Dreams: The Process

Let me now elaborate on the concluding comment of the last post and say something about the process of dreaming itself. Let’s suppose that dreaming is mostly caused by spontaneous brain activity—and see how that supports or illuminates our categories. I envision the following process: As we fall asleep, the stream of consciousness ceases; the higher brain banks down its functioning; dreamless sleep ensues. At regular intervals throughout the night, however, the higher brain stirs into life. The stream of thought resumes. With little or no sensory stimulus to work on, the brain begins presenting data from memory; it probably left some kind of marker before shut down and starts at the same point where it stopped. The new stream is the dream itself. Clinical studies support this view because we know that at recurring intervals the body exhibits rapid eye movements (REMs). When people are roused from REM sleep, they report dreams; awakened at other times they mostly don’t. Each dream is the dynamic representation of a thought, thus as a moving scene. Discontinuities in dreams are therefore most likely due to the sequences of thoughts. One dream content suggests a new thought. The brain obligingly fetches and displays the association appropriate to the stimulus; the new presentation becomes a new dream sequence. Eventually the dream stops as the brain’s activity once more lapses into dormancy.

Now one of the oddest characteristics of a dream, in my opinion, is the nature of our consciousness—much odder, in a way, than the occasionally weird content. We seem to be conscious but yet not really. We have memories, but they’re dream memories, not our real ones. Otherwise we’d know that we’re in bed asleep. We have intellectual powers of sorts, but they are weak. We accept weird phenomena without a “Whoa! Hold it!” We don’t question violations of natural law such as instant transfers from one location to another. Indeed, when we do begin to question what we see, we rapidly awaken. The self-feeling is present, but it is incomplete. There is a kind of understanding, but it’s a long ways from genuine grasp. My conclusion is that thinking, feeling, remembering, and willing are present—but really only as memories of these. Real mind is absent. When it returns we are awake.

The very absence of mind in dreaming also explains why, in dreams, emotions run high. Understanding is weak and emotional reactions, therefore, unfold without constraint.

The only difference between idle daydreams and sleep dreams, it seems to me, is that in the former the mind is present—but inattentive. At no point, therefore, are we convinced that we’ve really won the lottery, really wrested control of the company from those swine, or that Jane Sexy is really about to yield. We know that we are dreaming. In daydreams the stories we weave also tend to get a bit of an assist from the presence of mind; they’re better stories; and random distractions, so common in sleep-dreams, are absent.

It may seem improbable that a single thought could produce such an elaborate drama as a dream sequence presents. Here I would suggests that we have a poor grasp of the complexity of reality. To give an example. I just now heard Sparky barking next door. One thought. There he goes again. But sitting here, my attention is on this writing. Sparky and his barking are reduced to a single concept. But if my attention weren’t focused, that single riff of barking would produce a world of memories—of our neighbors, of our discussions with them of the barking, of the fact that Sparky only has three legs, of our own dog, Winston, who was a yellow lab (Sparky is dark brown), of banking, because our neighbors is a banker, of China, because the lady of the house is Taiwanese—and so on it goes. In the dream a single thought contains all of these things simultaneous, presented in full flowering without the harsh reducing functions of conceptualization and attention. Take any thought and examine what all it actually contains if, for the moment, we remove the focusing power of the mind as the chooser of those aspect of it that we wish to attend to. Here I refer back to my comments about William James’ view of the importance of attention. In the dream, furthermore, the brain presents the content of the thought in symbolic language. It must translate abstract concepts into images. How would you present a mortgage-based default swap in pictures? The brain does a fabulous job. Teasing out the meaning is the problem.

This view of dreams works well for explaining two categories, those that I call morning and deep dreams. I’ll discuss the other types later. But I note here that the absence of the real mind in dreams is a significant fact.

Another point is worth emphasizing in conclusion. It is that a great deal of mental activity usually associated with the mind itself may indeed be taking place in tissue linked in some ways to memory. Thus the naturalistic view of mind is in part correct. But adult functioning in the real world seems to require that something extra that only the mind itself supplies. Without it we’re just dreaming.