IMAGE: Kazuyuki Maeoka
4 days ago I had a long chain of vivid dreams, and the last in particular has remained in my mind. There was not so much to it, my brother and I were walking in a room and he suddenly lost consciousness and collided with the ground, injuring his head. I rushed over to his aid, but he was already standing up and regaining his composure by then. He looked a little ruffled and mentioned something along the lines of "what was that about?" but before he could explain further, he lost consciousness and collapsed again. A deep empathy gripped me; a kind of sadness with an overlay of intense loss. I was not scared; I rarely feel fear in my dreams. I recall distinctly being aware that whatever was happening was well out of my control, and that such emotions would not help the situation in any case. As I held him in my arms, and as he faded in an out of awareness, sometimes with little more than a second or two in between to make desperate eye contact or murmur a cry for help, I became increasingly drawn to the irresolvable state he was in. He was undergoing catastrophic brain failure, and the dysfunction was occurring at so microscopic a physiological scale there was simply nothing I could do but watch him slowly slip away.
This of course inherently brings me back some 20 years, to a much earlier nightmare that I feel was much of the same fundamental substance. In this, I had been playing in a lane-way behind my old house, with one of my best friends at the time. Some incident broke out with a passing stranger, who resolved the conflict by picking up a brick from the ground and hurling it; hitting my friend squarely in his head. Being a child of approximately 8 years: my imagination by all accounts should have followed this action with the brick ricocheting harmlessly away, or proverbially exploding his head like a watermelon... such consequences being staples of a childhood imagination so richly steeped in videogames and cartoons.
Alas; he did neither. With a clarity of detail unusual in any dream, his eyes turned inwards; his limbs folded into extreme angles and his muscles turned rigid. He proceeded to morph into a twisted and contorted figure, and his face presented such extremes of emotion as hate and fear and orgasmic pleasure it chills me to this day. As I watched on in a state of abject fear and confusion, he then proceeded to open his mouth and emitted a guttural, nasal wail; a single monosyllabic punctuation mark to drive home the reality of his transformation. In a split second: I had witnessed the most extreme and caricaturesque decent into severe mental retardation my immature dreaming brain could synthesise. As my friend continued to lurch about and spasm and grunt in front of me a deep and penetrating terror stuck me. For even then; in the seabed of my emerging intellectual awareness, I sensed my own vulnerability in this observation of his.
If my memory is a servant of any competence then I can say I distinctly recall spending the next few days walking around my house terrified that a simple bump might send me into such a state too. I asked my father how many brain cells (as I knew them at the time) had to die before one becomes brain damaged to this point and he would just laugh before reassuring me I had nothing much to worry about. At a deep internal level; I had known that one does not simply cease to exist with a little knock to the head. I was an active child and had more than my fair share of brushes with disaster with little more than the occasional bruise to show. I believed in my own resilience; and though through this I had perhaps formed a false sense of immortality. And it seems this dream showed me that such immortality was a false precept, and that what I valued most, my own Qualia; it was not supposed to last forever.
It could be argued that the foundations of my interest in neuroscience were born then and there. I had suddenly realised that the very substrates of my own conscious awareness were inexorably so unlikely and fragile; while also coming to appreciate the paradoxical logic that we have to actually be aware in order to be aware of our own awareness. From that point on I am not sure that I ever looked at humans again in the same way. I would observe behaviour in others, but never find myself thinking I was watching something that was in any way objective. Always, there was a deeper complexity lurking under the surface that I would live in eternal reverence too. My philosophy of the mind was tentatively born; and yet some 20 years on it is still far from complete.
So why the facsimile involving my brother? This is hard to say. What strikes me of this dream is the power of the emotions involved. I did say I never feel fear in dreams. A more accurate statement is that I rarely feel any emotion in dreams at all. The ones where I do; I typically experience them in such magnitude I wake up with a face soaked over with tears, such is the burst of raw intensity that has been and gone. This was such a dream. From my observations, they tend to come about once every 2 or 3 months, and I have no precise explanation why.
A novel theory? it might be that it was just my time to give my limbic system, usually pacified though years of suppression by an overbearing pre-frontal Cortex (along with mindfulness and whatever else it is that I do in my daily life); a scheduled run-through to make sure it does not forget its utility completely. We live a very privileged life these days: the death and disaster that were minute hands that once punctuated our evolutionary clock now only strike by the year or even decade. Our neurophysiology still retains a design that looks like it was built to handle so much more, and yet it actually handles so little with the environment we bring it into.
I think that this is simply a motif that strikes at me quite personally; the mystery of consciousness and the complexity of our cognitive subsystems, along with the affection I have for my brother. Was this the best my brain could retrieve to simulate such a scheduled fire-drill for more negative emotions I so seldom have to endure? I find it strangely poetic that the most profound nightmares I experience essentially come down to states neurological malfunction. Neurons, via my own subjective experience, not only get a chance to ponder their own existence; they also define the sum of all my fears by the same process.
At some point in my development: the neurons in my brain become aware of their own existence. After all, I am sitting right here explain all. At some later point; they actually started bringing my awareness squarely to their role in the emergence of my awareness in the first place. This endless cycle of self-reference is both fascinating and ultimately endemic of what brains do. And my dreams are seemingly the odd show I have endured as legacy to these strange priorities I inherit from them.
