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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.'"
Last night while I was dreaming of playing poker with Einstein and Hawking and an anthropomorphic Zebra, I stopped and thought "This is really a great simulation of reality!" It got really interesting when the dancing elephants started circling our table. I feel far better prepared for life now.
Apparently my brain is exhaustively preparing me for the possibility that I'll drive to work naked.
What about all those dreams you can't remember, can they really have that great of an effect on physical response?
> What struck him the most was how lifelike they were. "I would say to myself, in my dream, 'Oh shit! I've dreamt of this before, but now this is really happening!' " he recalls
I actually get that. And I thought I was like Isaac Mendez, now it just my brain running simulations. the fact my brain gets it rights shows how dull and predicable my life must be....
My little Linux and tech blog
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.
Full-contact theological debate, evidently.
Isn't it obvious? It's training you for the night where you mix Psylocibin and LSD.
Living With a Nerd
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Last night I dreamt I was reading /. I'm not sure what that means, but it can't be good. Oddly, I thought I'd seen that dream before...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I remember a dream in which I was standing on a railway platform and as a train passed, I shot the driver with some kind of rifle. What was interesting is that this was only a very small part of the dream. The rest consisted of me going through some ridiculously realistic emotions, including guilt, fear and remorse. Even though the events themselves were completely abstract, it was like I went through an emotional simulation of killing someone.
Amnesty International
nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios
Oh, I agree. Thanks to my dreams, I can totally handle it when giant marshmallow bunnies attack my sky fortress when it drifts over the Land Of The Tiny Pigs. Generally, I hit the Chaos Gong in the Dark Energy Rectory, and an army of cybernetic Winona Ryders materializes and attacks the bunnies with flamethrowers. There's also the alternative of firing the spacefolding trebuchet into the Inner Circle Of Thought, thus causing a degenerative cascade effect in the local fauna matrix. There's some damage to other marshmallow species, but it takes care of the bunnies pretty well.
Still working on the whole "showing up naked for the midterm I forgot to study for" scenario though, although I suspect a combination of satire, extreme violence and an industrial vat of chocolate fudge might be called for.
Our psychology professor gave us a packet awhile ago based on the same theory, and it's been mentioned in our psychology text which is at least a few years old. The experimenters used a mouse and prevented it from entering REM sleep(when the mouse would dream) by putting it on a floating platform with a large hole in the middle so that the mouse would slip through the hole in to the water below when it entered REM sleep since its muscles relaxed. It was then shown that the mouse was less aware of danger, and was less responsive to threatening stimulus and more willing to stay in the open where it is more likely to be attacked by predators.
Kind of true. Back when I was in school I'd often dream about taking finals. Even though few questions I dreamed up showed up on the test, I kept my cool on weird questions that I didn't know.
OK - let's do some load testing. HA! See? The test server fried. Fix that - so now it passes to other test servers. Set up? OK - run the test. See? Load OK. Good. Now config the prod servers like that, and we'll be good. Next? copy paste evil Evil EVIL hacker script into data entry on test server. Did it fail? Yes? Good. Prod server's fine then.
OK - you're dreaming that everyone is chasing you (load testing), so you pass the magic baton to someone else and the crowd runs past you. You are in a horrible argument with someone (hacker script) and you smash their brains in and feel happy about it.
Dreams as mental QA scripts. I like that! It makes a kind of "sense", and demonstrates the necessity of not only dreaming BUT PAYING FOR GOOD QA SO YOU DON'T PUT OUT A SHIT PRODUCT. Hopefully that will be heard in Redmond - but they never sleep, so they never dream...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Maybe that's why I keep having that nightmare about turning on my Mac one day only to find it's suddenly running Vista!
Babies. What could be more threatening?
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
My own experience is that I'll have dreams that will repeat several times over the course of a year or two. When there is some sort of challenge, my first time may end in failure, but I end up doing much better my third or fourth time around.
It is very strange to repeat a dream, but it is very pleasant to do much better with it. So I think I do end up learning things in my dreams.
So what about that dream where I'm naked at work and Jesus is fighting Nietzsche in pudding? What the hell is THAT training me for?
Coming out of the closet?
Developers: We can use your help.
Though having said that. It scares me that the only way to find this out was by waterboarding rats in plant pots, only the Finns would figure out that. Voi Vittu.
My little Linux and tech blog
Dude, that's not a dream, it's a repressed memory. Just push it back under, and you'll be a lot happier.
The article covers *rats*, and it explains what happens to a small, limited rat brain when it can't dream. And yes, it explains *some* human dreaming. But, what is going on in my human head when I dream of dead loved ones? What does that prepare me for? Are my dreams of being naked in public just training ground to remind me to get dressed every morning? Or do they reflect buried insecurities or anxieties? Maybe dreams started as a way for our primitive, simple brains to train themselves to survive, but their reason for being today, in our more advanced brains, is still a mystery.
I'm the queer the atheists sent here to take away your gun!
SYSTEM ERROR: Comprehension buffer overflow. Statistical probability approaches infinity to one against. Reset all variables within logical limits.
*REBOOT*
What's a recursive dream meant to prepare you for? The next level of recursion or that I am living in the matrix?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
My brother had a recurring dream as a kid. He was chased over and under his bed by an octopus. What kind of threat was he preparing for?
"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."
:)
I think I have maybe 10 angry or scary dreams a year. Most of the times my dreams are weird but nothing like they describe.
Two that come to mind that were odd and a bit geeky too (well I AM on Slashdot) was one I always use as an example when telling about the style of dreams I typically have and the second was one I had last night.
The one I had last night literally just involved me and Zach Braff (JD from Scrubs) hanging out playing Wii and then driving to some fast food place drive thru to get food. Though keep in mind I watch a lot of Scrubs too, but that isn't an uncommon style of dream for me.
The other, is one I had a few months back but also a common style of dream. The dream was just a typical basement house party. We were hanging around downstairs, music playing, a keg in the corner, and I was in the dream sitting there talking to a few people. I wasn't dreaming about any party specifically in the past, the dream was just like a representation of a typical basement party. Anyway, the only thing that was different is that there were no doors in the basement. People were casually coming and going from the party via a worm hole in the floor of the basement in the middle of the room. But in my dream it was such a casual "matter of fact" that it was there like "duh, how else would you leave and enter a party?".
That's what my dreams are like. Though I am a pretty happy go lucky geek type. They need to stop running these dream studies with all these angry, people with pent up rage it would seem
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
So, did he come up with this theory after much dreaming?
. . . for walking my high school hallways in my underwear?
What?
...is that it doesn't apply to me, personally, at all. Rarely will I have a dream where I am threatened and even more rarely will it be in a feasable, real-life setting. The only validity I can see in this is that I often face and deal with awkward social situations in my dreams, but these are wildly unrealistic and completely alter the personalities of the people involved in the dreams. (Essentially, I am saying that I see people I know in my dreams, but they act very differently than they do in real life.) However, I have dealt with threatening situations before, some very complex, but in a completely unrealistic setting. Once, several years ago, I had a dream where demons were possessing everybody in a wave-like pattern, starting from my block and expanding outwards, spreading their possesion by touch. I then found myself leading a party of twelve or so video game characters out of the city and away from the demons, searching for a way to set them back, which I eventually found. And this is supposed to help me in real-life situations?
So, let me get this right: we've all got a holodeck inside our head? K3wl!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...is that pretty much every dream researcher has his or her own f'cked-up dream experiences, and it's much less stressful to assume that everyone ELSE has the same f'cked up dreams than to go get therapy for oneself.
Having just been on vacation and getting ample sleep, I found myself remembering a large number of dreams over the past week. None were terrifying, none were in any way 'threat simulations', and most were quite pleasurable, if a bit weird.
Perhaps this particular researcher just needs to relax a little?
-Styopa
So this means my dreams of having a 3some with Jessica Biel and Jessica Alba are just preparing me for a future where it will likely happen!
I wonder if a eastern monk who learns to meditate on peaceful thoughts has peaceful dreams. This is not easy to achieve and takes some monks decades.
Maybe all the negative impulses are repressed into dreams then.
Had a dream I traveled back in time to 1961 and had to teach richard feynman string theory so he could disprove it before I hit grad school, thereby saving me considerably heart/head-ache...
It was like back to the future meets sliders, starring liev schrieber. The critics were not fans, talk about hostile!
In that case, I'm well prepared to defend myself from:
1. Naked girls willing to share my bed.
2. Inexplicably discovering I'm nude in public, even if no one else seems to notice.
3. Elevator doors that spring open, exposing a long fall down an open shaft.
What about lucid dreaming then? Usually when my dreams aren't turning out nice I'll make something better happen, I definitely can't do that in real life (otherwise I would have a harem of hot half naked men who would cater to my every whim and fan me with palm branches).
what's that now?
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.
In my dreams, I'm a badass mofo that kicks butt and never loses a fight. In reality, I've never been in a fight in my life.
FTFA:
The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events
Perhaps your brain realizes the futility of exercising such an unlikely event and decides to terminate the rehersal?
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
When I was a young child I had disturbing nightmares about scary monsters and falling.
Recently I had a dream about someone dinging my fender in traffic.
I guess that's the evolution of my reality:
From Earth shaking terror to bored annoyance.
I wondered why I was seeing so many fnords in my slumber.
The dreams are NOT supposed to be little "real-life" simulations such that they would represent some arbitrary scenario that could happen in the real-world. Instead the dream scenarios are merely meant to stimulate the appropriate areas of the brain so that they are trained to respond to the abstract threats - not concrete scenarios.
Therefore it doesn't matter if the dream is consistent with reality or not - that's not relevant. It doesn't matter if your aunt doesn't act like your aunt in your dream. It doesn't matter if the streets don't work the same, the train stations look odd, TVs don't have realistic shows etc...
Because dream's don't come true!!!
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
I like it. Maybe the mechanism has changed for us since horrible life-or-death situations are somewhat less common these days than they used to be, but there's a certain elegance to the idea. Also, as a weird thing that happens to creatures, it's nice to have some way of describing why it would come about in evolutionary context. I always think better of ideas about organisms that can be explained through evolutionary advantage; it makes them seem more solid to me. Of course, not everything should be attributed to natural selection, but it's nice for most biological aspects.
Psychology Today is like the Glamour of psychology. If you want real scientific studies, consider the many journals of the APA (there are two of them, one psychology, one psychiatry). The only thing worse would be to read some crackpot theory on Slashdot.
On that note, this all sounds like fancy semantic correlations of the word 'dream'. Since anyone can have a theory, I propose that dreams are merely the replay of the day's events or the 'echo firing' of thoughts you have had that day. My (admittedly small) reading suggests that the conscious portions f the brain actually act more as a filter and control of a vast number of underlying random neural events rather than a generator.
It would make sense then that the conscious portions of the brain, needing to sleep at some point, shuts down the body with 'sleep paralysis' (this is state in which your motor functions are intentionally impaired and you cannot move your extremities even if you try - sometimes you can become conscious in this state briefly) and basically lets the unconscious portions of the brain have at it, which starts with the cohesive patterns the conscious brain had recently established and then, as the randomness takes hold without a controller, eventually corrupts into odd dreams. When the conscious brain starts taking control again at different times in the sleep cycles or upon awakening, this is connected to memory again and some of it bleeds over into conscious memory while the conscious portions of the brain are still establishing control.
That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Am I the only one bothered by the high occurence of slashdotters dreaming about themselves naked? Ewwww.
Be more cautious around cliffs. Or in one of my dreams, the curb. That was odd.
I have been practising flying by levitation as long as I can remember and am now quite well trained.
While this theory is interesting and may be part of one subset of reasons why we sleep I believe that the evolutionary thrust to reproduce dangerous events in our dreams is only a small one. Most lethal threats happen too quickly for anyone to react before they are dead. While many people report the "slow-down" effect in life-threatening situations, the fact is that time won't be "slowing down" if you are shot in the back of the head; it will have "stopped".
:)
I suppose many of these instantaneous deaths have to do with our level of technology, but falling into a hundred-foot sinkhole or getting your back broken by a rampaging rhinoceros in early times I imagine could barely be prevented either
I imagine my dreams as a giant full-screen tv in my head that's tuned to the Yggdrasil channel...
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)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Jeannie!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
and it went something like this:
*situation: out for coffee with some friends: Patrick and Ken*
<Ken> So how are things with Sara?
<Me> Good. Money is a little tight... but there's nothing new about that.
<Patrick> Yeah, well, it would help if she would actually use her schooling instead of working in customer service, instead of, you know, electrical wiring like she went to school for.
<Me> *smacks Patrick upside the head* shut the hell up.
<real-life>
Me: *mumble mumble; roll over*
Sara: Are you awake?
Me: *smack* shut the hell up.
Sara: *punch to the side of the head*
Me: What the hell was that for!?
Sara: You smacked me!
Me: No, I smacked Patrick! I was defending you.
Sara: Right... and I'm a floating unicorn.
</real-life>
I read the article, and while I'm sure that a certain number of dreams could fall under the category of threat rehearsal, there are plenty that don't. I've had my share of fighting/running dreams (I used to kickbox, and once I had a dream that I was fighting with someone. I threw a punch woke and myself up from punching the headboard.), but I've also had plenty of dreams which seem more like my brain is trying to decompress and make sense of daily events. You know the ones, where you see/hear/do things in dreams that don't make any sense at first until you think about them for a while. I don't buy into those dream interpreting books that float around out there, but there definitely seems to be a lot of symbols in dreams, and if you know yourself well enough those symbols start to make sense after a while.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Property is theft.
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.
This was also the first paragraph of the article.
:)
I know, I know, I don't normally read the articles either before posting, but if you are going to criticize an article for its redundancy then you should at least make sure you aren't being redundant yourself.
I thought the experiment was very interesting, and this article is the first place I've heard about it.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
I don't know what this means or what causes it, but I very rarely actually remember my dreams. I usually fall asleep and *BAM* it's the next morning and my alarm clock is going off. I remember dreams so infrequently that I can't even say how often I do remember them. I had a bad one after going to bed after being out on New Years, but I can't remember when I had one before that.
I do remember that back during college when I worked in retail I'd have this reoccurring dream where I'd be closing the store and couldn't get people to leave, no matter what I did. It felt like hours passed while I tried to get everyone to leave the store.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Sure, the hypothesis would make sense for some dreams. My wife regularly has threatening dreams - about situations in grade school and trying to find her (long dead now) mother. So her mind is preparing her for repeating grade school, for losing the mother long lost? On the other hand, I remember dreams most every night, and while they might be interpreted sometimes as prep for something, the ones with any serious threat or strong negative emotion of any sort are so rare that I often feel guilty, awakening from a night time's pleasant entertainments, to hear my wife complain about the latest installment of her grade school and looking for her mother anxiety dramas.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Apparently, my subconscious is convinced that at some point I'll face a life-and-death struggle with Salma Hayek.
In my dreams, I find myself wrestling her on a giant bed at a really nice hotel. The problem is, she's naked, so I know she doesn't have any weapons, and she's really doesn't seem very interested in hurting me.
Weird, huh?
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My dreams seem to be preparing me for life as a superhero! I am often flying around, blowing stuff up, etc. And I can magically pull samurai swords and automatic weapons from my pocket! Explain that? How would this explain wet dreams? haha
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
If it were then possible to determine what a person experienced while dreaming, would it not be possible to impart skills, Matrix-style?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.:
/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.
(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
(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.
The wake-sleep algorithm for training neural networks
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/stories/dream.html
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
I remember once having a lucid dream and the "physics" were completely broken. First I checked if this was really a dream by hopping, and while jumping up seemed quite realistic, descending was a bit like a falling balloon filled with ordinary air (really slow). Oh, and the lights didn't work :-)
Anyway, I wanted to have some fun and threw my dog out of the window (about 15 meters above ground level), it landed without injuring itself and climbed up the drainpipe back inside. People were as dumb as bots in Half-Life and stuff like elevators either didn't work or worked in a very simplified way.
So the physics are a lot worse than in modern games and social interaction is just as bad. Probably has something to do with the brain working in "low-power" mode. On the other hand, I was able to understand that the world was simulated (badly), and that means the brain was expecting stuff to behave differently, probably doing simulation some other way as well.
If this is true and dreams are necessary simulations for dealing with life... I wonder what the effects of that snortable sleep replacing drug mentioned here 5 days ago would have on a person? Being rested and never physically ill from lack of sleep... but not benefiting from sleep's training scenarios.
I can't fathom what /those/ could be preparing you for! :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Engineering seems to me to be threat simulation too - you think of everything that could go wrong, work round it and then whatever you are building ends up working.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Nice recap, now I understand what that new curvy waitress in the company restaurant meant when she said "Yeah, keep on dreaming boy!" when I invited her over to my basement.
She'll come over once I got more practice!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
does that mean that the elderly are exceptionally prepared for anything having dreamed so much?
xkcd
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
You were able to solve the murder of Laura Palmer.
The track record for dream analysis is dismal. From my own casual discussions with different people about them, either everyone has radically different "styles" of dreaming, or the post-awakening conversion to a narrative is so subjective as to make comparisons moot. (My own dreams rarely include "me", tending more towards a movie-style narrative, with or without a main character. And almost never involve anything one could reasonably call "conflict" in this way.)
The only commonality I've seen is the "dirty bathroom" dream, when you have a real-life need that works its way into the dream, but the dream twists to prevent you from carrying out the act and eventually wakes you. (It isn't always an actual dirty bathroom, it might be lack of privacy or getting splashed with water...)
~ Nonsanity
The one with no face and a chainsaw who chases me down the hall of my elementary school after I run out of Mrs. Green's classroom wearing only Wonder Woman Underoos and bunny slippers.
I can't remember if it was Jung or Campbell, but this theory's been around since the first half of the 20th century, unless there's some detail about this I'm missing.
Last dream I remember I woke up in a parallel world in 2003. And in another one there was this huge blue man-sized octopussy creature who swallowed me by its bottom to dissolve my body and merge my mind with itself so that it would get a personality. And in that other dream there was zombies fornicating with each other and losing their decaying members at the same time. Or sometimes I dream that everybody in the USA speaks French. Or that I play Duke Nukem 3D (not Forever, it's useless to get yourself ready for this one). Or that I float and surf on the surface of the water by standing on a vertically held man-sized fork. Or that I look at my user page on Slashdot and that all my posts have been modded up to impossible scores.
I don't know what any of that is supposed to prepare me for. Now I understand why I had so many dreams about atomic bombs detonating near my home or airliners crashing into my backyard, but I'm worried that I never dream of actually fornicating, as if I didn't have to be prepared for this :-S. I only hope it doesn't mean I'm more likely to have an airliner crash into my backyard than to get laid..
You just got troll'd!
What does the fact I never remember my dreams mean? That I'm fully prepared for the Worst Case Scenario? The Freudian implications, if properly realized, would turn my mind to jelly? Some combination of the two?
Nightmares are basically a traumatic event. You want to forgot the most of them but some still hunt you, even decades later. If this was a vr training simulator, it would probably fall under torture by inducing traumas.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Too bad it's bad science - unless someone invented one of those dream viewer things that you put on someone to get a visual representation of exactly what they were dreaming...otherwise...there really is no way to know, and taking guesses at what someone is dreaming about or why is just plain stupid to do. Please inform me when we get real science here.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
...why I so rarely dream about being raped to death by lust-crazed supermodels.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It's a model, not a literal interpretation of what's going on. There's actually some scientific basis for my post, believe it or not. I read such magazines as Scientific American Mind and such. The brain often works on a subconscious level when the conscious mind won't or can't allow a particular thought pattern to occur. Some of the greatest minds on the planet -- including Einstein -- have been said to have found solutions to complex problems in their sleep by dreaming about them.
My blog
Apparently I've been working on my zombie plan
...that this article was posted today. I had the weirdest dream this morning right as I was waking up. I was a vampire in some sort of complex which was a community of vampires. Then there was a Hitler-like leader preaching from a pulpit overlooking a crowd of Nosferatu type vampires which got down on all fours and wildly moved (Think the girl from The Ring) into the complex where I was. I was fearful of those Nosferatu types and got anxious and then I woke up.
I highly doubt that this is ever going to happen or what the heck it means. The only thing I can think of is that it is a premonition of what Hillary and her administration would be like. ???
Confucius say: "Man who associates with smarter men than himself is smarter than the men he associates with."
So you're saying that was a negative dream to you? And that your brain is preparing you for the threat of sex with Jessica Alba?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Androids actually dream of gunfighting with Rick Deckard.
-=rsw
Dreams are actually a side effect of the return to equilibrium of chemicals in the brain. Conscious thought involves pumping chemicals around the brain (see Membrane potential for example). During dreaming resting membrane potentials are restored to normal, etc.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
I didn't make contact very hard, it must have been more of a twitch than a swing in real life. but it was enough to wake her up and make it swell a little. She thought I'd accidently head-butted her or something turning over... then I told her about my dream and we both started laughing so hard we cried.
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
This kind of ties into the earlier thread on mind doping using various prescription drugs to enhance thinking and reasoning. In particular, I've found beta-blockers, like Atenolol, tend to directly affect the brain even when asleep to some pretty useful levels. My own experiences were able to unlock certain aspects, such as lucid dreaming as well as controlled simulation of real-world problems with fairly usable results.
Unlike the type of thinking we typically do when awake, this actually allows you to take some more abstract and unconventional liberties you wouldn't ordinarily think of under normal circumstances. It's surprisingly useful for evaluating and countering logical uncertainties in things like computer programming. Of course, the medication did occasionally cause some extremely vivid dreams that would have given Salvador Dali a run for his money, but it was pretty rare after a while.
As for regular dreaming as threat simulation, it could be suggested that such medications directly alter how your mind prioritizes information, causing benign situations to be treated as traumatic, thus committed to memory more clearly, rather than being compressed and archived randomly. However, it's hard to say at this point if there is a net negative effect related to repeated exposure of such scenarios. For example, is it possible to take on so much "relevent" data, that it starts to hinder or even prevent any further "relevent" data from being stored for future use? (Sort of like how some vietnam vets suffer from "shell shock", and eventually become overly paranoid of their home surroundings.)
8==8 Bones 8==8
So by this I am already prepared to take on a massive robotic overlord by turning myself into a robot and owning his armor with a wind piercer and dual cannon fire. I breathe relieved.
I've found that as I've gotten older, I tend to enjoy my dreams more, even the nightmares. I've gotten to the point (for the most part) that I can recognize a nightmare, and I see it as more of a challenge or a game than an actually frightening situation. They can still be scary as hell (usually involving my family being hurt or something), but can be a great problem solving tool. One other thing that has always really fascinated me, is people having the SAME dream. For instance, apparently my father and I both have the exact same (or nearly the same) dream in which we show up for class one day and realize it's the end of the semester and we've completely forgotten about a class we were supposed to be going to all year. It really freaked me out when we discovered that we have the same dream. Cool stuff.
Clearly I forgot to equip my +5 Codpiece of Karma.
So me on top of a pyramid in sun-god robes with thousands of naked women screaming and throwing pickles at me is a REAL THREAT?
awesome.
Man-eating zombie babies?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Hrmm.
When I was a single hs/college student, where were all those "threats" in real life my dreams were preparing me for?
For instance, I was never once "threatened" by
- friends mom
- friends sister
- the two short brunette twins
- the MILF on the kitchen countertop
- 5th grade teacher needing an assistant to help teaching "that"
I suppose it's not all bad.
Luckily, I was _also_ never threatened in real life by:
- older black man with greying chest hair and a vagina
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I think I may have "discovered" a possible evolutionary purpose of sleeping. The first is that dreaming helps your brain reinforce old pathways to memories that may have been lost or close to lost. Well what is the brain doing while asleep? It seems that the brain randomly activates bunches of neurons without letting large chain reactions of firing neurons get out of control. The brain spends almost all of it's energy gathering, interpreting, and then storing data. So, the stored data is the most important element for long term survival. The human brain is large and complex, memories are forgotten. In order to refresh important data and or safeguard data from deletion, data that may not have been accessed actively during waking consciousness is instead activated during sleep. The more often a memory is accessed, the more connections are made towards it and the harder it is for that memory to be lost. It's very simple but seems the most logical explanation, but would also explain why people have dreams containing things that they haven't thought about in 20+ years. The other possible reason for dreaming would be that of comparison. There is the waking state, where realities laws and properties are in effect, and then their is the sleeping state, where almost anything is possible. By letting the animal compare these two worlds, more can be understood about the waking world. When looking at something as complex as reality, it would be easier to understand it if another reality was presented to compare and contrast to it. Just possibilities, and maybe these are just one of many functions of sleep; in fact they probably are. Any thoughts?
Dreams involving nudity always seem to involve cops, underage minors, icky relatives, or coworkers. They never happen at beaches, and the sort of people around whom you'd want to be naked are furiously absent. (Apparently no "training" is necessary for those situations.)
I had a great nightmare a few weeks ago. I was traveling somewhere with my wife, sitting at a pleasant outdoor cafe. My hands were developing hives or pimples or some sort of skin condition. So I said, "there's a pharmacy, let me go get some cream or lotion for this crap." It was one of those big chain pharmacies- I think it was a CVS. (Not the version control system, which has also appeared in nightmares.) My wife said she'd wait at the cafe, and I never saw her again. But during the rest of the dream, I "knew" she was waiting there.
The pharmacy morphed into a hospital as I approached. A doctor was lounging in the doorway. He was a composite of two real life characters: an internist who had given me an unpleasant procedure when I was in college, and a jewelry store owner in Cupertino where I had a watch fixed a few days before (he sits in front of his store like that, waiting for business). I showed him my hands and he led me upstairs, told me to strip, and wheeled me down a corridor in a wheelchair. Meanwhile this stuff had been spreading up my arms and appearing on any skin elsewhere that had been in contact. So I was trying to avoid touching anything.
We headed into a dingy wing of the hospital (think Jacob's Ladder ). As the wheelchair creaked down the hallway, more and more lights were flickering or burnt out. Rainwater was dripping from the ceiling and accumulating in puddles underneath. People were abandoned, crying from their beds, strapped to gurneys and convulsing, and the ceiling was starting to drip blood in places. We reached a room with a few empty cots, and he told me to wait there. Then he was gone.
So I was sitting and waiting on this cot, trying to avoid touching anything, but the inflammation was continuing to spread- on my feet, ankles, up my knees, and all around my waist. My face itched like hell and the skin on my hands and arms was completely burnt and peeling off. Sometimes faceless nurses wearing masks would walk by, and I'd call out, trying to get their attention (I still needed that lotion I was hoping to get at the pharmacy). Usually they ignored me. I got the attention of a few, but when they saw the disease they ran away in terror.
In came a crowd of second graders on a school trip. Two teachers were telling the kids to behave, and I quickly covered up my privates with my diseased filthy hands. (This had predictable dermatological results, but if I hadn't done it, MSNBC's Chris Hansen might have shown up. MSNBC pollutes my subconsciousness with that garbage whenever I don't pay attention after Olbermann's show is over.) I motioned to one of the teachers and whispered, "Pssst, do you really think it's a good idea to bring a bunch of little kids to a place like this on a school trip?"
"Oh don't worry- they have their permission slips signed," she says, "and besides, you look great... except for your skin condition." (She was right- I've been getting exercise recently.) Meanwhile the kids had formed a semicircle around me and were pointing and giggling, calling me a monster.
I got fed up with this pretty quickly and lunged at them with my arms in the air, yelling, "Oh yeah, you little brats? Well how would you like this pox!" They all laughed and squealed, "Ewwwww!" and ran off in every direction.
Then I woke up, surely prepared for something, but I'm not sure what.
Could this have consequences for the way we think of animals that dreams? Dog do, so that means they can imagine themselves in theoretical danger? Cows? Rodents? Imagining yourself in situations seems like a mental dividing line of sorts... or would you rather argue that dreaming can occur without being an indication of capability for mental leaps?
I've been told once that mammals make up the dreaming group. Why should we be the only ones doing these simulations, wouldn't a reptile stand to benefit from the same? Or could it be argued that simulating cost more energy than a cold-blooded design can provide...
This theory also combines well with the recent story about drugs that stops sleep with "no sideeffects". Lack of threat simulation would be a pretty damn difficult bug to catch in clinical trials, we could go on as a species for a hundred years until we came across a threat we might've actually thought about had everyone been sleeping.
I routinely dream that I can fly. And at least 90% of the time when I'm in a dangerous situation in a dream I just teleport away from it. Sometimes I just time-travel, or pop over into an alternate universe...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
If you can't move at all, and you cannot speak either, your dream is of a special kind - that's a sleep paralysis.
While I agree with the ideas of the FA, I don't yet see sleep paralysis fits into the big picture. Either way, it is a very interesting and unusual phenomenon, and I've spent a lot of time trying to force myself to enter such a state; it was fun, especially that most people are afraid of it, while I find it to be an entertaining experiment.
The saddest poem
People should stop worrying about things. What would we dream about if there wasn't any threats? What if I'm just happy with the reality whatever it is like? You could always state that the dreams are ahead of you and prepare you for whatever, but in the end it is you yourself who throttles the channels. The border areas are extremely interesting, and it feels like there's no difference in the end. It depends on your ability to resonate within the different properties of the universe, which provides the experience (diet, thought processes, bio-feedback etc...) I find astral meditation quite pleasing. Whatever it means, but I can see energy vortexes flow through myself and via my palms or soles held together (it feels amazing), while actually levitating over my sleeping body. The total openness of emotions and senses is overwhelmingly meaningful, and the focus seems infinite. The physical co-reactions, like tears or butterflies in your stomach, lack completely. It's all unattached and free. The threats the researcher refers to are typical for the human reality, to which we are attached and addicted to. In some cases the fears are manipulated in by an authoritative entities, which seek to control the information flow of the wake state...
I consider having a thousand naked virgins at my beck and call a very real threat.
Wait, so you're saying all those dreams I had as a kid where I had to face Darth Vader weren't actually preparing me for a smack-down with a Dark Lord of the Sith? I mean, Dick Cheney wasn't even Sec Def at the time.
If my mind was at all rational, I would have been having 'girl' dreams instead, a much more real (and formidable) class of adversary for the next few years.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well, at least I'll be prepared when a witch tries to shepard soul crystals down a river with the hopes of winning favor from a god that, unbeknownst to her, is the father of the land's emperor and has already favored him instead, and I have to teleport into the emperor's aerial flagship to gather information. ;)
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
Going on a tangent,
Are there any other indicators of REM sleep (except EEG changes and the actual eye movement) that can be detected with simple and relatively unobtrusive equipment?
Taping electrodes to one's head is problematic and some people find the eye cover too disturbing.
Shoot, now Jack Thompson is gonna sue my child's dreams...
So you have to wonder what some of the dreams on Slow Wave are simulating? :)
So, I read TFA and I have a hard time seeing how they can claim that their results aren't just a result of extended sleep-deprivation. The researcher's claim is that they've managed to deprive their test subjects of *only* their dreams, without also sleep-depriving them, and then, based on their pure "dream-but-not-sleep-deprivation" they offer a whole lot of speculation about the value of dreams. However, from TFA here's essentially what they did to deprive their rats of "dreams" (but NOT sleep, mind you!):
Imagine yourself, stranded in the ocean for a week, and the only thing you have to sleep on is an innertube that was juu-uu-uust a bit too big for you, so that just when you really fell asleep, you'd fall through the middle and get wet and wake up (and have to climb up again, dry off, and start all over again on falling asleep).
Um. OK. If you think about it, What they claim is kind of a Big Deal: How do you differentially prevent somebody from dreaming, without also preventing them from sleeping? Given our current understanding of the electrochemical nature of the brain, we can, based solely on an EEG, tell when a person is awake, asleep-but-not-dreaming, and asleep-and-dreaming. I think there *might* be a more precise and specific way to do this.
I don't think that their "dream-but-not-sleep deprivation" methodology is specific enough to claim that the effects on their subjects were caused purely by lack of "dreaming."
*leans back and holds pen and pad at the ready*
Tell me about your mother.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Let me get this straight. If, in the rambling, intergalactic, trans-generational epic that one of my dreams is, one small thing happens that poses some kind of danger, challenge, or puzzle, that is all that is required to characterize the whole thing as a "threat dream"?
Fucking idiots. By this measure, we'd have to say that nearly all human literature is "threat literature." Surely these scientists would conclude that that proves that "the reason" we write and read literature is that we are evolutionarily predisposed to imaginatively process threat scenarios.
Anyone who doesn't see what is wrong with that inference has not been reading. Worse: anyone who doesn't see what is wrong with that inference has no soul and cannot dream.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
In Soviet Amerika, Jessica Alba dream of sex with YOU!
Wow AC! If you are honestly for real, I don't envy you at all.
/. that is)
I've had some mild nightmares before but nothing like those described. Have you talked to anyone about them before?
(apart from
John 3:16. Know it.
Drink Yourself Healthy: MonaVie
Actually, I was just making stuff up per my 'crackpot theory' line as proof that anyone can come up with some kind of theory that sounds interesting, but doesn't have any actual evidence or scientific backing.
If I ever witness Noah Bennet murdered by the Cigarette Smoking Man, and then I involuntarily jump through time to 1972 and have to help defend a DHARMA station from giant alien tripods, I'm prepared!
Hell, if Earth is ever invaded by Xenomorphs, I'm your man. All I need are individual sheets of printer paper.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Because waking from a great dream and getting that "damn, it was just a dream" realisation IS a 'negative event'?
Boy that was some useless training... but great entertainment!
Preparation? Yeah right...
Look I'm all for scientific skepeticism. I preach it and practice it. But if you guys are dismissing ZMA becuase it has a fancy sounding name, then look at the ingrediant list. Look up zinc and testosterone. You'll find many reasons to suppliment your diet with zinc. You'll also find that you'll want to add copper to that as well.
Additionally I have personally noticed better gains in my excercising while taking ZMA. Better rest. Increased dreaming activity which I can plainly see with my dream logs. I have a Z or V next to my logs when I have taken either the root or ZMA. I have concluded that, for me, ZMA has improved my dream project.
Try it for yourself. It's just zinc. And magnesium.
Next thing you know getting fat from eating McDonalds will be called a placebo effect, sheesh. NEWSFLASH: DIET IMPACTS YOU LIFE.
I'll admit that the athetlic effects of ZMA are debateable. Personally, I think it has had a positive effect on my lifting routines. Whether or not that is from increased rest, or the increase in my testosterone levels, I do not know. What I do know is that it has increased my ability to rest and recover. I know this from my dream log (which also records sleep times and morning feelings, alertness ect.) I have also had my testosterone levels checked before and after taking ZMA. They have increased. However this is not completely causal and could be explained by other factors as well, such as increased lifting activity at the same time of taking ZMA.
Either way, it's quite ironic that people refer to it as psuedo science without ever having tried it themselves.
I have woken up on several occasions only to realize I had been having a dream based loosely on the story being discussed at the time on the particular news netowrk. I have been falling asleep to major news networks for the last 5-6 years and have often wondered if the news I hear while sleeping affects my dreams. Correlation != Causation, I know, but it still has made me wonder.
What about the dreams where you aren't able to do normal tasks? Like the dream where you are driving a Ferrari (or other fast sports car), but no matter how hard you press the gas, you still go slow. Or the dream where you're in a fight and you feel like you can only in slow motion (while the other person is in normal speed)? This seems to be a fairly common type of dream from talking to friends.
Are these just one type of the potential problems that your brain is training you for? In order to come up with different scenarios about one subject, the brain could rely on some standard types of challenges. These challenges could make sense for some situations, but not for others. This could explain why some dreams are nonsense.
For a starter - they are buggied and flawed.
They never retain acurate data or position.
Do this next time you experience lucid dreams: focus on any text or digit (in your dream) - say a billboard, or a newspaper clip - then look away and then look back again: IT CHANGES!! Always does.
Also - have you noticed how the mind keeps avoiding to model the hand?
You picture faces - but never hands - the mind avoid hands. Simply because hands are too complicated for it to recreate in perfect detail.
Unless of course you happen to be a manicure, or maybe Leonardo Da Vinci.
I am really upset with how flawed and full of innaccuracies my lucid dreaming and hypnagogic hallucinations have been recently.
The only thing it can do perfectly is musical compositions, absolute masterpieces.
But apart from that - I think it's time I upgrade my brain OS.
... that Pamela Anderson is a threat?
Have gnu, will travel.
No mention of lucid dreaming == fail.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Better not let Jack Thompson hear about our dreams being "threat simulators" or he'll try and get those banned.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.---Scott Adams
Revonsuo has been studying this for a while:
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche-6-08-revonsuo.html
It's not a popsci-article though, some familiarity with statistical analysis in psychological research helps.
And I think I'll be prepared for a full scale human-turning-zombie situation in my school...
Also, with the amount of training I have, I should at least have a +7 to hit with a long sword
(Actual dream, no making up stuff)
I should go to Hollywood, can someone give an airplane ticket and their email? I'll better start "training" to be a sucessful director.
*SNORE*
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
It's not like that mag is peer-reviewed or anything. It's a tabloid rag with very little real science to back it up.
I call bullpatootie.
I ain't sayin' you don't need "professional" help, you might have other problems, but not for some nightmares. And to label it bordering on psychotic? Psychosis means problems with reality, not dreamality. If you dream a little green man whispering to kill your family, watch fewer horror movies. Wake up and see it hop into your backpack to torment you for the day? Seek professional help.
The threat simulation theory of dreaming is expressed in the form of six propositions, each of which is empirically testable. The propositions can be summarized as follows:
1. Dream consciousness is an organized and selective simulation of the perceptual world.
2. Dream consciousness is specialized in the simulation of threatening events
3. Nothing but exposure to real threatening events fully activates the threat simulation system.
4. The threat simulations produced by the fully activated system are perceptually and behaviorally realistic rehearsals of threatening events.
5. The realistic rehearsal of these skills can lead to enhanced performance regardless of whether or not the training episodes are explicitly remembered.
6. The ancestral environment in which the human brain evolved included frequent dangerous events that constituted extreme threats to human reproductive success. They thus presented serious selection pressures to ancestral human populations and fully activated the threat simulation mechanisms.
I think that the 5th proposition is the most important. I think that he could even go farther to argue that the threat isn't nearly as important as the enhanced performance. Earlier in the comments people have mentioned dreaming about their favorite FPS (Counter-Strike here) and performing better the next day. I've personally heard tons of anecdotal evidence (ie... people telling me) that sleeping on a problem will help you solve it or become better at it.
I think the authour could remove the threat events from the paper and get an interesting result.
In other words you'll breeze through the next RPG to use that plot.
" "That's what one kind of dreaming is for, yes. Rendering to long-term memory is one of the functions of REM sleep."
"That's rapid eye movement, right?"
"Yes."
"What other kinds of dreams are there?"
Mr. Mississauga tosses away the end of his smoke and begins the process of fetching and lighting another. Lightning flashes, distant thunder groans. "The kind you never remember. The kind that plays when the you in you is totally disconnected, during slow wave sleep."
"Do you remember those?"
"Yes."
"What are they like?"
Mr. Mississauga makes a sour face. "Did you ever have night terrors, as a child?"
"Like really bad nightmares? Nope, not me."
"Have you ever watched a dog dream?"
"Sure," she says, plucking pizzicato up the neck. "They chase stuff and bark in their throats. I guess they dream about dog things. Cats, and cars, and bones."
Mr. Mississauga shakes his head solemnly. "They're being trained."
A shiver runs along Aglakti's shoulders. "What do you mean? By who?"
Mr. Mississauga looks at her through the fire, his eyes swimming with reflections of its golden spires. "By their brains," he says. "It's the same with any of us. When we go into deep sleep our brain puts us through our paces. It runs training programs."
Lightning flashes. She whispers, "Training to do what?"
"To survive," says Mr. Mississauga heavily, then pauses as the thunder interrupts him. "Slow wave dreams are a very dark place, Aglakti. There's a reason we're not supposed to remember -- because it's damaging. It's too basic. It's too brutal. It's blood and panic, fight and flee."
"We fight?"
"Yes. We fight, we kill, we die. We rape. We're eviscerated, and we hold our warm, ruined organs in our hands. We jump and run, tear and chew. We are, in that place, nothing but animals."
She sneers and shakes her head. "What's the point?"
"Reflexes are primed, for when they might be called upon in the real world. Your muscles remember, so does your brain. Your mind, thankfully, does not."
Something occurs to Aglakti. She looks up again, her eyes welling with compassion. "...But you remember it all."
Mr. Mississauga nods."
There have been other studies linking dreaming to memory. When people are deprived of REM sleep, their memory works less well. This is probably at least partly due to being tired or less alert, but there is a component that is stronger for things they were exposed to on the previous day. One of the primary theories in dream research (from a neurobiological viewpoint at least) is that dreams work to solidify memories. During the day, information (about events that happen to you or just things you hear) is stored in one area of the brain (probably the hippocampus, short-term memory, which is different from working memory which is more of a phenomenon of reverberation in the prefrontal cortex). While you sleep, the brain replays the information so that it can be more permanently stored in long-term memory (probably the entorhinal cortex). We know at least some of this through studies of people with damage to the hippocampus or the entorhinal cortex, along with the sleep studies mentioned above and lots of animal studies.
The dreams themselves are probably just your brain trying to make sense of a series of random information that is being replayed. The actual important thing is likely to be the stream of imformation, which is probably not as coherent as even the most wild dreams. My dreams tend to jump all over the place, people turning into other people, myself teleporting to all sorts of random places.
We also know that memories can be altered any time they are replayed. This does suggest that a dream could help you practice for a given scenario, since when you're in the scenario itself you would probably act the way you remember from the dream. However, it's unlikely that this was the actual purpose of the dream.
I thought this sounded more like wishful thinking than research ... then I had that thought confirmed by going to the site.
The very to of the page tells us:
- It's an article by "Psychology Today" of all things, (and we all know what great serious scientific credentials they have.)
- The author is not a psychologist and not a doctor of any kind.
Reading the actual article we find the research is highly questionable as to what they are measuring and to how the experience might translate from a rat to a human subject.
Doing a little reading up on the background we find that:
- the theory has been put forward before (not new)
- the consensus *already* exists that this is *one* of the functions of dreams (not exclusive explanation)
- the theory cannot explain the structure of all dreams (not conclusive)
- other theories abound, each with about as much experimental support as this one (not unique)
The only rational conclusion is that it's an interesting idea that has been thought of before but never proven. This latest experiment changes pretty much nothing about that, and not only doesn't rule out other theories, it fits rather well with the suggestion that dreams have many multiple uses/causes.
In short, there is absolutely nothing new at all here.
Way to waste half my lunch hour slash-dot! (shakes fist angrily in air)
Dreams prepare us for future events. Some are threating, some are not.
A lost opportunity could be a very significant future event, where no threat is involved.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
You know, I guess even strange epic dreams like that might be of use ;)
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
Of course we confuse the crap out of it with mixed messages (media, advertising, societal moral strictures, religion, politics, war) and hence get confusing unrelated dreams. So there are a range of influences upon your dreams and your subconscious states, not only that but some have the ability to control and direct dreams, which further confuses the issue.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen