I often wonder if some dreams are the result of some kind of pre written script or if they just develop as they go along. I can recall some dreams that would almost require that a script had been pre conceived for the begaining to make any sense at all. Other times it is obvious that a dream has simply developed as it went along.
I often have what I refer to as very disturbing dreams, they fall short of nightmares but are none the less very disturing.
I had a dream last night that I felt just developed as it went along. My son makes home brew and is very good at it having won awards at a national level. He had mentioned to me a few weeks ago that he thought he may have cross contaminated one of his batches with a wild yeast he was experimenting with. Anyway I guess that planted a seed in my brain
Without too much detail we were having a party and serving the home brew, the guests appeared to be getting drunker than usual and exhibiting very odd behavior. The oddest part was how they were becomming unresponsive to any kind of verbal cues and becomming very destructive, their eyes started rolling back in their heads like zombies and eventually they would fall down on the ground and their bodies would contort backward until they died. I woke up when they started dieing.
An example of a dream I had that seemed to be preconcieved or at least partly preconcieved went like this. I came out of a coffee shop and there was an Asian lady screaming bloody murder. I ran over to see what was wrong and she had been bitten by a poisenous snake. I failed to calm her down so I took the snake and let it bite me to let her see it wasn’t so scary. I then proceeded to try and enlist someone from th parking lot to give us a ride to the hospital. When I opened my mout the speak the venom started taking effect and my vocal cords and mouth became paralyzed so I couldn’t ask for help. This is where I woke up.
I’m not sure if it is true, but I was reading an article about sleep and insomnia that claimed most of our knowledge of dreaming and sleep didn’t exist before 1980. So there is that, it is a new field and we are just getting the tools to explore the brain.
It is my understanding that the major causes of nightmares are things like unresolved stress, sleep apnea or low blood sugar.
I used to think that dreams just developed, second by second, and this is borne out by their extreme changeability. You’re talking to your best friend one second, and the next second, it’s the “same guy” but it’s your uncle. You’re driving a car…no you’re rowing a boat…no you’re a passenger in a school bus…
But I’ve had a number of wholly-developed dreams with a long-term steady plot, with coherence, and even a dramatic arc, and I just have to believe that some part of my mind “scripted” the whole thing and is directing it. Somehow.
I’ve read, from time to time, the theory that dreaming is the mind’s way of doing some kind of “housecleaning” – rummaging through old memories to decide, somehow, which ones can be discarded, to clear out old obsolete garbage from the memory banks.
I’ve always been skeptical of such theories. I don’t know why the mind would need to clear out old deadwood (the theories of Sherlock Holmes notwithstanding), nor how this mechanism would work. Not to mention, that the things I see in dreams are things I still remember afterward. Oh, wait. Maybe those are just the old recollections that I decided to not discard. :dubious: Besides, dreams often feature very recent memories, like events that just happened yesterday.
I’ve got a different theory of dreams. It’s based on two observations:
(1) Everyone has noticed, and I’ve seen it mentioned in some discussion of dream theory, that dreams can be arbitrarily illogical, and yet seem perfectly cromulent in-story. For example, it’s perfectly possible in a dream to open your 5-foot-tall refrigerator and find a 100-foot-tall redwood tree inside it. (And that redwood tree might even talk to you, or anything else equally absurd). And within the dream, it all seems perfectly normal (usually).
The implication is that we have some kind of logical filter in our minds that is active when we’re awake, but gets turned off when we are dreaming.
(2) Here’s a personal observation: Does this happen to everybody, or is it just a weirdness of my mind? At random times, while awake and thinking or doing whatever I’m up to, I’ll have a fleeting image of some random time in my past experience, suddenly flash through my mind, just for a transient moment. (For me, it’s almost always a visual image, of something I’ve seen or some place I’ve been.) For example, I might get a fleeting image of driving a car over a certain hilltop and seeing into the valley beyond, from when I lived in Hawaii 40-some years ago. This sort of thing happens fairly often.
My hypothesis: I think the memory neurons in the brain are just continually firing, or trying to fire, all the time, creating these frequent but momentary phantasms. The above-mentioned filter, active while awake, keeps this in control, allowing us to focus our thoughts and attention. Otherwise, our conscious experience would be a total hodge-podge word-salad of disconnected incoherent thoughts. But that filter is turned off, or at least very turned down, during dreams. I think the memory neurons are just randomly firing, triggering semi-random memories, and without the logic filter to cut them off, the mind just takes any image that pops up and runs with it.
I believe that we are sometimes shown our future in our dreams. Not necessarily big momentous stuff, but everyday mundane stuff. Then when it happens in life, and you have that deja-vu feeling, it’s because you experienced it in your dream before. This has happened to me multiple times and I can then remember dreaming it before.
That sounds right to me. I also believe that much of dreaming is taking this random visual input and re-purposing it. You might remember the light through an open window, but your dream turns it into an open refrigerator with the light inside.
(This happens often to me when I snore! My dream will turn the sound into some other sound, like geese honking, or an argument between two people, or, once, into the groaning of a windmill as the sails went round and round. That one was actually musical, and I was able to remember the tune and write it down later. That’s how I know I snore in 5:4 time.)
Another aspect of dreams I fins strange is the need to match the physical senses with the action. I had a flying dream where I was actually leaving the earth headed for space. As i reached supersonic speeds I could feel my skin just trying to rip free of my body. The shrillness was indescribable. The very second I left the atmosphere i had sudden stillness and silence even though I was still traveling at supersonic speeds. I get very realistic sensations like this with most anything I am experiencing in a dream.
I have those also. Their are some locations and places I find myself returning to. I wonder sometimes where my mind got the template or idea for them and I wonder if I actually was at such a place long ago.
Whats even weirder is when I have the occasional flashback of such places when I’m awake.
I have a “dream landscape” with quite a number of fixed reference points. Buildings, streets, parks, etc. Many relate to real places, but are of the wrong size, in the wrong place, or have extra features.
Once or twice, I’ve been out and about, and found the real place part of my dream landscape was based on! e.g., a particular road my dad drove me over, once, years and years ago. It settled into my dreamscape, but only recently I happened to drive on it in real life. The experience was WEIRD! Very dream-like!
I’ve definitely had dreams that almost seemed like some kind of written out story or maybe your brain just progresses the story naturally in a way from the beginning, but I’ve had horror movie type dreams that I wish I could have consciously made up. I also have weird recurrent dreams with similar themes. I have a lot of dreams where I’m holding a church fan that I can fly around with and there’s always some danger below me like I’m trapped in an abandoned mall or city but I’m precariously close to giant Alligators, hovering feet above them. I had this other creepy dream where I found this artifact in a river that was like a four sided totem pole with 4 different figures dying in ominous ways and then as the dream proceeded I met 4 different people and watched them die that way. It really creeped me out and I’ve also had people wake me up in the middle of a nightmare and I’ll literally scream like I think I’m about to die.
I think that any attempt to know dreams, what they stand for, and why they occur is hopeless.
I once dreamed that I was visiting my brother in Manhattan. Then a herd of elephants came stampeding over the Brooklyn Bridge and past the pleasant brick houses and manicured lawns.
In reality, Manhattan has no brick houses or manicured lawns, and neither elephants nor my brother live there. Why would my brain put together Manhattan, brick houses, my brother, and elephants into a single dream? There doesn’t appear to be any connection between any two of those four things.
The REM state is very brief, even though a dream can seem like it is hours long it’s actually only minutes or even seconds long. That suggests to me that it’s not linear, but we rationalise it into a linear form in order for it to “make sense” to our waking or reflective selves. So we were bombarded with five or six strong images, which didn’t happen in any linear plot, but we can spread them out into one during our attempt to comprehend it all.
My hypothesis is based on the idea that our brains are constantly analysing and interpreting our sensory inputs, filling in the many gaps to make sense of the whole. This is illustrated for the visual senses by the many illusions such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYJkM4wfyZI. Despite being incomplete there is a certain coherence to these sensory inputs because they are generated from a coherent world. Each naturally follows from the last and this gives our mind a fighting chance to construct a logical and more-or-less accurate narrative of events. It is not common to be completely fooled, which is what makes those illusions such fun.
Whilst we sleep our senses are largely shut off. I suspect that our brain is still monitoring them but is now mostly listening to “noise”. The weirdness of dreams can then be explained as the attempt to make meaning of what is essentially meaningless. There is no logical ordering to these “events” so it is not surprising that our internal narrative can veer wildly from one interpretation to another. Surely the interpretation our brain makes, the assessment of what “makes sense” to our sleeping self will depend upon our existing thoughts and memories and be colored by what is important to us at the time.
Given this hypothesis I would suggest that the idea of a “scripted” dream may be an illusion. By the random nature of the process it would be expected that some dreams seem more ordered than others and the narrative will hold up better. Since both scripts and dreams are essentially linear it would be impossible to determine whether a sequence of events was pre-ordained on created one-by-one. To the dreamer experiencing the events one after the other there would be no difference.