Two Ryans: the Phylogeny of Belief

17/12/2014: Two years later...
IMAGE: Heidi Alayne

I think it is time for another dark and scary dream entry. This is actually one I had some time back: alas while its contents were relatively short and simple; it's meaning did not occur to me until quite recently, as I happened to be reading the plot synopsis of a Phillip K Dick novel on Wikipedia. Yep, in this particular instance that was my muse.

I'm actually kind of grateful to have come this close to solving what has been something of a mystery in my dream narrative to date, so sit back and enjoy. Controversy guaranteed.

The dream itself involved me walking into the second bedroom of my apartment, where my cousin at the time happened to be staying. Various personality conflicts and some disagreements about recreational drug use had pushed me to the point where I was thinking of a diplomatic way of basically asking him to leave, and this had been weighing on my mind quite heavily for a number of days since I still quite liked him as a person, just not as a house-mate.

So back on subject: not at all surprisingly, this dream involved me walking into said bedroom and having an in-dream simulation of this dreaded discussion. It went surprisingly well, at first: I was both confident and astute. However he shortly into things he broke down crying, and I mean physically bawling his eyes out... and I felt terrible. I tried my best to reconcile him diplomatically without giving into his pity and extracted myself from the bedroom, when suddenly the front door opened and standing in the doorway, staring at me with hollow passive eyes was none other than this cousin Ryan. I quickly darted my attention back into the bedroom, where the sobbing Ryan remained, and then back again to the doorway, where he was walking in, groceries in each hand and asking me what the matter was. There were two of him: and if ever there was a sheer feeling that accompanies loosing ones sanity then this was undeniably it.

I panic swept over me: and the words formed in my mind "Help me Ryan!" and I was overcome with an intense desire to charge up to him (the original one, who had been crying) and hug him and beg him to never let me go. I felt so vulnerable and uncertain and confused that even the slightest amount of affection and care from another human soul was a very comforting idea. Alas the words stuck in my throat, for I was aware I was now in no position to ask any such thing from Ryan, having just evicted him and broken his heart.

With his big watery eyes, he just looked at me: confused, hurt, but ultimately sympathetic. It was as if he almost was begging me to break down and seek his comfort. I did not. The feeling of loosing my mind, in conjunction with the feeling of having nothing or no-one to turn to was boiling to a breaking point and yet I just stood there, resolved to ride it through. I woke up then, in a sheer state of terror with my heart exploding through my chest. I will never forget that feeling of complete helplessness and cognitive vulnerability that accompanied second Ryan mysteriously appearing through the doorway. It was among the most intrusive and unsettling emotions I have ever experienced.

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And now... you guessed it: It is time for some Dream Introspection.

As I earlier mentioned: it was reading up about Phillip K Dick, both his creative spark and subsequent battles with mental illness and uncertainty that ultimately caused these ideas to take form. For those who are not accustomed to his work: they centre very heavily on multiple concepts of reality that overlap and intersect (especially at the emotional level), about paranoia and delusion, about belief and fantasy. A theme that runs through one of his books, Ubik... is the idea that in such a distraught and tormented existence, all we have to cling to and keep us persisting is the concept of the divine, which in this particular book happens to take the form of a spray can advertisement that punctuates the chaos of reality and provides some crumb of hope and direction through the oblique grey fog of a confusing and unknowable world.

Well, this did it. I had long ago suspected that in an earlier version of the human mind, and by that I mean the one that clearly predates written and possibly even spoken language: we lived in a state of perpetual fear and religious anxiety. Before they were able to be hunted; large predators and mega-fauna were probably revered and feared as both demons and deities. All we had to pull us through life and keep us persisting was a hopeful light, a quiet inner voice, that was at once our own guardian angel as well as our own private religion. Of course, this was probably just a proto-conscious aspect of our rapidly emerging Default Mode Network... but before it was fully integrated into our cognitive sense of self it was very likely the greatest mystery and the greatest source of hope we had ever known.

And while it seems I was not the first to have this same idea, it nevertheless stuck with me through much of my earlier through experiments and daydreams that came to define the body of my neurophilosophical doctrine. The ultimate conclusion that I came to hold was that the very concept or notion of religion or worshipful godhead was reducible to a high faith we placed above our conscious awareness to guide us through our own floundering/emerging sanity. Bearing in mind that to exist as a prey animal and live in a constant state of anxiety and fear is qualitatively not that different to being insane; those brain regions that helped us establish ourself as apex predators did not simply do so through improved brain function... much of the battle was in helping us perceive ourselves differently and dispensing with our legacy fears and prey instincts.

As we eventually grew to fear no animal (even those that might kill us by statistical chance) a void was inevitably left: we could still go insane and we still had a legacy reflex to 'look upward' to the higher domains of our non-conscious self to descend from the clouds and make things right. Earlier in evolution: this might have been something so simple as the inhibition of the limbic system by the prefrontal cortex. Now days: it takes on a remarkably more complex pattern of activation and yet upwards we ever look, and so upwards lies the salvation from the chaos of our own selves. Indeed if you have followed any of my earlier entires: you will be well familiar with the in-dream subjective experience I have detailed about having my own functionally segregated prefrontal/temporoparietal networks come online to save me from my own dreaming delirium. I have every reason to believe that earlier configurations of the human mind had a lot more in common with the current dreaming brain than any other form we could currently conceptualise, and thus is may yet be a very old reflex in our historical cognitive phylogeny.

In the fear of insanity: which ultimately reduces to the fear the great dangerous uncategorisable, we seek the higher faculties of our own mind to bring peace, tranquillity and reason to an otherwise unbearably helpless situation. And so high do we look; we seek that which communicates with us but that we do not necessarily even perceive as an aspect of our own selves. It makes sense that what I have described in the context of this dream, is exactly paralleled by this feeling: the terror of the unknown and the complete lack of place to turn except to myself.

So why did I dream it? To this question I have a solution. In my hard-headed belief in my own beliefs, and my lifelong lack of desire or even need to rely on another person for the emotional comfort and support that we so often draw from to stabilise our own thinking and bring sanity into our lives: I (or rather my dreaming brain) saw fit to put this philosophy to the ultimate test by simulating such a terror. It is not even that I am such an atheist: I just don't rely on others for spiritual guidance, and this happens to rule out organised religion as an ipso facto. But when push comes to shove, do I rely on those around me, in their capacity as my friends when all else crumbles down, and I am left feeling alone and exposed?

...I suppose this is the ultimate point in all this. I probably do. I am only human after all. But I have developed some very clear boundaries about how and when, and to what extend, I do rely on others to derive my internal clarity and consolidate my sense of self. And when push comes to shove, it seems my dreaming brain will ultimately respect these boundaries, and not simply see false idols in every anthropomorphic shadow.