Saturday, February 16, 2008

To Dream or not to Dream.......


Dreams are interesting. Quite interesting really. A few days ago while at work, one of my co-workers, his name is George, started telling me about this recurring dream he has quite often. He dreams a lot about flying. He said that in this particular dream, he's sitting inside the batmobile, ( If you're thinking of Batman and Robin, you're right! )

So, in his dream, Batman and Robin are sitting in the front seats and he's sitting in the back seat of the vehicle with ( of all people ) Elvis Presley. lol
He told me that he looks over at Elvis and just opens the door of the car and starts flying. He doesn't have any special super powers or anything like that but he can fly. Also in the dream, he's wearing regular street clothes. He doesn't have any type of crime fighters attire on. Of course when he told me and my other co-workers about the dream, we naturally began laughing. I guess you'd have to know him to get the full benefit. George is an African American male about 60 years old. He's a very likable person. Very down to earth and friendly. There's just something extremely funny about seeing him in jeans and a T-shirt flying through the air. lol
There's also another dream he has quite frequently where he's pulling something in the form of taffy candy out of his mouth continuously. He just keeps on pulling he says and it never ends. lol Strange dreams, eh. We all have them at some point or another.

Which brings me to what I want to talk about. WHY DO WE DREAM???

I don't know if there is actually a concrete answer to this question but I have come across some interesting theories, if you will, concerning our mental brain activity in the dreaming process. In an article I found recently, a Neuroscientist by the name of Mark Solms explains how dreams may protect and distract our brains from the outside world and allow the body to rest.
According to Solms, he suggests that we may very well have been confusing cause and effect. He says that dreams are not a by-product of sleep as assumed all along but may very well be what allows us to sleep in the first place.
"Dreams protect sleep, " Solms says. His iconoclastic view of dreams springs from emerging evidence that REM sleep and dreaming are not synonymous, and that the brain mechanisms involved in REM sleep may be entirely different from those involved in dreaming. Dreaming, in fact, is now thought to recruit areas of the brain involved in higher mental functions. So in essence he's saying that dreaming is a diversion and without this diversion, the brain would be urging us up and out into the world to keep it fully engaged. Solms also states that " dreams are a delusional hallucinatory state " -driven by activation of the brain's basic motivational system. And like delusions, they appear to be stoked by an abundance of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Scientists now know that dopamine plays a critical role in directing our attention. The neurochemical dictates what is important in our environment, regardless of whether that environment is inside us or outside. Under dopamine's influence, events or thoughts jump out of the background, grab our attention, move us to act and drive goal-directed behavior.

Dreams trick us into thinking we're out striving in the wider world. Solms says that the fundamental problem of being alive is that we must get all our needs met in the outside world. The brain has an answer to that; it has developed a kind of unified motivational course variously called the " seeking " or " wanting " system, an orchestration of primitive and higher neural structures that orients us to the outside world with an air of anticipation and positive expectancy. As Solms puts it, " It's an all-purpose looking-for-pleasure-in-the-world drive " that sends animals out to satisfy their needs.

Pioneering neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp describes the seeking system as a " goad without a goal " ( goals, such as gathering food, being dictated by the specific situation ). It is a readiness for action, an appetitive arousal, the neurobiological decendant of Freud's idea of libido. Representing a very basic function of the brain, it commands and activates an array of neural circuits.
Researchers mapping the functions of the brain have shown that the hallucinations of psychosis involve hyperactivation of the seeking system's structures. They also involve dysregulated dopamine transmission. Increasingly viewed as " the wind of the psychotic fire, " dopamine prompts the brain to assign abnormal importance to its own internal representations. Delusions, in other words, are errors of salience attribution. We over value our own thoughts, which are mistaken for perpetual experience of the world.

Dreams share many qualities with hallucinations. They are the hallucinations we all experience. Both dreams and hallucinations involve intensive activation of the seeking system. And Solms points to accumulating evidence that dreaming, like hallucinating, is driven by dopamine. French neuroscientist Claude Gottesmann reported that dopamine release in the brain's nucleus accumbens, a site long recognized to be involved in the hallucinations of schizophrenia, is maximal during dream sleep. " Dreaming and schizophrenia have the same neurochemical background, " Gottesmann says.

Other studies show that the dopamine-boosting drug L-dopa, commonly used to treat Parkinson's Disease, prompts people to have more dreams, more emotional content to their dreams and more bizarre dreams. Driven by dopamine, dreams fill our minds with myriad stimuli that feel worthy of our attention, says Solms. " That's necessary because the body is withdrawn from the external world. "

Goaded into seeking but blocked from action by paralyzing neurochemicals released during dream sleep, we feed on our own internal representations of the world. And we wake hungry for new experiences that build our psychic cinema of internal representations.

Says Solms, " The dopamine hypothesis is at the core of why we dream. "

-So there you have it.....

5 Comments:

Blogger DaBich said...

Interesting theory.
I've found myself dreaming of my two bassett hounds I've lost.
Weird.

7:46 AM, February 18, 2008  
Blogger Zeppelinlady said...

Yeah, I myself have a couple recurring dreams also. One of them is that I'm pregnant with sextuplets!! YIKES!!

9:35 PM, February 18, 2008  
Blogger DaBich said...

Yikes indeed! lol

10:22 AM, February 19, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Quite interesting. Long ago I idly asked my daughter: What do you think dreams are? She said: Something you do at night when you are sleeping.

I have something called lucid dreams. They happen when I fall asleep directly into the deep sleep stage where we dream. (think it is called REM) It always amazed me how much action could happen in the matter of minutes. I learned to wake myself up from nightmares and those lucid ones terrified me. So I got in the habit of looking at the clock when I closed my eyes~just in case~and when I had a lucid dream was able to see I had been asleep for only a few minutes.

I love that guy's dream or your image of him flying around. I do not fly in my lucid dreams but have something that is like an out of body experience where I float up in the air, but I can still see me asleep on the bed.

Hard to explain them. What I learned was there was some issue I was not aware of when I start having them and now I know when I get one, to examine my waking life to see what needs fixing.

1:52 PM, February 19, 2008  
Blogger Zeppelinlady said...

dabs ~
I'm sure you're dreaming of your bassett hounds because you miss them and had a nice life with them. I've also dreamt of pets I've had in my life. I miss them all dearly.


mary ~
Thanks for stopping by! It is really amazing how much can go on in a dream in just a manner of minutes. Sometimes I'm in such a comatose state that I'm dreaming but at the same time it seems as though I'm trying to wake myself up or "get up" out of the bed but I seem to be paralyzed. I believe that is somewhat of a hallucination perhaps..

8:41 PM, February 19, 2008  

Post a Comment

<< Home