Dreams

by Dominic Vautier
6-2010

When I was a kid sleep seemed like such a stupid waste of time like being dead or something.  That attitude carried over into adulthood so here I am stuck with pills to help me sleep.

I was not much into dreams either but then I found out a little more about them and how they could make my life better.

The brain is supposed to shut down and go into deep sleep for three or four hours or so then slowly come out in stages characterized by rapid eye movement (REM) where scientists detect that the eyes are moving behind the lids suggesting they are following dream images.  There is also a different kind of chemical activity occurring in the brain during deep and partial sleep periods that may be rearranging memory connections.  This framework kind of describes expected sleep pattern but few of us are easily able to get deep sleep and then transition into dream sleep, especially me.  I always fully wake up after deep sleep and have to force myself to dream. So why do I have to dream?  Because dreams are the stuff left over after brain clean up that occurs in deep sleep.  That's why.  The leftovers have to be cleaned up too.

Dream sleep alone doesn’t fulfill the kind of mental needs as deep sleep does and it does not allow the brain to produce the right kind of chemicals but it is still necessary.  Everybody must have at least a few hours of deep sleep every night before the lighter REM sleep, otherwise the mind starts misbehaving and making bad decisions and doing strange things and even hallucinating.  Deep sleep gives the brain an almost total shut-down period, a chance to catch it’s breath, a half time, a necessary down time to sort out and recharge its synapse connections and put itself in good order for the next days activity.  During deep sleep blood supply to the brain diminishes, the body cools down, the heart beats slower, and since less blood is needed for the brain, muscles get more for rebuilding and removal of lactic acid.  The result is better body and mind balance for wakefulness.  During deep sleep there are no dreams, no time, no feeling, no awareness of motion or change of position, leg movement, or turning, or memory, or anything.  The brain is off line.  It does seem strange that we spend close to a third of our lives in sleep and a portion of that sleep in deep sleep and nobody knows much about what goes on in there.

Even after taking sleeping pills if I can't fall asleep within five minutes I get up because I'm afraid of just laying there.  If I do the cycle becomes reinforcing.  I sometimes can't fall asleep at all but I can dream while still awake.  Weird.  Sometimes I run out of pills and can't sleep at all so I stay up all night and the next day I feel totally wasted.

My sleep problem may have been built in. I accepted it as just another nuisance.  As I grew up my insomnia became a bigger issue and began to affect me.  I couldn't figure out why sleep did not come like it did for other people.  I often missed too much sleep and once in awhile became absolutely and totally exhausted, usually like once a week.  After years of too much hyperactivity and too little sleep and occasional periods of complete utter exhaustion, the doctor told me I had to get deep sleep so I got pills. I hate to depend on chemicals but our brains were not designed to live long.

Scientists say dreams happen during REM sleep which usually occurs after deep sleep and just before waking up.  During REM sleep the eyes move around so scientists have a hunch that is the time when dreams happen and the brain starts getting more blood and begins processing stimuli but there is no stimuli yet so things get made up from stuff that was left over from the deep sleep clean up.  Scientists can also detect activity in different parts of the brain which along with eye movement suggests that portions of the brain are starting to boot up one at a time and that's how the dreams start first in the frontal cortex where the optic nerves are and later in other parts of the brain.

Strange things happen during dream sleep and nobody really understands it because not all parts of the brain are operating.  Can dreams be reflections of subterranean desires, or scattered images of things recently seen and heard, or unconscious manifestations of your innermost feelings and desires, or suppressed emotions, or long forgotten cravings, or communications with the nether world, or monsters from the Id, or nothing at all but just a bunch of mixed up leftovers from deep sleep?  That's probably it.

I never dream in color.  My wife always dreams in color but I don’t.  My dreams are in shades of gray ... always in shades of gray and in black and white.  I have dark dreams too, sometimes very very dark, a collection of usual suspects: falling from tall buildings, late for a college test, failing an important exam, under water, unable to escape from something very wicked like the devil, monsters under the bed, going to everlasting hellfire or being condemned to die.  I don’t worry too much about my dark dreams because dreams have no basis in the senses: no color, no smell, no taste, and often no words, so I quickly forget my dark dreams entirely and move on with my everyday life.  That’s life.