Dreams Actually Virtual Reality Threat Simulation?

Time Slows Down writes "Psychology Today has an interesting story on a new theory of why we dream. Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo believes that dreams are a sort of nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios simulating emergency situations and providing an arena for safe training. 'The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations,' he says. We have 300 to 1,000 threat dreams per year — one to four per night and just under half are aggressive encounters: physical aggression such as fistfights, and nonphysical aggression such as verbal arguments. Faced with actual life-or-death situations — traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, street assaults — people report entering a mode of calm, rapid response, reacting automatically, almost without thinking. Afterward, they often say the episode felt unreal, as if it were all a dream. 'Dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to the threatening cues in our environment,' Revonsuo says. 'Their function is to protect and prepare us.'"

Comments

That explains it

[MrHanky]

All those dreams I had of being chased and then not being able to run, losing all the power of my usually very strong and quick legs. It's all there to prepare me for giving up in case a real situation should arise. Thank you, science of psychology.

Re:That explains it

[provigilman]

Or perhaps because you feel that your legs are strong and quick, your brain is trying to trying to train you on what you could do if you couldn't use your legs. What if you twisted your ankle while running? Then you might have to turn and face your attacker, rather than that running.

That's what the TFA was getting at. It's not so much that your brain is like "This is the most likely scenario", but rather that it's decided that this is a "feasible" scenario that you should be prepared for.

Interesting

[jellomizer]

It makes since, and could explain other things as well. Such as why adults are more apt to not have as many horrible nightmares. They still have the negative situations but they seem to handle the situations better, so they are less scary after a while because they know what to do. Evolutionary reason for dreaming, it seems like a silly thing to evolve a period of a beings life where they body goes into paralysis just so they don't kill themselves from acting lucid imagery, the fact the dreams gave us a survival advantage would explain the tradeoff of the paralysis during the night.
This seems a good theory. It should be investaged further.

Re:Interesting

[steelfood]

To say that dreams are a virtual reality, or a simulation of reality within our minds, is a good way of describing dreams.

To attribute a reason to this phenomenon based on shaky, selective anecdotal evidence sounds suspiciously like supersitition.

I've had such dreams before. I've had dreams of fighting, of killing, of being in mortal danger, and of being wounded. Sometimes, I wake up before the action begins, sometimes in the middle just as things are about to get good, sometimes I can force myself to continue dreaming, to see how far I can go before I wake up. I've had dreams where I died. The one time I forced myself to continue dreaming after I had died in it, my heart rate slowed significantly and my breathing stopped. I probably would have died if I hadn't woken myself up (think Matrix--if the brain thinks you're dead, you're dead).

I've had far more dreams where I've relived recent past events, though slightly distorted by the dream environment. And dreams that feature some type of violence in them usually reflect something I saw or read about the day before, or occasionally, something I did, but with a violent twist, perhaps a possible scenario that I was considering during the event.

And every so often, I have dreams that have nothing to do with anything recent, or anything significant. However, the dream would remind me of something that happened a long time ago that I didn't consciously remember before.

We don't know why dreams happen. There might not even be a "why." Let's not start making up shit like this just because we want dreaming to have some special meaning. Quite frankly, I'm more inclined to think that dreams are linked with memory. But that's based on my observation of all my dreams, not just the exciting ones.

Re:Interesting

[hkmarks]

I was watching this incredibly repetitive documentary the other day called "Mammals vs. Dinos," or possibly "vs. Dinosaurs." They suggested that earlier dinosaurs were a) cold-blooded and b) couldn't see in the dark, so they went dormant at night. Early mammals were small and delicious, so they had to hunt at night. To do that, they evolved really good hearing, and some eventually developed good night vision.

Most birds (or maybe just songbirds, I forget) can't see in the dark even now; they have cones but not rods (or, you know, whatever the bird equivalent is. IANA biologist).

I'm kind of surprised at this article, because I'd suspected that for some time. The "random firing of neurons" theory seemed pretty silly, prima facie.

Sweet Dreams are Made of This

[CristalShandaLear]

The other night, I dreamed that I misjudged a car exit and drove through a rail, over an embankment and into a river. As the river got closer, the water turned the color and consistency of Google Earth water when you get too close and just as I submerged, my car bounced back out again and onto the road (just like Neo in the jump program). I was soaking wet, but otherwise unharmed. I don't think my brain was trying to prepare me for this type of emergency. I think it's more likely that I've seen the Matrix one time too many, that I just started a new gig where part of my job is to find aerial views of properties on Google Earth and that I'm from Ohio where 6 people from my home state died in an accident where a bus went over an overpass? And I kept watching Bourne 2 before Bourne 3 came out, a movie where a car dives into water. I think dreams are made of the total of our experiences. Our "weirder" dreams are our experiences combined with our imagination's flights of fancy, our experiences and our more subtle observations - things that may not register when we see them, but are still lodged in our memories - like people only remembering a license plate number through hypnosis.

Re:umm..

[Matteo522]

"Neurons that fire together, wire together."

Whether or not you remember them, the dreams still caused a physical reaction in your brain. So if you spent your night dreaming about Guitar Hero, whether or not you remember the dream, you'll find yourself playing better the next day because you still practiced it by playing through the simulation in your head all night. Your brain believed it had a real experience because it sent the real signals to the various parts of your brain/body (the brain stem blocked any motor signals, but the brain itself doesn't know that). This is all true even if your short-term memory cannot recall it.

This article is pretty timely for me, as I've been reading Head Trip by Jeff Warren over break. It provides a very interesting take on the various states of consciousness, with an early emphasis on the different kinds of dreaming states we have. I highly recommend it for anybody who's interested in the topic.

Re:Yeah

[pixelpusher220]

The funny part is some of us *don't* dream. Seriously.

I know that I pretty much stopped dreaming about the time I hit puberty. Vivid dreams as a kid but once I 'grew up' they stopped.

How do I know this you ask? Because during a sleep test for sleep apnea they found out my blood oxygen saturation level was about 80%, below the threshold needed for REM sleep. So from about 12-14 to 26, I couldn't dream. Just not enough oxygen to do it.

There were the occasional odd dreams when a sleeping position allowed better than normal oxygen levels, but mostly I just didn't.

Even today, after the surgery, my dreams are wildly mild stuff. Mostly just replaying some experience of the recent days.

It did sort of explain why HS was mostly just a fog for me though...going without restful sleep for multiple years will do that ;-)

Nonsense!

[eno2001]

The aborigines of Australia have got it right. Dreams are reality. Just in a different universe. Once I got that straight, it really explained why all of my dreams are so whacked and have nothing to do with real life. When you dream, you're experiencing life in a different parallel world. Simple as that. (cough)

Modern dreams?

[twifosp]

Interesting concept, but wouldn't modern dreams have adapted to modern problems by now? I also thought (perhaps incorrectly) that the flight or fight response was mostly subconscious. So would "dream training" even help you in those situations?

I would personally think dreams are more hormonal than that. A while back I began taking a vitamin supplement of zinc and magnesium (ZMA). A side effect of this vitamin combo is vivid dreaming. You notice right away that your dreams are more lucid, and you remember more of them. Right away I noticed that my dreams were very violent or sexually oriented. Now this vitamin supplement increases testosterone production as well (when combined with exercise). So I'm not quite sure if my violent/sexual dreams increased as a result of testosterone production, or that I was already having these dreams, and my memory/frequency of them was improved. I happen to think it is the latter because you notice the dreams on the first night of taking the vitamins.

Either way, my dreams include fights, wars, sexual encounters, robberies, and all sorts of crazy behavior that just simply doesn't apply to my life. If dreams were a virtual reality training program, I wonder why they haven't adapted to train me for my real world problems that need solving. Not robbing a bank Heat style (a rather lucid dream I had the other night).

I suppose the socially embarrassing dreams such as arriving to work naked might be a counter-point, but I just don't buy it.

On that related note if anyone is interested in lucid dreaming, I highly recommend it. Google around for some quick guides. It's not very hard and requires very small amounts of simple self-hypnosis to start. Simply thinking of the question during your waking hours over and over again "Am I awake or am I dreaming" was enough for me to start asking myself that question while I was dreaming after a week. Once this question appears in your dreams and you recognize it enough to answer "dreaming", you can have lots of fun with lucid dreaming.

I highly recommend the vitamin ZMA (Zinc Magnesium Aspartame) combined with valerian root* 30 minutes before bed. Also keep a dream log for maximum enjoyment. Lucid dreaming can be a lot of fun. Trying to get to know your own subconscious is a real challenge and it never gets boring.

*Valerian root has very very pungent odor that can make your breath smell for hours after you take it. It sits in your stomach and seems to work its way up, no matter how clean your mouth is. It also has the reverse effect of pineapple juice, if you catch my drift. Thankfully ZMA on it's own is enough to enhance your dreams. Valerian root does provide that extra kick, so it's good to try now and again. Just do your SO a break and only use it sparingly.

Unfalsifiable

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Read the part of the article starting:

But not all our dreams contain threats. That's not surprising, says Revonuso. There's no reason a biological system has to express its function at all times...

It's a clever move. It makes the theory immune to falsification. Of course that also makes this theory pseudo-science, but you hope people won't notice that. In fact the analogy with sperm is flawed. The fact that there are many sperm that fail to fertilize an egg does stand in need of explanation. See Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen" for some discussion of this. Similarly non-threat dreams stand in need of explanation.

Personal experience...

[Phanatic1a]

One fairly common dream that people in the self-defense community have is the one where you come under sudden attack and your gun malfunctions, or is out of ammunition, or for whatever reason you can't fire it at your dream-attacker.

I didn't have this dream *until* I started training with a handgun for self-defense purposes. I grew up hunting, with rifles and shotguns, and didn't have this dream. Not until I incorporated the self-defense aspects into my identity. Then my brain started to throw that dream at me.

So, yeah, I can buy this idea.

no wonder psychologists don't get respect

[Quadraginta]

And that is what passes for proof of a theory? No wonder psychology is the poor stepchild of the true sciences. I mean, I can think of about three other explanations off the top of my head that also explain why the mouse was less aware of danger after being prevented from REM sleep, viz.:

(1) It was bloody tired after being woken up all the time the night before.

(2) REM sleep is just a way for the short-term memory banks to do a dump and clean out all the crap that's accumulated during the day, useless sensory data. Since the poor mouse was prevented from doing the reformat on /dev/swap, it didn't work so well the next day, and the mouse's short-term sensory memory of what was in its environment was degraded. You might as well have given it a few hard knocks on the head.

(3) REM sleep is just a weird, accidental by-product of some necessary biochemical house-cleaning that goes on at night. Some metabolic side-product chemical gets produced, and it jiggles the imagination handle randomly in the brain while we're asleep. The resulting images don't mean a damn thing, any more than the flashes in the eye when you rub your tired eyes. But because the mouse was prevented from doing the biochemical house-cleaning, whatever it is, he didn't function as well the next day. That is, the mouse's poor performance had nothing to do with the prevention of its dreams, but rather with the prevention of whatever else was going on that independently caused the dreams.

None of these theories is disproved by the data you mention, so they're just as good as the psychology professor's theory.

One of the unfortunate ways in which even quite educated people misunderstand empirical science is that they don't fully appreciate that finding an explanation for the data isn't at all the same as finding the explanation. There are usually bazillions of theories that match the data: the trick is designing an experiment that, along with common sense and experience, can rule all but one of them out. This experiment with the mouse certainly doesn't qualify.

Overbearing

[Fantastic Lad]

Evolutionary reason for dreaming, it seems like a silly thing to evolve a period of a beings life where they body goes into paralysis just so they don't kill themselves from acting lucid imagery, the fact the dreams gave us a survival advantage would explain the tradeoff of the paralysis during the night.

This assumes that all elements of life in this reality resolve down to questions of evolutionary theory, which I think is false. --I tend to think that we are not living in a closed system; that there are a LOT of outside forces at work which dramatically affect the human species and which have little to do with natural selection, --that and the rules which govern our reality are infinitely more complex than is currently understood. When people are positing theories based on such enormously limited understandings, then the best they can hope for is to be hopelessly wrong with a chance of nudging themselves in the right direction; IF, that is, they are willing to kill their sacred cows, (or at least allow them to starve to death). As such, this is a stab in the dark at best, and while there is certainly some substance to the idea of solving problems during dream time, I very much doubt these researchers have the chops to know what the heck they're actually playing with. I wonder how they would account for such simple items as lucid dreaming and many of the other odd dream experiences noted by every second person who posted in this thread?

I really don't mean to hammer on you personally, and indeed I hope you will forgive me if it appears I am doing so, but it's just that I find this kind of science quite overbearing in its general conceit and intent. --It's another attempt to shave another strip of humanity from the human being; to reduce us all to less than what we are through the application of Socratic nonsense logic dressed up in lab coats. Ugh. This can be really limiting in that belief and existential reality are linked at the hip. (Believe you are less, and that is what you will become.) The general tone of this kind of work reminds me of reading old science texts which spoke with authority upon subjects which it later turned out they were hopelessly wrong concerning.

The dream realm is one of the few areas which reductionist science hasn't been able to taint. It allows personal freedom even within deliberately oppressive environments. It is just like a fascist regime as ours (where the prisoners are also the proud prison builders and guards), to attempt to convince people that their own dreams are worthless without state approval. The hell with that.

-FL

Re:Yeah

[Zenaku]

That's odd. My dreams are distinctly unrealistic, but FEEL perfectly natural when I'm having them. I routinely fly, teleport, shape-shift, and use telekinesis, and in the dream it seems to me as if I have always been able to do those things and there is nothing unusual about it. It's not even like a super hero fantasy. . . it just feels like everyday life, and in the dream-state, it doesn't even occur to me that those things are impossible. In addition, I frequently dream that I'm hanging out with a friend of mine who died -- and not in the way that I dream she never died, but in that she is merely not dead anymore.

It's about as realistic as Marvel Comics.

old people?

[benburned]

does that mean that the elderly are exceptionally prepared for anything having dreamed so much?

Re:Yeah

[inviolet]

Take, for example, the oft-cited 'I dreamt that I showed up to work/school/whatever naked/wearing only underwear.' Showing up to work naked isn't actually the real problem the brain is trying work out. The real problem is that the person is a afraid of being unprepared or being caught in an embarassing situation. They are usually insecure about something or other when they have dreams like this. This is the brain trying say "Hey, you! You're insecure about this or that, what are you doing to fix that?"

Or maybe your hands simply felt your own unclothed body in your sleep, and your mind integrated that data into your dream, the same way it integrates (for a brief period) the sound of your alarm clock. I wonder what the "Dreamer's Dictionary" says about the appearance of razors? ;)

Dream interpretation, meanwhile, is not so much about interpretation of our dreams; the real intrigue comes from interpreting our interpretations of our dreams. Dream interpretation itself is a rorschach, in the same way that peoples' Halloween costumes are projections of what they wish they could be.

Re:Yeah

[darthgnu]

You may well be dreaming without remembering. Apparently, having the intention to remember a dream can help you get started. Some people keep a dream journal.

Re:Yeah

[jpfed]

Your analogy doesn't work. People who are born deaf are born with a missing part of the ear or the brain that processes auditory information. People who become deaf usually are deaf for a reason that we know about. In the latter case, action and result are directly observable. Point taken. But there are certainly cases where the "purposes" of evolution are not 100% reliable. For example, if you want to believe some evolutionary psychologists, you'd think that men do silly stunts to impress women. They don't impress every woman, but they impress enough that they get to spread their seed around, and that's good enough.

Maybe, just maybe, these rats were tired too. They gave the rats amphetamines specifically to counteract the tiredness. Whether or not that manipulation actually does what they're hoping, I couldn't say- but my main point is that this was certainly not a case where a single false result takes down the whole hypothesis.

-------

I think a bigger issue with this is that dreaming is probably great training for other animals, but humans have a capacity for coming up with hypothetical scenarios (lying, roleplaying, prediction, etc...) that other animals probably lack. The addition of that capability (and who knows what other capacities) could make what was once useful now less useful.

Re:Yeah

[syousef]

How long ago did you have the surgery? How painful was it? The failure/recurrence rate after surgery for most sleep apnea is abysmal unfortunately so make sure you schedule another sleep test a year or so after surgery if you haven't already.

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about 5-6 years ago now. I'm 32. CPAP machines are horrible but they're better than the alternative for me. (3 nights without CPAP and I'm a headachy zombie with a very sore throat, plus my wife gets no sleep. I don't doubt I'd have lost my job in a few months if I hadn't found treatment that worked (I was falling asleep and snoring at my desk and in meetings while working for a consultancy on a client's premisis!). In fact if I'm honest with myself I seriously doubt I'd be alive today.

The other thing is that in some ways the opposite experience to what I'd had. For me when I got REALLY sleep deprived I got to the point where I'd actually have mild hallucinations and about a half dozen episodes of sleep paralysis (you think you're awake but you're not quite awake). Technically you're right though - no REM = no real dreams.

By the way if you're treated successfully your dreams should come back. They certainly did for me. Now if only I could go to sleep without the mask. It took me about a year to get use to, if you can call me use to it. It feels like a giant squid has attached itself to my face. If the mask leaks or I don't use a humidifier it feels like I have windburn in my nose. The straps for the mask are uncomfortable and if placed wrong even dig into the back of my ear. If you have a cold or blocked nose the mask is ineffective and I often end up with a headache if I have a cold (and for some reason often if I sleep in). However I still manage over 6 hours a night almost every night and I can function like a normal human being.

Re:Yeah

[Painless Parker]

What you are saying is not that you didn't have enough oxygen in your blood, but that you didn't have enough oxygen perfusing your brain cells to allow dreams to happen. This may have been a doctor's opinion, but I don't think there's any good evidence for it, since there's an enormous difference between dreaming and dream recall. In other words, the low oxygen in the neurons of your central nervous system may have been interfering with the link between your unconscious and your conscious mind.