Dream Process as a Computer

The brain is not a computer, but it has the power to compute. The word computare is Latin, and comes from putare – to think.

Neither is a computer anything like a human brain. But there are parallels. Christopher Evans, a psychologist, computer scientist and world authority on micro processors, says the brain and computers are both information handling devices – taking impulses which in themselves mean nothing, like sound waves, and processing them. It is also his theory that both computers and the waking brain function are taken ‘off line’ to re-program. Our behaviour responses and information bases need bringing up to date with new experience and information received each day. In the case of the computer, ‘off line’ means having modifications made to programs. In the human it means sleeping and dreaming – the dream being the powerful activity of review, sifting and re-programming. Thirdly, the brain and computers use ‘programs’. In humans a program means a learned set of responses, values or activities, such as walking or talking, but including more subtle activities such as judging social or business situations.

If, as Christopher Evans believes, dreaming is partly a period of revising and updating responses, insights and skills, and much research has also indicated this, then by working with the process one can make it more efficient. The background for this statement is that many people have recurring dreams which change very little. Looking at this from the ‘programming’ view, the attempt to revise is thwarted. But individuals can free such ‘stuck’ dreams by using dream processing. See – Secrets of Power Dreaming

Also, as some dreams are obviously a synthesis of experience and information gathered over a lifetime, the dream process is much more than a computing function which sorts new information and updates. It is also capable of creative leaps through synthesis and conjecture. J. B. Priestley’s dream of the birds – see example one under religion and dreams – appears to be a massive synthesis of things observed over a lifetime. It also depicts a brain function like computer simulation, which takes information and forms it into an experimental view of possibilities arising from the thousands or millions of separate bits of gathered data. See: esp in dreams; creative and problem solving dreams; processing dreams.