Sleep paralysis and the Frontal Cortex

7/10/2014: Six months later...
IMAGE: MatthewMeyer

My previous entry (well one of them) was one of the most Euphoric dream I had ever had. I think it is appropriate that I now take the time to describe the most terrifying. I think this dream happens to particularly stand out in the sense that I was able to avoid the worst of what was in store for me, through a kind of hybrid in-dream lucidity. Until now, I simply could not have explained this: it was phenomenally unique but lacked a framework for further exploration. However, some recent research produced by an associate has thrown me just over the threshold of compression and I can now suspect what might have happened. Exciting stuff, for a dream researcher of any creed or colour.

Sleep Paralysis: a simple enough phenomenon. When coming out of a deep stage of NREM sleep, you sometimes find yourself experiencing a kind of false awakening, and confusing the resulting REM artefacts for waking reality. A menacing presence is then felt, usually as some form of monster or ghost. Sometimes it is a loved one who approaches; before turning sinister. Lying there awake in bed (though not actually awake) the urge to run and flee is met with sudden bodily paralysis, making the whole ordeal ineffably more terrifying still. The genuine belief that the dream stage is over, and that this experience is waking reality then lifts the terror to extreme levels. You finally wake up (this time for real) with a heart rate high enough to give an Olympic athlete a cardiac arrest. Or were you always awake, and just hallucinating? The whole question of whether it was a false awakening or just dream content (hypnagogic hallucination) creeping through into waking reality for a number of seconds is very much of a moot point here, believe it or not. In these cases, the normally sharp distinctions between waking and dreaming reality are blurred to become part of two overlapping systems. Welcome to sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Succubus. Kanashibari. Many names: one singular, perplexing phenomenon.  

Such cases are potentially unique in that you experience a kind of false positive lucidity. A false what? Well think on this if you will. When we are awake, we can reliably question ourselves "Am I awake?". If you can answer this (or indeed if you can even ask the question) the answer will probably be yes. Ask yourself right now... you will probably know the answer! As for why we cannot ask ourselves this very same question while we sleep; there is quite a delicate explanation that I will leave the hungry reader to follow in their own time. But it does involve the parts of our brain that allow us to stand back from ourselves (our frontal lobes) and their diminished state of activation during sleep. In the cases of night terrors; it is quite curious that one actually thinks one is awake but secretly is not. Not simply assuming wakefulness, but they can actually pause and can say "thank god that dream is over and my day has started. Wait, that's an interesting monster trying to disembowel me!". This is virtually unprecedented, and throws the whole notion of dream/wake logic on its head. It screams, of course, of a renegade frontal cortex. The following was my experience.

I was dreaming some forgettable dream about something; then woke to find myself lying in my own bed. I pondered with whether I should get up or go back to sleep, and lay there balancing the proposition. I relented, and decided to return to my slumber. To hell with productivity, I am a university student! As I slowly drifted off to sleep, I heard the wind blow through my kitchen window and rattle a bamboo strip mural of the Chinese kitchen God that normally hangs on the opposite side of a brick wall that borders my bedroom. This snapped me to attention, killing my slumber and started to I grow frustrated. But the wind had stopped now. So, once again I let myself drift back into sleep, and alas, once again the wind picked up and rattled the wall hanging. This time, however there was a quaint whispering noise that accompanied the wind and I came to attention violently. This was weird. Fuck, that was scary whatever that was!! I thought as I lay there on edge. Was this all in my mind? I had no idea. I paused for a moment. Aaah, to hell with it. And back to sleep I went. It's not like I even believe in ghosts anyway.

This time, as I drifted off to sleep, I was pulled into a relaxed slumber quicker than I had imagined. It was like rolling down a hill on some kind of wheeled device and not entirely appreciating the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration. I resisted falling into it, pulled out, then allowed myself to fall back in... existing on the edge of this event horizon like riding a strange sine wave. It was quite fun, like suppressing a sneeze and then encouraging it again; the thrill of control mixed with the pleasure of relinquishing it, well the best of both of them really. And though I could control it, there was an ineffable lag to how this control operated, and whatever my volition produced was a few seconds late in its effect. Yet the siren call of the slumber operated on my willpower in real time; making the whole exercise uncannily dangerous: I could ride the sine wave down with enough leeway to pull it back up, except might find myself wanting to change my mind when the time came to escape. And all the while, the deeper into the relaxed comatose I drifted, the louder and more lifelike the haunting whisper and rattling wind became. And it scared me in a way I cannot describe, but so long as I was master of this game there was just too much enjoyment to be had in surfing the uncanny valley between these stages of the unknown.

After a while curiosity won me over. I decided I didn't really believe in ghosts anyway, so I might as well just fall asleep and see what happens. Or perhaps I simply just loss of control over the physics involved (in whatever I was indeed manipulating) and simply crashed the whole thing through the very diminished state of cognition I had put myself in. Either way; I let the feeling carry me over a little too far and the haunting chattering whisper grew to a loud curdling breath. And it was unmistakably horrible. Think of that fog horn sound in Inception; this sound could have launched an A grade Christopher Nolan film (and a dozen counterfeits) had I actually had the means to record it. Then again I was dreaming; so who actually knows how good it was and how much the Amygdala was simply pitching in. I could hear the sound radiating from somewhere inside my kitchen, and as it grew louder it would simultaneously move laterally along the kitchen wall towards my doorway, always halting before coming into view (as I pulled back from the edge).

Now, it was coming through my doorway and approaching me. And it was black. Formless. It was pure evil. In a state of sheer terror, and with every bit of willpower I could muster, I tried to force myself back awake. And yet the lag was now so profound I could not make the ghostly entity back off, it kept advancing as my brain struggled to accelerate back to life like a 10 ton truck. And then I finally experienced it: I was lying there completely paralysed! And the ghost was upon me. And I was now past the threshold of awareness and falling fast asleep while on the surface of reality, the ghost was free to do as it pleased. It felt like what dying must feel like. With one last effort, I forced myself back to attention and the black ghost did finally back off, the wind died down and I woke up. I was lying there with my heart racing, in a pool of my own cold sweat. Somehow I had won.

And so I got up, got dressed and went about my day. Some time later (after what felt like hours) I seemingly woke up again. Yes, readers... just like my I dream of Anima entry, I had actually experienced a false awakening the first time and did not know it. The ghost approaching me was synchronous with my entry into a dream within a dream though thinking I was awake, I did not know this. Which possibly explains why it was so dangerous and terrifying: my brain did not know how to handle such a paradox without taking some very sensitive and delicate physiological information partitions and essentially smashing them. So what was going on? Emergence delirium and sleep paralysis alike would seem to both involve functional connectivity changes in the frontal cortex during reorganisation of the brain's self-reference networks. Both can involve a kind of intense fear or paranoid delusion however in the case of sleep paralysis; the negative emotions are granted visual manifestation too, making matters considerably worse for the recipient. Given it is is the job of the frontal cortex and associated posterior parietal regions to produce visual images out of virtually nothing in the dream stage (and some would argue: during waking life too) this is entirely understandable. However what strikes me very clearly with both cases is that the frontal lobes have a lot of explaining to do.

What and why they should explain, is a question that I keep asking myself. Over-active brain regions, bordering on seizure threshold can produce some very interesting cognitive changes indeed: Temporal lobe epilepsy would have to be the gold standard. The research by my associate has linked these phenomenon to something that certainly appears to resemble a frontal lobe seizure. Beyond that, I could only speculate. But it does tempt me to ask if the functionally separated frontal networks (experienced during REM sleep) could be failing to properly re-integrate on wakeful emergence, and in the process, to excuse my language... freaking the fuck out. Of course, the brain is actually very good at this (freaking out). Phantom limb syndrome, amphetamine psychosis and PTSD are all prime example of what the brain can do when its afferent inputs do not make for a congruent experience.

And what would a primary consciousness, rooted in the hard integration of Limbic system and Thalamus, make of a frontal cortex that was quite literally loosing its cool? I expect something along the lines of this. As these two divided entities of our dreaming consciousness self re-enter a state of mutual information sufficient to be recognisable as the waking thought, the reciprocal nature of feedback between the two would reliably ensure that the emotional centre was bombarded with confusing and manipulative signalling from a frontal cortex that had utterly lost control of itself. For this is what the frontal cortex does best: micromanage and inhibit our emotions, and these seizure like impulses would have to be interpreted by the limbic system at least in some kind of sense. I suspect the intense fear and emotional association of approaching supernatural entity is exactly how an awakened primary consciousness would interpret a minor seizure emanating from the frontal region.

This network would in turn produce negative recurrent signalling back to the frontal cortex, that might very well (in its over-active state) interpret these emotions to bring about a hallucinatory visual reality to match. Which of course would make plenty of sense: for again, this is exactly what the frontal cortex does so well in waking reality. I admit I know little enough about seizure and the EEG measurements that quantify them to proceed further; but watch this space. I'll be coming back to this subject soon.

Unlike my other dream entries to date, I have little in the way of soft philosophical ramblings to end this piece. I know I am dealing with things I do not fully understand and yet have experienced myself in their full phenomenal intensity, making the problem a frustrating one. This simply drives me to understand, and bring my comprehension to new heights. And this is what I will now do. If there is one thing I draw from all this: do not mess with the frontal lobes; for whatever it is they are doing, they mean serious business. And while I still don't fear ghosts; I may just grow to fear the brain parcellations that so effortlessly creates them in my dreams. Because those really can scare me if they want to.

Images and the sense we give them: the search for the psychadelic

24/10/2014: 12 hours later...
IMAGE: Charlize Cape

This was a simple enough dream, but I have been thinking about it the the most part of the day. It has really hit me where it hurts: like the best dreams that I have, it has left me with something completely indescribable. This time it was not a steel-string guitar piece or an emotion or even a romantic encounter, it was simply a moving image.

And it was at once so personal and so powerfully alive, it remains alive in my memory even now. I have no idea what this dream means to me: all I can do is try to describe it.

The dream was very basic and short. It consisted of me and two friends, Dexter and Andrew. We were sitting in a steel room, possibly compatible with the set of a science fiction movie or even just a university laboratory. The room contained a screen or monitor, mounted on the wall, and we were watching it and talking.

The screen started to display an image: and this is where words will probably fail me. It was simple enough, a red and blue cycling gradient of background colour with an orange ring that grew and rotated in the centre, sprouted hubs, begun spinning on its axis while parts would break off and change then rejoin the centre once again. An vocal exchange between the three of us went approximately like this: 

Hereditary: "See the genesis of the human imagination, expressed in visual form. What we are watching is the psychedelic experience. Such compounds cause human ideas to become experienced as mental images."

Dexter: "But with such intense emotions, and understanding. It is not just images, but the raw feeling that the idea gives too"

Andrew: "......"

Hereditary: "Yes, but the feeling of comprehension and the perception of the image are two aspects of the same thing. You cannot separate them"

Dexter: "So they lack specific causality?"

Hereditary: "Precisely"

Dexter: "And yet the image is there. It is tangible. Why do ideas have so much function but so little form? Even music can be expressed symbolically"

Hereditary: "They can be expressed symbolically too. That is what we are now studying"

Dexter: "Interesting..."

  

Andrew: "I still don't get it"

I continued to watch the image, expand and grow and resemble the life form that it did. I then went through some other dreams and woke up shortly after. I drank my coffee and jumped into the shower. That is when it hit me: I was still thinking about that damned image! It was just there inside of me, evolving through itself over and over, bringing my focus back to itself from whatever else I had been doing, or indeed trying to. I begun to think not about the exchange about the image itself. It was haunting my thoughts as I prepared for my journey to work, and it would not stop.

At work, I decided there was simply not much too it. I had seen the image a thousand times before, from many examples in my life: A Simpsons episode, where homer eats a chilli. Beetles music videos. That "Sick, sad world" TV program that seems to be the only thing on when a television is featured during Daria episodes. These are proverbial tropes of the psychedelic experience are so common in our popular culture they could not have had to work hard to embed themselves in my subconscious for future recall. And yet, on arriving home after work my curiosity got the better of me, and I endeavoured to find this image, or one like it. I had to know from where it has actually come. Three and a half rather painful hours later, and I did not so much as come close. There was nothing on the whole internet that I could derive this image from. Nothing!!! And even worse: the images I could so easily recall that bore its resemblance turned out to look nothing even like it. It was as if those memories themselves had been overwritten and falsely associated by this recent creation from my dreaming imagination. This image was indeed my own and that begun to scare me.

So where had I seen it before? Probably nowhere. For all I know it actually was my own "endogenous idea generation process" (as referenced in the dream conversation) breaking through into my dream reality; and the guise of studying the psychedelic experience had simply thrown me of the trail, with the image eventuating to be a lot less psychedelic than I thought. I have, of course long suspected that the generation of internal imagery played a crucial role in how the cerebral hemispheres integrate information. The thalamus is simply too crowded to represent an entire cerebral hemispheres worth of computations while the limbic system is uniquely ill-suited to convey much at all except for basal evolutionary emotions super-serving the fight/flight responses from the hypothalamus. The corpus callosum, meanwhile has scarcely little to do with information exchange at all; and exists predominantly to enable one cerebral hemisphere to facilitate dominance over the other during the selection of cognitive strategies.

However the psychedelic experience reliably does cause these images to break through into the sensorium. That does not mean that these images are innately psychedelic; as evidenced by this dream and my whole experience in writing this entry. Perhaps the network changes brought about by the psilocybin ligand simply allow the contents of the thalamus to accept internally-generated information from the occipital cortex, that would otherwise be gated from waking experience (in addition to whatever other qualitative changes they produce in one's though process) and in our haste to classify we simply confuse the two. I have suspected this much in the past as well.

All I do know is that in focusing on this image, that has burned itself into my mind ever since, I am overcome with a kind of intense pull into my own visual thinking, and before long I find myself using my own visual thinking to think about visual thinking. From there (as I experienced in the shower) I am free to visually think about just anything I want, and I happened use the occasion at that time to decode a particularly complicated interpersonal relationship I had been rather uncertain what to do with. It worked quite well, then again my visual thinking always does: It is how can think in systems, and in large part how I have picked up so much on the theoretical neuroscience that I have.

Of course, shockingly little has been published (in contemporary times) about the neuroscience let alone the psychology of visual thinking: if you read my bio, you may well suspect that I intend to be one of the first. I had long suspected the power of visual thinking, but I was proverbially made a convert a little earlier this year at a friends wedding. Waiting for the formalities to commence, a particularly sprightly Google programmer was challenging an immunology professor to solve the Sleeping Beauty paradox. The programmer had read some number of books on the subject and was quite eager to leave us all in a state of 'benign bewilderment', as he himself had been for some time. And as he continued on, quoting mathematical arguments for and against I just shut my eyes and let the images take over. 

A web of coloured balls, connected by strings. Strings branch off from the balls, and new balls, with new colours emerge. The set of balls of a single colour combine and collapse. New strings. They have colour now too. Aha.  

...Opening my eyes again, I came to my conclusion:

Hereditary: "It all comes down to whether you believe we exist in a single universe, or as distinct entities in the multiverse doesn't it?"

The expression had virtually deserted the programmers face. All he said was "Yes, that's right". It was especially validating, as I had absolutely no idea what I had just said. Image and emotion: the language we use can only hope to interpret. In a way it was not even that difficult, it was just a neat hack to quickly put intuition into words. Of course I do not always slip into visual thinking so easily, it takes enormous concentration and it rarely comes to my rescue even when I call for it. It thinks with a mind of its own, and it's intrusive interruptions to my field of consciousness are necessarily limited, for countless aeons of evolution have effectively gated this presence in the great evolutionary battle against insanity. This cognitive maginot line is not breached for any old thing (unlike the real maginot line) for the protections are just too strong: It takes a truly powerful idea indeed, or perhaps a little psychoactive substance. Or even just a very interesting dream.

So was this dream of mine simply a vehicle to deliver me this self-referencing totem of my own visual thinking, that I may enter that wondrous trance of inter-hemispheric meditation that little bit smoother? Or was the dream itself essentially self-referential: in that the image was literally a visual analogue for the verbal discussion simultaneously taking place (about the nature of the image) suggesting the validity of image, exchange and dream in one great open system? I wish I could say. But the image I saw still speaks to me. It has a sound and a voice of its own, and it talks to my emotions and my mind's eye in equal measure. And if I had to put its strange message into words, as the exchange it generates refracts within my head, I would probably put it like this:

Image: "Think about what I am"

Hereditary: "...but you make me so curious"

Image: "And that is the secret"

 ★★★

Dogs of War: The Emotions and the Self

7/10/2014: Three months later...
IMAGE: House of Orpheus

A short story. Some time during and around World War 1, a talented young female scientist meets a male journalist and the two become drawn into the vortex of the anti-war movement. One of these people was so far along the Asperger Spectrum it brought the term 'high functioning' into a class of its own; while the other was a turbulent and impassioned soul that fell somewhere between Alexis Zorba and Randle McMurphy in both character and spirit. The complementary dispositions of the pair turned out to be well suited, and they soon fell in love. Three children were born.

Meanwhile; another part of the world, and a very different story. The seventh son of a religious scholar rages against his faith and his family, and is all but disowned. He takes to the cold streets of Warsaw, where he floats about in an existential void before finding his meaning in a distant, demure but elegant young woman. The two dispositions are again, well matched; and the two fall in love. After much European adventure attempting to escape the Nazi dragnet and the disoportunity of the war itself; they settle down... and two children are born.

Some time later, a far away place. One of each of these offspring meet, and if the pattern of this tale is anything to draw predictions from: yes, they too fall in love. The child of the first pair had turned out to be a peculiar mix of autonomous, uncontrolled and unconstrained emotions, that were paradoxically quite mild and subtle in their intensity (having the scientist's genetic contribution to thank for this). He makes of course, a very good jazz musician and finds his unpredictable but ultimately harmless emotional compass a big draw card for the people he meets. The child of the second pair; meanwhile inherits another complimentary pattern and balances extreme emotional intensity with an uncanny sense of pre-frontal emotional control. She finds her formidable emotional restraint, when synergised with her near-limitless emotional energy, a real asset in her own purists likewise. And yes, they raised two children, and yes (once again) it is one of them who sits here typing this blog entry.

My relationship with my own emotions is as such, a complex one. I would say somewhere between Senkaku Islands complex and Israel/Palestine complex. The quadripartite split between control and disinhibition on one axis, along with intensity and emptiness on another, has left me orbiting in a somewhat perplexing figure of eight. For the grass is always greener when you have a limitless spread of role models to emulate, the meta-cognitive control to pick your proverbial poison, and the genetic influences to weight you down into whatever basin of equilibrium your environment has seen to imprint. The following is a dream I had, only some months prior, that (if my impressions hold true) may have heralded a reasonably profound state transition in my own personality. It draws precisely from much of this confusion, and I will do my best to attempt an explanation.

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This dream would rank as the single most euphoric I have ever had. And unlike the simple euphoria of other dreams gone past; it left me with such a feeling that I sensed my entire personalty wanting to change in the months that ensured. While that may sound like a bold enough statement, it is by no means a new phenomenon: dreams always seem to do this to me one way or the other. I can recall once, after having a particular euphoria-infused down hill skiing dream; I resolved to become a skier myself and picked up and became competent at the sport in a remarkably short period of time. With the memory of the euphoria, it seems, along came the drive to perfect. Incidentally, only the night before last; I dreamed of eating a bowl of Cocoa Krispies (or coco pops as they are known to us colonial types) and despite having eaten nothing of the sort for at least the last decade; have since found myself eating approximately 4 servings a day of the regrettable foodstuff. Indeed I am snacking on a generous serving of them right now, even as I type this. So dreams, for better or worse, seem to just do this to me. They are my brain's own in build multi-purpose indoctrination device, and they have always had their way in the end. I suppose euphoria would probably just be their default currency of choice.

This is how the dream went. I was walking through a forest, which was encircled by a large oval-shaped stone perimeter. It had the overall feel of an overgrown European private garden. Everything in the dream was in a highly unconventional gray-scale; with perhaps just a hint of sepia tone or maybe green filter to offset the colourless shading. I was walking through slowly, and suddenly I noticed a person walking in the distant growth. He was a close friend of mine but in spite of this; a kind of intense predatory instinct took over and I proceeded to follow him with intentions that were neither violent nor gentle. As I paced through the thick undergrowth and sharp branches, I closed in on a wooden board-walk and decided this was my time to make my move. And close in for what? By this point I was aware the I was simply playing a game of some description; and the goal was to reach him undetected and unseen though he was still my friend and no harm was to ultimately come to him. As soon as this thought ran through my mind, and I made the attempt to muffle my footsteps and close in both quickly and silently, my mind shifted and my consciousness became at once disembodied and fragmented. It jumped somewhere else.

Some other place: Same garden. There were two Rottweilers sleeping comfortably over each other, and my Qualia or sense of experience became distributed between my own body and their own ephemeral states of existence. They were now waking up, and immediately their attention was drawn to something distant. As I continued to stalk my friend, and slowly closed in on him... they were now beginning to fully arouse from their sleep, and were joining in on the hunt too. I felt an existence that was now completely split between myself and the two other entities that shared my goal, and yet I was acutely aware that my connection to these animals was driven by nothing more than that quaint feeling of purpose that comes with the pursuit of a collective action. And it was euphoric in a way I could never hope to describe. The sense that my control over these animals was finite; and yet their loyalty to me so absolute that I need only intuit a volitional state and it was enough to bring them out of dormancy and into full action. It was like controlling an F-22 fighter jet with nothing but ones own mind, but even better: for they were still autonomous and free of will, but shared one thing with me that was more pure and special to them than it ever had been to me. They contained my own emotions; and to these dogs, this was consciousness itself. I woke up then and there; for the wave of euphoria that accompanied this idea was enough to force me well and truly out of the dream state. And as I lay there in the middle of the night, in the blackness of the bedroom, I felt a mixed sense of companionship and closeness overlaid with distance and melancholy in that I did not know who or what these dogs were, except that they were a part of me I had never completely appreciated. And I now missed the feeling of having this closeness more than I missed anything else in the world.

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If you have read any of my previous entires; you will be quite familiar with my ideas of dreaming; my perspectives on the top down cognitive control states that allows us to dream, and the mechanisms that give these control states the power they have to do redesign our beliefs at the most fundamental, subconscious level. In the words of Douglas Hofstadter, regarding his question of "who pushes who around" in the hierarchy of agency in the brain; I have often suspected the dreaming process as fundamentally nothing more than our own beliefs and deeply nested precept complexes pushing each-other around, with the REM stage the open beta to assess how the organism responds to these changes, and the NREM stage the slow process of encoding / cementing them in as the new political reality. Hofstadter heralds ideas and concepts as the prime mover of the brain, but I would personally contend that even these cognitive powerhouses subserve something deeper.

My conclusion: as with my other euphoric dream experiences, the purpose of this dream was ultimately to engineer in me a profound intensity of feeling; and to then bring me dwell on this feeling in waking life. And in doing so, I am drawn to discover the very thing that replicates it, be it a literal interpretation or an entirely abstract one. I had pondered for some time whether this would turn out to be a living person, some fundamental component of my inner self, the ascendancy to greater responsibility in my workplace or even the simple joy of owning a dog of my own. Which is all a little simplistic when I think about it, for the answer has come to resemble a very different category indeed.

In my own life, my emotions had never been so strong that I could not override them when I had wanted; while they had equally never been so mild that I could ignore them when they were rising up, as rare as that actually was. What I have ultimately come to decide about this dream was that though this experience, and the euphoria that accompanied it; I was being made aware of an entirely different way of using my emotions that I had in the past neglected. And that is neither to micromanage them with an endless series of commands, nor coax them into a frenzy and let them off their leash like a dog of war, but to grant them a kind of limited autonomy and enjoy the process by which they act in my greater interest by interpreting my volitional states, and then proceeding to pursue these states through their own logical means. This philosophy of mind strikes an uncanny resemblance to the one of Walter J Freeman in his book, How Brains Make up Their Mind's, which potentially rates as one of the more intensely complex and indecipherable neuroscientific philosophies of mind at least in my experience. I am surprised I even can draw that much of a link; so much did I struggle to understand the text myself. But perhaps that was all part of the larger point here. Incidentally, I think I might have described a very similar topology of agency in a previous post, the way my own pre-frontal cortex turns back time through an empathic link it voluntarily retains with the limbic system. I had little understanding of what I was exactly trying to articulate back then; but it certainly seems to have been a common trend in my dreaming, if not my thinking too.

If I was to articulate that euphoria again: and yes, I have been searching for it in just about every waking day since; it is the feeling I might have if I were to focus on an idea or goal, and without having to either pre-frontally coax my emotions into a strategic place in state-space to achieve this goal at the meta-cognative level (feigning mild disinterest in a job interview in order to benefit the salary negotiation stage would qualify as example of this)... nor inhibiting them completely, nor even determining their contents and letting them off their proverbial leash at whim; it is the feeling of letting my emotions be my emotions and trusting that they know what the hell they are doing, even when I do not. It is the empathic bond I would ultimately hope to share with my own limbic system; reliably flogged from decades of subserviation and pre-frontal discipline, to not only think for itself but to act with its own sense of agency in the greater good of the self that I constitute. And yes; I have come closer and closer to this exact relationship since the time of this dream, and yes I feel it may even have changed me as a person through the process. Though I am far from complete in this prospective state transition, for if the theories of Walter J are any foundation from which to base my own; such discretisation of the self may be the key not only to emotional intelligence but to meta-intelligence in its own right.

In the cognitive ecosystem of the brain: does true power of choice come not from the hierarchical dominance of one particular agent over another, but from the discrete multitude voluntarily combining to form a collaborative whole? And if so, what potential attractor state could ever guide such consolidation without also being a product of it? Perhaps it is simply the case that the greater the power that we distribute outside our direct sphere of self; the more robust that self actually becomes. It is a counter-intuitive conclusion to be drawn for sure, but it is one I am gradually coming to accept. Perhaps it is similarly the case that the only true freedom of will we posses exists within the very freedom we are first willing to abandon. In any case I continue to remember this euphoria, and I continue to search for it in my waking life. When all is said and done: maybe I will just find myself the proud owner of an adorable new Rottweiler and consider the matter closed.

Music in my Dreams

6/10/2014: Three days later...

 IMAGE: Oh My Dear

The following dreams are accounts I have had (and one I have not) where profound creativity was an apparent epiphenomenon of the auto-creative dreaming process. I say 'epiphenomenon' because far from relying on the dreamers bag of tricks (emotional synthesis and memory association) to get the proverbial point across; the subjective experience and value of these dreams has seemed to survive the apparent waking process and continue on in living, breathing waking memory. In this context I focus on the two most profound displays of human creativity I can personally relate to: music and laughter.

The dream in question (because of which I chose to write this entry) was a strange one for many reasons. I had drifted happily off to sleep listening to Abbey Road, in a strange apartment, next to an even stranger girl. She was in my dreams too... probably from the moment they started. While we get along very well (in real life), her mind has always been a puzzling place, and in this dream world we explored the surreality together; providing each other a valuable feeling of kindredness and companionship to offset the otherwise cold, emotionally distant reality that we were two beings perceiving two very different worlds. I have never entered a sleep stage and taken my real-life companion with me. It was something quite special.

We explored some dirty streets of my subconscious mind, passing dishevelled, boarded up store fronts and broken windows. We settled at something approaching a vagrant's street residence; a collection of wooden crates and make-shift furniture that at once enveloped and colonised the side-walk to form a kind of open-walled house. It contained a surprisingly aesthetically pleasing collection of house plants, pin-ups, semi-functioning electrical equipment and of course the vagrant himself, who was friendly enough and seemed to resemble in personality and in presence, the beach hermit from Local Hero (a film I had viewed some days earlier). Among his possessions, was a radio.

As we stopped and played with it; we managed to produce a song so distinct and melodic it froze me and brought the entire dream-world into sharp focus. It was a haunting, bitter-sweet acoustic guitar track that at once had all the emotional and characteristic timbre and energy of Mark Knopfler, Chett Atkins and Brian May. It sang to me in chords progressions and and delicate licks that have embedded themselves so deeply inside of me I woke up with a near pain in my chest and I have that pain still. Were I any good at composing music (which I certainly am not) I would have transcribed it while I had the chance. I hear that music still and it was at once my favourite song on earth; and yet I will never hear it again.

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Alas, on to brighter examples. My brother, an aspiring advertiser and artistic director, has many dreams involving creativity and he most certainly does put them to work in the way I never did in this instance. He has regularly told me of going to sleep with a complex brief on his mind; and having the answer come to him in his dreams... either quite abstractly, or bone-numbingly concrete to the point. He has likewise told me of dreams he has had involving comedic events, music, or interplays there of; with slow motion cinematic sequencing and a kind of creative quality that has likewise, transferred itself into waking reality and intersubjectivity with remarkable ease. But he was always the creative one between the two of us. He has likewise told me of dreams that have entirely consisted of him watching comedic sketches playing over and over, with himself a passive observer or formless, featureless ghost who's only in-dream ability consisted of being able to laugh manically at the situations his dreaming brain was concocting for his sheer amusement.

Often he has woken himself up with such laughter, and continued laughing there in bed, wide awake, at the ongoing brilliance of the joke. Other times his girlfriend has simply commented the next morning "you were laughing in your sleep again" to which he would suitably reply "yeah, I had another one of those dreams where I laugh". I suppose it is fitting that his success in advertising school came largely from his ability to produce visual images that would make his instructors laugh too.

I mention this; because I had just such a dream only a few days ago myself. It was in the same apartment, overlooking the same tennis court and next to the same cryptic girl. We had drifted off to sleep listening to psybient netradio streamed from my iphone and the next thing I knew I was talking to some old high-school friends/bullies, who were once a proverbial node of my great oscillating identity; (at various times a member of their clique, and others a victim of their excesses). This dichotomy carried itself through into the dream emotional atlas; as it were... and I talked to them in a familiar way only to experience their whispering an behind-the-back gossip no sooner as my back was turned.

As I made casual conversation, and felt the eerie tension of knowing I was neither an insider nor an outsider (the most precarious and dangerous place to be in any social hierarchy). As I gathered my wits to anticipate the impending social dangers contained therein; a splitting sound interrupted the conversation the de-facto group leader fell through the wooden floor he was lying down on, before complaining and recomposing himself and moving to a new section of ground space. In retrospect all the members of the group were in various positions of sitting, lounging and lying on what looked like a wooden stage or perhaps table-top skating ramp.

I turned around to talk to an unnamed dream character and heard the whispers again '...Do we really like him anyway?' ... 'We should make our move' ... 'Who does he think he is? Is he even one of us?' ... 'Nah he is ok' ... 'Leave him alone' ... 'No. Let's get him' ... and so on it went. My tensions were really up now. I turned back to talk to them in the casual manner once more. The ensuring conversation was thick with tension you could cut with a knife. I could identify by voice, as well as by body language, who had sided with me and who against me. I asked a question. Everybody froze: it was not intended to be symbolic but somehow, everybody now knew it's answer would decide my fate. It was just one of those questions that has meaning you did not intend to give it. The leader leaned up on one elbow to give his answer, and everybody was on edge for his response...

CRACK. The leader fell through the broken flooring again and tumbled head over feet into an inclined abyss bellow, and everybody started laughing with an energy I cannot describe. I was laughing too. I ran over to look down into the hole he had descended into; and he was collapsed in a heap of sawdust and broken wood in a rag-doll position and my laughter picked up further. And that is when I woke up; laughing to myself with hideous satisfaction. "What the hell are you laughing at?" The girl next to me inquired, waking up herself. It was quite hard to describe. I continued laughing there for some time, just as I laugh now as I write this. The image, context and the timing were utterly indescribable. I at once understood and envied my brother a great deal. He was certainly lucky to have this.

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So what does all this tell me? Seeing that this latest entry has been remarkably neuroscience free for a change. Nothing that I did not already know (or at least suspect). And that is that our dreams are likely to be mediated and modulated by the highest stages of our neurocognitive networks; if not the commanding echelons of our consciousness itself. That rare gift of human creativity; the ability to evoke an intense emotion through a mathematical arrangement of sound frequencies, or the capacity to strip all anger and aggression from a situation by pointing out its utter ridiculousness with nothing more than an unconventional selection of adjectives and good sense of timing, it comes to us when we sleep just as readily as it may when we are awake. Sometimes even more so. And we may never turn these creative insights into anything of value unless we are similarly creative in waking breathing actual life; for something of the gift becomes stripped away when our brain requires itself for our daily survival. Musically, I know I am not capable of transferring this into everyday life. Alas my brother sees no clear distinction between the creative arrangements he sees in his dreams and the ones he produces through his chosen vocation. I in turn make some effort to interpret my dreams creatively through this blog; but that is where my in-dream creativity starts and stops.

Are we all profoundly creative beings, hampered only by our own brain topology as cerebral pre-frontal blood flow returns to basal homoeostatic levels; our Serotonin and Norepinehrine rise to prepare us for our days journeys and our biparte states of consciousness re-integrate for the eternal game of trying to out-whit outsmart of foes? I have wrestled with this question often: why diminished states of consciousness can so reliably be conducive to some of the pinnacle achievements of consciousness itself, and all we call human. It is actually one of the many curious subjects of my project right now (human thought processes under Xenon induced disassociation) and I have no answer, though I feel I am increasingly close, at least theoretically.

All I know is that the blurred-lines between the boundaries of our own awareness and that which we give over to our blind reflex arcs and instinctive urges and muscle memory can be more than a proverbial treasure trove for the highest faculties of our minds; they can in cases be an oasis too. The fragmentation of the self yields many dividends, if done correctly... but the question of what does the fragmenting and what 'done correctly' exactly entails evades me quite reliably. Well, maybe not for much longer. My creativity might be dream bound but my curiosity is a free. For that I am thankful.