Posts Tagged ‘lifeprocess’

Dreams – What Are They?

Experts discussing any subject will disagree, and expert opinions on dreams and what they are differ considerably. A neurologist might describe them as random firings of the brain; a biologist would consider them in the light of their evolutionary emergence and advantage and say they are a way of practising life skills. Psychologists such as Freud and Jung also disagreed, but both saw them as doorways to deeper self understanding; while in his book Dreams and Nightmares, the psychiatrist J. A. Hadfield says dreams reproduce difficult or unsolved life situations or experiences. They thereby aid the dreamer toward solving or resolving problems.

But for myself I believe that if you really investigate dreams, first you will meet yourself. You will walk again the long road of your growth with the etched-in experiences that shaped you into the person you are. You will however, if you persist, see that there is a vaster self than this present personality, one that can reshape who you are, if you so dare.

Example: When someone falls asleep, he takes the stuff of the entire world, and he himself takes it apart, and he himself builds it up, and by his own bright light he dreams. … There are no chariots there, no harnessings, no roads; but he emits chariots, harnessings, and roads. There are no joys, happinesses, or delights there; but he emits joys, happiness, and delights. There are no ponds, lotus pools, and flowing streams, but he emits ponds, lotus pools, and flowing streams. For he is the Maker.

Finding your way through these different theories may be difficult. However, if you remember that there countless ways you could examine or relate to a house, some of the difficulty drops away. You could see it from the perspective of a builder, a buyer, a sociologist, a historian, a chemist, or even a psychologist, as the place and environment of where we live greatly influences us. We can’t say any of these approaches is wrong. They all have value. But none of them by themselves cover every aspect of the house and what it is or can be.

The same applies to dreams. The neurologist who from that particular study might refute the possibility of precognitive dreams, or their psychological meaning and benefit is telling the truth – from that perspective and discipline. And the biologist and psychologist are giving their truths from their perspectives, disciplines and experience.

So if you are actually serious about understanding your dreams or their relevance in your life, there are bits of information you can take from the various disciplines that can clarify and help, remembering of course that all theories are constantly being revised.

At one time one argument was as good as another about what dreams were, how often they occurred, and what length of time a dream took to experience, but in 1953 Eugene Aserinsky stumbled upon a way to begin a science of sleep and dreams. This occurred while working under the direction of Nathaniel Kleitman in a sleep study laboratory, and Aserinsky was the first to observe the Rapid Eye Movements – REM – now known to occur during dreaming. As Aserinsky had seen this in the sleep of babies, it was first assumed only to occur with infants. Later investigation proved it occurred with all people observed. This finding started a period of intense research into the psycho-physical functioning of dreams. See: Aserinsky.

To sum up what such science found, we now know that –

1 – When we dream the brain produces full sensory and muscular impulses to express what is done and experienced in the dream. But the impulses to move the body are suppressed by a small area of the brain called the pons, otherwise we would perform all the movements dreamt. It is only the eyes that are allowed full movement.

2  – While dreaming our voluntary muscles are thus paralysed making it difficult or impossible to move. This is probably what gives rise to such dreams as feeling your limbs are like lead and hard to move. Also it is behind the experience of sleep paralysis in which the dreamer struggles to wake from a dream, often with great fear, and is unable to move. See: Sleep Paralysis.

3 – Waking a person each time they dream quickly leads to psychological breakdown. Animals died when this was continued. We can therefore say that dreaming is not simply random firing of the brain. It is in some way vital to physical and psychological health. See: Dream Deprivation.

4 – Almost without exception, we all dream every night, on average about five times in regular periods of dreaming. The longest of these periods is just prior to waking.

5 – The most ancient creature to show signs of dreaming is the duck billed platypus. As this creature has existed for 250 million years, dreaming has been around for a long time before human emergence.

6 – Some neurological research has shown that a learning process is observable during dreaming.

These scientific insights have done much to dispel older speculations about what dreaming is and what it does, but it has not done much to help us understand and relate to our own very personal dreams and nightmares. As an aid in doing this we are often directed to the writings of experts on how to interpret or analyse our dreams. Unfortunately these are intellectual activities, and as the platypus connection suggests, dreaming existed long before the rational mind. A dream is an ancient and primeval process, and to actually experience it you might need to strip off your civilised veneer of thinking and enter into the jungle of the deeper parts of your nature – the unconscious – the unknown parts of yourself that lie beneath your usual awareness, the parts that actually do all the work of your existence, like heartbeat and cellular integration.

Having trod those ancient pathways of dreams for the past forty years, I believe that thinking about a dream is like attempting to know what swimming is without getting into the water. Swimming is a total physical, emotional and sensory experience. As with swimming, the surface of a dream – the dream imagery – often holds beneath it a vast depth. Beneath the image lies enormous data, emotional response and created patterns of behaviour. So when you actually plunge into a dream you are in a full surround databank of fantastic information. Even the trees and animals in your dreams are enormous reservoirs of information, linking back perhaps infinitely with your potential, your memories and experience, and your biological past through the millennia.

This need to dive beneath the rational mind exists because it is your ancient self, your platypus self, the process of life in you, that is creating the dream imagery as a primeval form of problem solving or ‘thinking’.

But, and this is a key to such dream swimming, all the data held in the dream imagery and drama is unconscious. Most of it has never ever been brought anywhere near language, and language is what we use to think and analyse with. The dream is imagery and drama expressive of issues and processes that are still without words, without a voice. Thinking about a dream is, as already said, like thinking about swimming without getting into the water. You can only really understand after directly experiencing immersion. Words will come later.

Nevertheless, the thinking questioning mind is vital in bringing this massive and ancient unconscious life experience into awareness. Dogs and cats dream, but they cannot take the lantern of personal awareness back into the usually unconscious process of their being to investigate it. That is what you do when you truly know a dream.

As for how you can directly experience your dream beyond thinking, it is a learning process. You have to discover how to be something of an animal that experiences life without words or thinking. You need to learn how to be aware of your feeling response to what is around you and the imagery and drama of your dreams. You must learn to enter into things with your feelings wide open. So instead of thinking about a friend who sits beside you, imagine yourself in their body, with their movements and their expression, and observe what happens, what you feel. Then do the same with your dream characters, animals and places. Eventually you will arrive at very positive felt responses that give you recognisable insight into yourself and others. You will touch passions so deep, so felt, that your whole body will experience excitation and depths of things that only great adventurers, mystics and lovers usually know.

As for what you will find if you do that – well anything and everything. The ancient world of the unconscious is not, as Freud suggested, full of dark repressed infantile urges, though of course it has its share of those. Like an ocean it stretches away gradually from the shores of personal, limited awareness – limited to sensory impressions and what has been learned and experienced. From the reasonably stable and concrete world of the physical it moves to the more plastic world of what has been called the psychic – the world of dream imagery that can be shifted by a thought or change in attitude. But it moves far beyond that into realms only suggested by quantum physics in the last century – where everything is at the same time past, present and future, where here and there are the same yet separable, where life and death do not have fixed boundaries.

But first you will meet yourself. You will walk again the long road of your growth with the etched-in experiences that shaped you into the person you are. You will however, if you persist, see that there is a vaster self than this present personality, one that can reshape who you are, if you so dare. See Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Dream Deprivation

A factor that is missing in many scientific arguments and even therapeutic arguments about whether dreams are functional and meaningful rather than random pieces of flotsam, is the question of their possible self-regulatory function. After the first and second world wars, hundreds of ex-soldiers suffered recurring nightmares about battle scenes. The dreams re-presented the original experience, often accompanied by the original body movements made to escape the horror being faced. Charles Rycroft, in his book anxiety and Neurosis, describes the observed results on people of unexpected disasters such as earthquakes and train accidents. Among other things they have a tendency to ‘waking actions and dreams in which the traumatic experience is repeated.’ He goes on to say that these repetitions in dreams or actions can be ‘thought of as manifestations of the healing process. By repeating the trauma the traumatised person is, as it were, trying to get it in front of himself again so that he can anticipate it, react anxiously to it and then assimilate or ‘get over’ it in the way he would any other distressing experience.’

Working with such dreams leads to the view that there is a self-regulatory process within our psyche, which attempts to find healing through the presentation of such traumatic incidents in dreams. Jung and Hadfield in particular supported this view of dreaming. See Life’s Little Secrets

The findings in researching also link with this self-regulatory theory. Dr. Dement and others experimented with dream deprivation with many subjects. The most obvious finding was that if the REM – dreaming – period of sleep is disturbed or prevented by waking the subject each time the REM activity begins, the REM periods of dreaming quickly became more and more frequent. The experiments had to be abandoned because without the use of force it became impossible to stop REM sleep, and the subjects were becoming seriously effected. (6)

When the subjects were awoken during their normal sleep for similar periods of time, these critical effects did not arise. While such findings might be explained in a purely physiological way, the mind body unity prevents us from saying, ‘Yes but that is only the result of brain chemicals’. There is obviously a great need on the part of the body/mind to dream. If for no other reason, dreams thereby have a meaningful function.

When the subjects whose REM sleep had been prevented, were allowed normal undisturbed REM dreaming, a massive increase in REM dreaming occurred. This suggested to researchers that the brain has some real need for dreaming, and when deprived will later fulfil its need by increased activity. In the 1970’s research by Ramon Greenberg and Chester Pearlman suggested that REM sleep was an important ingredient in learning from experience. They deprived rats and mice of REM sleep and observed their performance while running a variety of mazes. It was found that loss of REM sleep – no loss of sleep altogether – hardly impaired the performance of running mazes already learnt. However, there was a marked drop in performance of learning new a new maze or performing new tasks of any complexity.

Similar research was later performed with human subjects and showed similar results. These findings led psychiatrists to believe our mind is doing serious work while we dream. It is integrating what has recently been learnt into our long-term memory and possibly practising how to use this in enhancing personal skills. REM may therefore be important in stimulating the development of connective links of thought in infants and young children. The theory would explain why humans, who are constantly adapting to meet new challenges, exhibit so much REM activity.

That dreams occur more frequently after a period of deprivation certainly shows their link with a regulatory process. Learning is also a part of our survival needs, and much of it would appear to occur in a self-regulatory way.

(1) The initials REM stand for ‘rapid eye movement’. This refers to the fact detailed later in the book, that in 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman found rapid eye movements occurred while people slept. In 1957 the REM were linked with dreaming. Therefore sleep was observed to have two different phases, REM and NREM – non rapid eye movement, or non-REM. Later it was found that even during NREM sleep, a form of dreaming took place that is different to the REM dream with its pronounced imagery and drama.

(2) Van de Castle, Robert L. Our Dreaming Mind. Aquarian. London 1994.

(3) For instance Jules Verne wrote about submarines before they became a reality. Flying machines had been drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.

(4) In the USA by Basic Books, Inc., New York 1988. Published in UK by Penguin Books 1990.

• c(5) An expression of what is happening in the physical body. Some doctors consider dreams to show signs of illness long before they are evident in other ways. Women frequently know they are pregnant very early on through sleep awareness in a dream. See: body.
• A link between the sleeping mind and what is occurring externally. A person may be falling out of bed and dream of flying or falling for instance.
• A way of balancing the physiological and psychological activities in us. When a person is deprived of dreaming in experiments, a breakdown in mind and body quickly occurs. This type of dreaming can often be a safety valve releasing tension and emotion not dealt with in waking life. See: compensation theory; self-regulation dreams and fantasy; science and dreams.
• An enormously original source of insight and information. Dreams tap our memory, our experience, and scan information held in our unconscious to form new insights from old experience. Dreams often present to us summaries or details of experience we have been unable to access consciously. Sometimes this is as early as life in the womb. See: creativity and problem solving in dreams.

• A means of compensating for failure or deprivation in everyday life, and as a means of expressing the otherwise unacknowledged aspects of oneself. Such dreams are a move toward wholeness.
• In dreams we may be integrating new experience with what we have already gathered and digested. In this way our abilities, such as social skills, are gradually upgraded.
• Dreams often stand in place of actual experience. So through dreams we may experiment with new experience or practice things we have not yet done externally. For instance many young women dream in detail of giving birth. This function of what might be called ‘imagination’ is tremendously undervalued, but is a foundation upon which human survival is built.
• An means of exercise for the psyche or soul. Just as the body will become sick if not moved and stressed, so the mind and emotions need stimulus and exercise. Dreams fulfil this need.
• An expression of human supersenses. Humans have an unconscious ability to read body language – so they can assess other humans very quickly. Humans have an unimaginable ability to absorb information, not simply from books, but from everyday events. With it they constantly arrive at new insights and realisations. Humans frequently correctly predict the future – not out of a bizarre ability, but from the information gathered about the present. All these abilities and more show in our dreams. See: esp in dreams.
• A means of solving problems, or formulating creative ideas, both in our personal life, and also in relationships and work. Many people have produced highly creative work directly from dreams.
• A presentation in symbols of past traumatic experience. If met this can lead to deep psychological healing. Such dreams are therefore an attempt on the part of our spontaneous inner processes to bring about healing change. See: abreaction; compensation theory; nightmares.
• In the widest sense nearly all dreams act as a process of growth or a move toward maturing. Some dreams are very obviously presenting internal forces or dimensions of experience that might lead the conscious personality toward a greater balance and inclusiveness. See: Individuation.
• A way of reaching beyond the known world of experience and presenting intimations from the unknown. Many people have dreams in which ESP, out of the body experiences, and knowledge transcending time and space occur. This type of dream may indicate a link between the present person and people who had lived in the distant past; or between the dreamer and all existing life. Some of these dreams present powerful insights into how the transitory human personality may arise out of an eternal consciousness. They thus deal with the spiritual aspects of human nature.

(6) In the mid-1960s, a psychiatrist named Howard Roffwarg, at Columbia University in New York, suggested that nervous activity during REM sleep helps to stimulate the developing brain in very young children, thus promoting the growth of neural connections necessary for learning. In adults, according to Roffwarg, REM serves, like physical exercise, to maintain tone in the central nervous system.

The notion that REM could be a crucial ingredient in the learning process gained momentum during the 1970’s following the work of Boston psychiatrists Ramon Greenberg and Chester Pearlman. In the laboratory, Greenberg and Pearlman deprived rats and mice of REM sleep while training the animals to run through a variety of mazes. The researchers discovered that while REM loss caused test rodents to perform only slightly worse on simple routines that they had already mastered, it had a markedly adverse impact on the animals’ ability to carry out more complex tasks or to learn new ones, of whatever degree of complexity.

Greenberg and Pearlman noted that the same pattern appeared to be true with people. Human volunteers who went without REM sleep could per-form routine activities without much trouble but had much greater difficulty tackling complicated word-memorising tasks. This finding led the psychiatrists to conclude that the mind is doing serious work when it dreams-specifically, it is incorporating newly learned information into a long-term memory bank. According to this theory, REM may thus be critical in stimulating the development of associative thought in infants and young children. The theory would also explain why humans, who must constantly adapt to meet new challenges, exhibit so much REM activity. See The Secret Power