The dreamworld and the deepness of sleep

“Man is a genius when he is dreaming.” — Akira Kurosawa, film director

'Dreaming provides a unique suite of benefits to all species fortunate enough to experience it, humans included. Among these gifts are a consoling neurochemical bath that mollifies painful memories and a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity.' - Mathew Walker, neuroscientist and author of 'Why We Sleep'

'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.' - Salvador Dali, artist

'It is a curious fact, of which the reason is not obvious, that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory' - Roman rhetorician Quintilian, AD 35–100

Sleep's power

Look at the numbers - we spend on average two hours a night dreaming and live on average 29,000 days. This means we dream on average 2417 days or over 6 and a half years of our lives!

That is considerable to say the least, and without doubt we experience a range of experiences far more variable and extreme than our day to day lives permit during those dreaming hours. Though differently, we feel in our dreams - we can be crying, flying, making love, playing, being shot, everything in our dreams.

The majority of our dreams and the most vivid occur during the REM stage of sleeping, and it is believed all mammals dream (in fact even that spiders dream). Sleeping is an ancient act, perhaps coming before animal life and certainly coming well before the dinosaurs. Worms can sleep, and they emerged during the Cambrian explosion: at least 500 million years ago, whilst it is believed REM sleep and dreams existed before mammals and birds even existed as REM states have been reputed to have been found in an ancient Australian lizard. Sleeping is so important that aquatic mammals such as dolphins and whales (cetaceans) who would otherwise drown, and birds that would otherwise be hunted, have learnt to sleep in one-half of their brains only and be awake via the other half.

The idea of ignoring dreams or relegating them as a worthless part of life can simply be said to be one of incredible naivety, as modern science and psychology back up our intuition that dreams play an important role in keeping us sane, mentally-well and creative. Are we genius when we dream - well look at science and brain-waves, then try to recreate a movie of such complexity as to resemble a dream in your head:

On the other side of the coin, there are those who play too much importance to dreams or who intend to over-control them. Whilst being attentive is one thing and recalling dreams fun or insightful, the fact is clear for anyone who has kept a dream journal that dreams are equally often totally out of place, ugly and nonsensical as they can be prescient, helpful and beautiful. The point being there are different qualities to different dreams, and a person who appears in a dream acting one way, out of it maybe totally the opposite or maybe totally as they were in the dream, or not.

Freud's theory of repression and wish-fulfillment as apparent causes of dream symbolism has been widely reognised as the effective. Dream analysis must be taken seriously, and especially when there is a wide gap between the conscious and the unconscious side of the dreamer. A lot of what we need, even if it's not what we necessarily think we want, is given in dreams, so our subconscious can get through to our conscious.

However, even though dreams are not always subtle, it is not always plainly obvious that dreams should be taken at face value. For instance, Jung another of the most influential psycho-annalists, interpreted a man’s dream of his wife being degenerate as a warning sign that his anima was off ( the female side of him) and he was behaving like degenerate female since Jung agreed with the ancients that every man 'carries Eve, his wife, hidden in his body.' Jung essential stated to the man don't take it literally, that it was his wife's fault but that the dream was 'merely an attempt to balance the lopsidedness of the conscious as he believed he was behaving perfectly gentlemanly.' What Jung was underlining was to take dreams seriously, but not literally - in fact he specifically told that they were mostly symbolic, centred on myths and legends, and releases of repressed feelings - neuroses, psychoses and uncomfortable truths; be they individual repressions or societal repressions.

It is my view dream--books and the internet aren't particularly useful for analysing dreams, better instincts and patience, but of course symbols coming from dreams have been shown to be important. For instance, teeth falling out is a common dream and associated with depression, as flying is associated with liberation. It is said sexual dreams can be about needing certain abilities possessed by the other person involved. It is no co-incidence that we share certain dream features, since we all are part of the cosmic consciousness. Such findings prove dreams have meaning. The meaning would get lost if we over-seek ways to control dreams, though lucid dreaming is a great way to understand the vividness and feel of dreams, and how dreams function, since otherwise - only when we wake do our dreams come across as strange, surreal experiences where time is stretched and physics no longer necessarily applies.

Salvador Dali was an artist whose work was centered on dreams, and the creative power of the dreamworld. He told how 'one day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams' and understood that dreams were far more interesting than what we consciously creatively construct through the TV. Dali exclaimed 'what is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.' Dreams, like reality, happens to us and feel entirely spontaneous - they are not invented nor manufactured but instead, are another layer to our world, beyond the material, physical reality we consciously live, though dreams encompass various physical aspects from our conscious reality.

Sleep is absolutely vital for our mental health, and the more we are developing, the more we need it (that why babies need it the most). Dissecting it, there are various stages to sleep, two REM stages and two NREM stages (which are far longer lasting than REM stages). The majority of your dreams take place during REM sleep, and each night a person may have several dreams, and even if not all or none are recalled a person will typically have three or four. When you are in the NREM sleep stage however, your brain is far from resting or any hibernation-like state. In fact neural scientists have shown that it is the brain's most impressively active time, where neural synchrony and collaboration is performed to its absolute greatest scale and effectiveness in the whole day, and a maximal cerebral unity is achieved. Deep sleep NREM brainwaves are generated exactly in the middle of your frontal lobes, perhaps an inch above a person's third eye area, and travel from the front of your brain to the back, emitting forward and dissipating in strength along the way.

The sleep cycle

Mathew Walker, neuroscientist and author of 'Why We Sleep', shows us that dreaming is only safe as when we sleep our thalamus, which is our sensory gate, 'blocks the transfer of perceptual signals (sound, sight, touch, etc.) up to the top of the brain, or the cortex... severing perceptual ties with the outside world' allowing us to lose track of time in dreams and essential lose total conscious in NREM deep sleep; and preventing us from acting out our dreams physically in REM by eliminating muscle activity even though there are during REM a 'nonstop barrage of motor commands swirling around the brain'. Walker writes 'it is not sensations from the outside that are allowed to journey to the cortex during REM sleep. Rather, signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are all played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices in the brain.' Unlike in the NREM deep sleep state, REM sleep brain activity is almost exactly the same as that of the wide awake state. Thus once you have flowed from an NREM to REM at any of the various cycle points in sleep 'the many thousands of brain cells in your cortex that had previously unified in a slow, synchronized chat during deep NREM sleep have returned to frantically processing different informational pieces at different speeds and times in different brain regions—typical of wakefulness.'

However, what is the principle purpose of these different stages. Walker writes that 'deep NREM slow-wave sleep donates a state of inward reflection—one that fosters information transfer and the distillation of memories' whilst ''REM sleep exquisitely recalibrates and fine-tunes the emotional circuits of the human brain... (It) increases our ability to recognize and therefore successfully navigate the kaleidoscope of socioemotional signals that are abundant in human culture, such as overt and covert facial expressions, major and minor bodily gestures, and even mass group behavior.' Walker stresses the importance of REM sleep in regulating emotions, so that we can enjoy richer, more complex emotions and socially connect with others, writing 'we humans can instantiate vast numbers of emotions in our embodied brains, and thereafter, deeply experience and even regulate those emotions. Moreover, we can recognize and help shape the emotions of others.' The two states work together in perfection - 'NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information.' All this explains why thinking about puzzles before you sleep is a proven effective and reliable ways to solve them. Mendeleev, from dreams, drew up the periodic table. In his own words he said 'I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.'

It is interesting that infants sleep very differently to adults: not only do they sleep far more - a six-month year old has 14 hours a day of sleep on average( twice the amount of many adults) but also their sleep is split 50/50 between NREM and REM sleep. That balance progressively changes into more NREM sleep at the expense of less REM as we grow order, till it reaches an 80/20 NREM/REM split when we are roughly around the late teen years, a ratio that stabilises throughout early and mid-adulthood. One of the reasons NREM sleep becomes so important in teenage years is that teenagers are less rational (higher risk takers and poorer decision makers) than adults who's brain has been refined by the powers of deedp sleep. First, parts of the brain relating to visual and spatial perception is most refined by NREM sleep, and last the tip of the tip of the frontal lobe related to rational thinking and critical decision-making is refined by NREM sleep. Finally, older adults and the elderly are most at vulnerable to lack of sleep despite still needing it - it becomes harder to get and the quality is much lower. Walker writes 'passing into your mid- and late forties, age will have stripped you of 60 to 70 percent of the deep sleep you were enjoying as a young teenager. By the time you reach seventy years old, you will have lost 80 to 90 percent of your youthful deep sleep' all as a result of the fact that 'the areas of the brain that suffer the most dramatic deterioration with aging are, unfortunately, the very same deep-sleep-generating regions'.

The need for sleep therapy

A struggle to obtain sufficient good quality sleep leads directly to memory and mental health problems, and now as countries face aging population issues, the need for sleep therapy is one of the number one necessities to improve mental health, particularly for the elderly. Walker emphasises sleeps amazing role on memory as above all discerning, writing 'sleep does not offer a general, nonspecific (and hence verbose) preservation of all the information you learn during the day. Instead, sleep is able to offer a far more discerning hand in memory improvement: one that preferentially picks and chooses what information is, and is not, ultimately strengthened.' Sleeping pills must never be confused with sleep therapy, as Walker explains - it has been shown by some researchers that sleeping pills 'caused a 50 percent weakening (unwiring) of the brain-cell connections originally formed during learning', in other words - caused memory loss instead of memory gain. Not only are they addictive, a study of 30,000 people (10,000 taking sleeping pills) by Dr. Daniel Kripke, who was a physician at the University of California, San Diego found that taking sleeping pills contributed to multiple problems that could even cause death (those taking sleeping pills were nearly five times more likely to die over a period as short as two-and-a-half years compared to those who didn't). Scarily 'even very occasional users—those defined as taking just eighteen pills per year—were still 3.6 times more likely to die at some point across the assessment window than non-users.' Naturally, pharmaceutical companies are very quiet about such findings shown in the graph below, as they make billions off sleeping pills.

One very clear improvement that can be made to improve sleep are siestas. Popular in the Mediterranean and among tribes, Walker writes that 'there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence' that 'Ala humans, irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired dip in alertness that occurs in the mid-afternoon hours' and that therefore we most naturally require siestas. In the past, people used to sleep in biphasic patterns not monosphasic patterns, that is with siestas, and they were wiser and healthier than us sleep-wise. When taking a siesta it's worth making it count a full sleep cycle of at least two hours.

References

(1) - Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, Mathew Walker, 2017.