Perplexing, vivid dreams are a constant in my life. Most are discarded, but some remain with me to this day. The earliest one I can recall is when I was eight years old.
I was playing next to a river with a pink and a purple ball. The balls started to drift away from the shore. I walked to grab them when, all of a sudden, I was sucked down into a cavernous and rocky world. A couple seconds later, I shot out of the water like a rocket before landing back in the river. This cycle repeated two more times, with each cycle bringing me deeper under the water and the balls closer to the opposite side of the river. The dream ended with me being shot out of the water, only this time I wake up on the top bunk.
My Fascination with Dreams
Bizarre, right? That series of events makes no sense, or does it? As I sit here writing, I realize this fascination with dreams is probably why my favorite movie is Inception and my favorite TV Series is Westworld. Both these shows are heavily influenced by the nature of dreams.
In Inception, the protagonists use a variety of fictional techniques to implant ideas into people’s psyches. Westworld is less pragmatic with the show centered around the sinister intentions of an adult “dream park”. In both, the ability to differentiate between dream and reality is used as a test.
Is there more to Dreams?
I started journaling my dreams a couple years ago; and by journaling, I mean waking up and brain dumping everything I can remember onto a note in my phone. At that stage in life, it was purely for curiosity. Lately though, I’ve been wondering if there is something more to this misunderstood, seemingly random process. Furthermore, I’m wondering if there is a way to influence this process to achieve a productive outcome.
The next few pieces will attempt to answer this question – can we leverage our dreams to accelerate the journey of being more? This week, we’ll set the foundation by looking at the biological mechanisms behind dreams.
The Process of Dreaming
When you first fall asleep, you are in the slow wave sleep phase. During this phase, the neurotransmitters dealing with memory and attention, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, respectively, are at extremely low levels and serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for regulating overall mood and sleep, is at high levels. This stage of the sleep cycle is where learning related to fine details and motor functioning occurs.
The Brain While We Dream
Dreaming primarily takes place during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of the sleep cycle and has the aforementioned neurotransmitters in opposite concentration levels: high levels of acetylcholine, low levels of norepinephrine and serotonin. Acetylcholine, as previously stated, is the neurotransmitter responsible for memory and learning.
When you are sleeping, your brain slows down its intake of sensory information and its primary function transitions from intake to interpretation and synthesis of that information. Furthermore, the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for logic and planning, shuts down. That is why in particularly perplexing dreams, like my river dream, it seems like you are defying the laws of physics.
The absence of norepinephrine also plays a critical role in the dreaming process. Norepinephrine is not only responsible for attention, but also for assigning emotional value. Its absence during slow wave and REM sleep means we are able to agnostically observe our dreams.
However, it is not completely absent, which is why in rare instances people have incredibly powerful dreams if an emotional connection can be made to an existing memory. One such dream led Carl Jung to break away from Sigmund Freud on the subject of dream interpretation. We will examine this break further in the next piece.
Why the Brain Needs to Dream
In short, sleep is the brains’ time to filter, synthesize, and assign meaning to all information it has taken in. But why does it need to create dreams to work through this process? Are these images its way of showing its work? Again, in short, yes.
Our brains do not shut off while we sleep. In fact, parts of it go into overdrive. The Thalamus is one of these parts. Located in the mid-brain area, the Thalamus is your brain’s information processing center. It is where all internal and external inputs go to be analyzed before moving through other areas of the brain. Absent of new input, it begins to project previous inputs to other areas during REM sleep. These projections are our dreams.
So then, it stands to reason our dreams do have some meaning given they are rooted in real information. They are confusing, but they are not random. All of them contain stories and symbols of significance. But why do some seem realistic and some seem impossible? That is where we begin our next conversation with our two favorite psychoanalysts – Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Be More.
Become Polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “The dream does never trouble itself about things which are not deserving of our concern during the day, and trivialities which do not trouble us during the day have no power to pursue us whilst asleep.” – Sigmund Freud