Dreams

notes from "Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction"

What is dreaming? These are the cardinal cognitive features of dreaming:

• Loss of awareness of self (self-reflective awareness)
• Loss of directed thought
• Reduction in logical reasoning
• Poor memory both within and after the dream

And so:

• It never occurs to me that I am dreaming
• There is a flagrant disregard for the constancies of time, place, and person
• There is a processing of extreme associations - a hyperassociative processing

There is mental activity during sleep. Some mental function are enhanced, while others are diminished. In dreaming there is both:

• Selective activation of brain circuits underlying emotion and related percepts in REM sleep, and
• Selective inactivation of circuits and chemicals underlying memory, direct thought, self-reflective awareness, and logical reasoning

A typical REM sleep report includes:

• Rich and varied internal percepts, especially sensorimotor, audiory, and anti-gravitational hallucinations
• Delusional acceptance of the wild events as real despite their extreme improbability
• Bizarreness deriving from the discontinuity and character incongruity - settings are indefinite, characters are vaguely defined, changing
• Emotional intensity and variety (fear, elation, and exuberance)
• Poor reasoning

If dreaming is not interrupted by awakening, it is rare to have recall. Poor or no dream recall by many people is a function of the abolition of memory during these brain activated phases of sleep. As the chemical systems that are responsible for recent memory are completely turned off when the brain is activated during sleep, it is difficult to have recall unless an awakening occurs to restore the availability of these chemicals to the brain.

Phases:

• Sleep onset
• Non-REM sleep
• REM sleep - dreaming doesn't just happen here, it is just the most ideal condition for it. Every 90 minutes and occupying 1.5 to 2hrs per night
• Waking
• Awake - dreaming is essentially impossible

Associationism:

• asserts that memory is organized according to categorical similarities among objects, people, ideas, and so on, to every category of content.
• David Hartley thought that dreams were bizarre because there were too many associations. For him, dreaming served to loosen associations that were otherwise inclined to become obsessively fixed. 'And that would be madness'.
• Associations are not associations unless they have meaningful connections.

The brain is activated during sleep:

• The reflex brain is not completely dependent on external stimuli - it is capable of spontaneous activity
• Neuronal activation is continuous during sleep
• Dreaming has no particular function in and of itself. it is nothing but our occasional awareness of brain activation in sleep. It is this activation that:
  • establishes psychic equilibrium,
  • integrates recent and past learning,
  • casts our inventory of personal information in emotionally salient terms