times, sort of like hallucination. Since basically nearly all humans (even animals) dream, and rem-deprived individuals exhibit some sort of desperation to seek compensation for dream-loss, it seems logical to assume that dreaming has certain biological functions.

Professor Rosalind Cartwright posited that dreams ‘keep us safely sane, by allowing us to be crazy at night.’ Dreaming is seen as a way and an opportunity for our mind to come to terms with unresolved feelings and emotions during the day, by tapping on memory and similar experiences from the past. Tough problems that can’t be resolved return eventually as recurring nightmares. Coming from this point of view, by looking at the details of our dreams, we can possibly find out unknown facts such as our deepest fears and find means to counter them. 

Similarly, Sigmund Freud believed that dreams are infused with tons of symbols that could tell much about the psyche of an individual, though mostly sexual. And by reading these symbols analysing them and the connections with each other and the dreamer (psychoanalysis) the psychologist could find solutions to reduce trauma or cure the problem. 

Many ancient cultures believe on the other hand that dreams have prophetic powers. In Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria and Egypt, the dream is of heavenly origin considered ‘messengers of the gods’. The shift from the mythical-religious to scientific approach began in Ancient Greece when priests interpreted the dreams of sick men in temples, and through a mixture religious rituals and patients’ feedback, prescribed medication to them. Pythagoras believed that nightmares are caused by bad food. Many familiar symbols included animals and as with most cultures, birds represented freedom, the yearning for freedom etc. According to some, the dreams play out the exact opposite of reality and so a bad dream indicates the onset of something good.

Prophetic dreams are later given scientific and medical interpretations as the mind’s first detection of changes in the body that had yet to be resolved. For instance the dream of a dead baby being put into the freezer had been a ‘prophetic’ dream of a mother with a stillborn child. For me, this seems like a more convincing way to look at the prophetic function of dreams. I can’t believe that they occur on random. to me, it’s more like we have yet to rationalize the mystery of dreams (whether on a scientific level or personal).

Urban Myth

i was thinking about the way we record dreams, essentially based on our waking memories of these dreams, can’t always or entirely be truthful. i learnt that as our mind wakes up, the chemical composition in the brain changes quickly, thereby causing our memory of the dream to slip quickly away. if one is to wake up in the nrem stages, it’ll be less likely to remember the dream. doctor emmanuel mignot pointed out that the biggest difference between the state of rem sleep and wakefulness lies in our memory during these periods. hence more often than not, our memory of dreams includes some imaginary input on our part. the idea of trying to capture and memorialize the fleeting and intangible through a mixture of memory and fantasy seems in some ways similar to urban myths, based on ancient beliefs and personal experiences. for someone who hardly dreams or remembers her dreams, this is somewhat intriguing.

progress…

… i know i know i haven’t been very diligent lately. the translation of all this research for my hypothetical audience 1000 years away from now is seriously cracking my brain. really, i’ve been thinking and researching it just didn’t feel right about posting things before i sort of processed them in my head. still in the process.. 

watch these from discovery science, on the process of sleep, function of dreams, dream prophecies, sleep disorder etc. (in order of parts 1 to 5)

quote | on dream:

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”

– Dr William C Dement, The World: Medicine: Psychiatry & Psychology

 

surprisingly poetic for it’s scientific origin. i simply love the phrase ‘safely insane’.

quote | on sleep:

To die, to sleep—

No more, and by a sleep to say we end 

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause.

~ William Shakespeare; Hamlet, act 3, scene 1, l. 62-70

The Cell

One of my favourite thrillers of all time.

The Cell DVD cover

The Cell original poster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cell is a 2000 psychological thriller film written by Mark Protosevich, directed by Tarsem Singh and starring Jennifer Lopez. Catharine Deane is a psychotherapist, part of a revolutionary new treatment which allows the therapist to literally enter the mind of her patients. Her experience in this method takes an unexpected turn when an FBI agent seeks help to find the last abducted woman by a notorious serial killer, Carl Stargher before he fell into an irreversible coma.

The film provides a fascinating take on the unknown territories within the twisted mind of the killer – a visualisation of dreams, memories and desires that goes on in the brain. I was swept off my feet. The idea that past experiences could have a big impact on future psychological development and tendencies of an individual has always fascinated me. The mind as a cell.. and the surrreal stage  of Dream set by Tarsem as the integration of both memory and desire, past and future, is simply breath-taking.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

El sueno de la razon produce monstruos by Goya.

Probably a 18th century attempt to explain the reason for nightmares or dreams, or so i thought. Sleep is portrayed as the loss of reason or logic, frightening and unknown. 

Why do we dream?

Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. 

There are many hypotheses about the function of dreams, including:

• During the night there may be many external stimuli bombarding the senses, but the mind interprets the stimulus and makes it a part of a dream in order to ensure continued sleep. The mind will, however, awaken an individual if they are in danger or if trained to respond to certain sounds, such as a baby crying.
• Dreams allow the repressed parts of the mind to be satisfied through while keeping the conscious mind from thoughts that would suddenly cause one to awaken from shock.
• Freud suggested that bad dreams let the brain learn to gain control over emotions resulting from distressing experiences.
• Jung suggested that dreams may compensate for one-sided attitudes held in waking consciousness.
• Dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are off-line, removing parasitic nodes and other “junk” from the mind during sleep.
• Dreams create new ideas through the generation of random thought mutations. Some of these may be rejected by the mind as useless, while others may be seen as valuable and retained. Blechner calls this the theory of “Oneiric Darwinism.”
• Dreams regulate mood.
• Hartmann says dreams may function like psychotherapy, by “making connections in a safe place” and allowing the dreamer to integrate thoughts that may be dissociated during waking life.
• More recent research by Griffin has led to the formulation of the ‘expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming’, which suggests that dreaming metaphorically completes patterns of emotional expectation and lowers stress levels.
• Ernest Hoffman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., suggests that “…a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events.”

:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream

http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/p/dream-theories.htm

Slumber System

Before the turn of the century, it was assumed that the natural state of the brain was awake, and that sleep represented a state of generalized decreased brain activity. In recent years however studies showed that injuries to certain parts of the brain could result in a sleep-like state, known as coma. This led scientists to speculate that the brain might not be so much “naturally” awake as kept awake by some distinct mechanism, probably in the brainstem. Scientists uncovered a system of pathways within the brain, arising from the brainstem, that stimulate the forebrain and cause it to remain awake. These “wakefulness” pathways consist of nerve cells that communicate using as neurotransmitters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Humans generally take about 90 minutes to complete a full cycle of REM and non-REM sleep. As dawn approaches, however, we spend more and more of that time in REM sleep and less in non-REM sleep. Above are EEGs (electroencephalograms – recording of the waves of electrical activity in the brain) showing brain activity at different stages of wakefulness. In the delta sleep stage (stage 4 of NREM), low frequency delta waves are produced. Children are champion slow-wave sleepers, which is why they sleep so soundly when being carried from the car to bed. Adults, on the other hand, get less and less slow-wave sleep as they age, which may be one of the reasons they wake up more often in the night. This is the stage in which night terrors, bedwetting, sleepwalkingand sleep-talking occur.

During REM sleep, most brain cells behave as active as when it is awake. The hypothesis that sleep provides a chance for the mind to restore itself then seems contradictory. Yet interestingly, it was discovered that the release of some neurotransmitters ceases during REM sleep, which disables body movement and reduces awareness to the environment – the body enters a state of near paralysis. The activity of the brain in this stage suggest the workings of the mind which lead to the studies on dreaming.

:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1006591-1,00.html

http://www.med.harvard.edu/publications/On_The_Brain/Volume05/Number3/Sleep.html

Jerome M. Siegel, Why We Sleep – the reasons that we sleep are gradually becoming less enigmatic

Thomas Edison claimed it was waste of time.

We spend a third of our lives doing it. Napoleon, Florence Nightingale and Margaret Thatcher got by on four hours a night. Thomas Edison claimed it was waste of time. If one can get by without the desire to sleep, one could watch latenight movies everyday like mad; stargaze all the time; always churn out last minute presentation overnight AND stay awake during the presentation itself etc. The amount of energy saved by sleeping for eight hours is miniscule – about 50 kCal, equivalent to a piece of toast. Now it does sound like a waste to fall asleep. So why do we sleep?

No one really knows why. What we do know is the effect of the lack of sleep. For all those who have pulled an all-nighter before, you would have noticed these common aftereffects of sleep deprivation: grumpiness, grogginess, irritability and forgetfulness. Concentration will be impaired and attention span shortened. According to studies, after staying up for about 18 hours, most people will start to experience bouts of microsleep — moments when you zone out momentarily. Reaction time slows down to that equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.05% (two glasses of wine). This is the legal drink driving limit in the UK. Your eyelids start to droop more severely, and by the 20-hour mark you begin to nod off. In short, sustained lack of sleep has serious impact on the emotional and physical health. 

Researchers have yet to find any vital biological function that sleep restores. As far as anyone can tell, muscles don’t need sleep, just regular periods of relaxation. Sleep or no sleep, the rest of the body chugs along as usual. It then seems to me that the function of sleep, if does not directly concern the physical body, could have something to do with the mind. Now I’m really excited about this project. 

:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1006591,00.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/articles/whatissleep.shtml