Archive for September 6th, 2009

I’m sure you have all had this experience: you are dreaming, and it’s not a good dream. Perhaps you are being chased by a vicious creature. Perhaps floodwaters are rising into your home. Or, perhaps, you are reliving some relationship that turned bad and was over long ago – or so you thought, because the person is back, and it’s awful.

But. at some point, the idea comes from the back of your head that “wait a minutes, this is a dream, I don’t have to put up with this crap!”

Then, or in the next few moments, you emerge back into reality, and suddenly it’s all gone, and instead of worrying about vicious creatures, be they of the flesh-eating monster type or the ex-boyfriend type (small difference), you are looking at the ceiling, and thinking about breakfast or how you are going to fit everything in to the day.

However, I find that often with dreams that are based more rather than less in reality, the shadows remain. I am still half asleep, and agitated over what was “happening.” The feelings, whatever they were, anger, fear, rejection – they linger. I wander around trying to transcend this quasi-reality. Eventually, I do.

Thanks to brunosan at Flikr Creative Commons

But, man, how can your brain do that?! Simultaneously dream and realize it’s dreaming – that’s pretty danged self-referential. If I had that kind of introspection during the day…well, if my brain could exercise that kind of restraint, imagine the possibilities!

Now, the truth is that we do that. We have “multi-track” minds. But still…I think this specific example is pretty insane. I was reading the chapter on consciousness in my Psychology text yesterday. It skipped over dreams as saying they are the final frontier in neuroscience or something, dangummit, but it did talk about how the two hemispheres (halves, basically) of your brain operate differently and, in some cases, independently, even though they constantly communicate through a piece of tissue called the corpeus luteum. In people with healthy brains, this means little “split-brain” activity: your right hand always knows, very soon at least, what the left is doing. Not so in people with split brains – who do survive quite well, with some interesting effects I won’t go into at this time).

However, maybe this morning the right side of my brain was projecting and perceiving (what it does best) until my left brain, thanks be to goodness, halted this backwards deal by saying “This isn’t rational. Wake up!”

However, that leads to the emotion side of things – you don’t usually wake from any old dream. In fact, I will toss out the un-verified fact that I voluntarily wake from bad dreams far more than good ones. So, the emotion I had somehow triggered the rational side of my being?

Whoa.

Furthermore, somehow those emotions and concerns lingered, like smoke dissipating slowly. Perhaps they were related to a hormone release, like adrenaline, that would linger before it is reabsorbed by your body(adrenaline, or epinephrine, prepares you the fight or flight reponse, by opening airways, speeding up the heart rate, etc. Released into the bloodstream, it’s effects take a minute to take effect – and they linger even longer). Maybe the lingering adrenaline triggered my mind to come up with a reason – “I feel stressed because… of this stressor! And I’m going to think about it and it’s stressing!” It seems somewhat circular, but it’s good food for thought.

So,  the brain? Craziest thing ever. Like just now, I was able to switch from thinking about this all deep and all, to saying good morning to Kalypso and cutesy voicing and thinking how soft her fur is, and back, in the space of about four seconds.

Whoa.