4/04/2014 On reflection, plus one week...
I have been outside the throws of a certain relationship for going on 4 years now; but the memories of the girl in question never left me. They should have... I ended things with very little to regret. But with an almost a PTSD like flavour of irrationality, certain feelings remained. Following a lengthy discussion with a close friend on the subject, I accepted my resignation to this phenomenon. His experiences quite similarly mirrored my own, it turned out, and he too was equally powerless to move beyond the nostalgic pangs. Our conclusion? You never forget your first love... or at least the Amygdala does not.
The Amygdala: long thought to be the centre of fear. I do not think it has much to do with fear. I think it is everything to do with the intensity of an emotion, and fear just happens to be a remarkably intense emotion. It has since been linked to aggression and anxiety... and quite remarkably; the feeling of intellectual satisfaction when finally achieving a solution to a problem and shouting "Aha". Likewise; it's feedback loops have implications for the ability to recognise faces, by overlaying a quality of intensity to the computations of the Fusiform Facial Area. And when something happens to go really quite wrong... such as loosing half a foot to a landmine, its reciprocal connections with the the hippocampus allow it to apply a layer of intensity to many things it probably shouldn't, in the mad rush to learn a lesson before the chance is lost. I suppose this is where this story begins.
The dream starts with the girl in question turning up at my door, after some years of absence in my life. I invited her in and we begun talking. I was immediately struck by how little attraction I had for her, in the kind of in-dream logic where your emotional landscape is almost a narrators voice in of itself. She looked older, and had lost much of her distinctive body dimensions not to mention her energetic presence. She was just an generic anthropomorphic form with an identity; a meta-data tag somewhere in my hippocampus that should have but did not rouse any downstream activations in more exciting parts of my neurophysiology. And while I was not aroused by her; I was none the less so expecting to be aroused that I acted as if nothing had changed... and proceeded warm my actions to her in the most subtle way I knew. It was as if the errant amygdaloid activity was so normal, so expected, it actually had to be compensated for through my choice actions at the macroscopic level.
Before long, she turned to me and asked "when are we going to do this" and we proceeded to undress. I complemented her on her choice of underwear and as the words came out, my attention grew more and more to her vague and lifeless shape, her uninspiring presence and her flat voice. Everything about her that once had me acting well beyond self-control was no longer present, and true enough I felt no particular emotion or desire as consequence. And yet, still she was this person, and still the metadata from my hippocampus was finding its way to my the very genesis of my actions. It was an odd experience for sure. It was as if simply knowing her name was enough to override any and every other immediate perception I had.
When this bizarre striptease got to it's final stages, the familiar creeping lucidity started to hit me. I said to myself "I am about to have a sex dream. Wow" which I followed shortly with "Is it right for me to have this sex dream? Will I wake up to regret it?"... It was a tough question no doubt. By now I was fully aware I felt nothing for the girl: certainly in real life, nothing beyond a vague and archaic wiring pattern of that I no longer needed or even wanted... but even in the dream this much was apparent. What to do? I'll be blunt enough about it. When it comes to things in life that are enjoyable, sex while lucid dreaming is probably high on the list. So I relented, and made the choice. I went for it.
...what my secondary consciousness had in store was a joke in of itself. No sooner did I consent to enjoy what was in front of me, then the dream world went and changed on me. Changed! even made that characteristic whooshing airplane noise that accompanies flashback scene-changes in the teledrama Lost. The exact same noise too, as if from a sound board! It was almost as if my secondary consciousness had sprung this entire experiment just to get me to experience my own pathetic subjugation to my own lust, and then deny me even of the guilty pleasure of accepting and giving in to it. What bastards the frontal lobes can be? I was now awake, lying in bed and very much unsatisfied and simultaneously disappoint in myself. I got up and went about my day.
Some time later; I actually did wake up. It seems the first occasion was a false awakening, with an accompanying false layer lucidity too. Wowsers, that's weird. Just after the whooshing Lost scene change; I was well aware that the dream "was over" and even took the time to introspect its meaning and purpose. I felt guilty and annoyed. I felt angry that I still had this wiring in my brain that would allow this person to control my emotions even in the chaos and bizarreness of the dream world. I resented myself for giving in and resented my dreaming brain even more so for tempting me in the first place. But life when on. And when I finally did wake up, for real... I had a bloody good laugh. Quite a bit of fun it all was; and I was certainly a fool till the end.
I find this dream so interesting, of course, because in the ensuring days I have lost any residual attraction I still had for the girl in question. Even looking at photos of her, kept on an old hard drive not even connected to a working computer and stored away at the back of my cupboard, elicited no major reaction beyond a mild disgust and a strange sense of sexual emptiness. This is the first time in so many years this has ever been the case. What permanence in feelings I had for her, it appears I no longer do. I would certainly like to think this was the ultimate purpose of this dream: I would quite like to believe my frontal lobes were that damned clever. But who actually knows?
It is entirely likely that the process of discussing this lingering attraction with my close friend; combined with promising and exciting recent developments in my real, waking love-life are what brought this into a state of existence. I had certainly dreamed of this girl before: she would come to be and give me strange and cryptic bits of life advice and always the dominant emotions would be a desire to ignore her sage words and resume physical intimacy; combined with the understanding that it was never going to happen. But the girl of this dream was neither elfin nor mystical nor sexual in the least, and despite my in-dream intentions, my attraction was negligible too. Perhaps it was just time to move on, and this dream was my brains way of burning what was left of those older pathways out with a red hot iron.
So was this my dreaming brain's way of "clearing all the shit" out of my hippocampus, by selectivity activating it for all it was: context-less and empty metadata? With my Amygdala safely inhibited, it seems possible there were no feedback loops though which this girl's very concept could survive being experienced by bringing about the characteristic Amygdaloid intensity; and thus coding right back in the hippocampus again in the process. I believe in clinical psychology this refereed to as extinction, and it is often used for rape counselling of all things. This could have been what happened here.
By not allowing me to indulge in the actual act, pretending to pull me out of the dream world, and then leaving me to regret and reject own behaviour... while still actually dreaming, I suppose my secondary consciousness laid the proverbial 'land mines' that would prevent me from re-accessing these pathways until they were truly rusted over and forgotten. Which sounds like a good enough idea from where I am sitting.
If all this is true: it is remarkably clever work, and something a kin to the brain psychotherapeutically treating itself through the biologically hacking its own information systems. Which all makes sense. Except we are not particularly good at it, in the vast majority of cases, are we? If we were, we wouldn't have to pay professionals to do it for us in the temporal scale of moths and years.
Frontal lobes: I certainly admire your work, but what the hell have you been doing for the last 4 years, and why descend from heaven to help me now?
As always, the answers only raise more questions.
Welcome to dream introspection :)
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