How to Train your Dalmatian

17/12/2014: 7 days later...
IMAGE: Carl Moore

This dream was perhaps one of the more intense, philosophically important dreams I have had in recent memory. Somewhere between psychedelically haunting, intelligent and outright strange, it has been on my mind since late last week and I feel myself now compelled to write about it.

The dream starts with a fairly standard narrative: My mother had recently purchased a new family pet and wished for me to play with it. It was described in-dream as a Dalmatian and Red Healer cross, though it basically just appeared as a Dalmatian. Brief side track: until writing this dream entry, and actually having cause to hyper-link the word "red healer"... I actually had no idea what this breed was. And it turns out that it is just a fairly common hybrid/Australian cattle dog, though prior to this: all entires in my memory would reliably bring up strong associations of "dangerous" and "independent", due to a story I have of such a bread almost killing a friend of mine. So coming back to topic: for whatever reason my dreaming brain was attempting its very best to sow weariness and unpredictability into this animal, from the moment of dream inception.

So I tried playing with the animal: and true to my previous statement, it started displaying problematic and adversarial behaviour, as far as dogs typically go. I would throw a ball, and it would run in some opposite direction. I would call for it; and either it would not come at all, or would come close then veer of in some other direction. It was frustrating and indeed I was growing quite frustrated. The next thing that happened was retrospectively quite amazing. The dog transformed into an 8-foot tall walking anthropomorphic being, with human gait and skeletal physiology but canine features. Then it started talking to me.

Dog: "See, I am a Dalmatian cross Red healer. That combines both the intelligence and loyalty of one breed with independence and adversity of another. You have to work with that."

Even in under the dreamer's delirium I was surprised by this. A talking dog!? If he could talk then why does he need training? But I persisted. I started giving the gargantuan nightmarish canine instructions, and he would either respond or fail to; each time with some aspect of feedback to give about his own breed's temperament and some trick to making use of that knowledge to simplify and improve the training process. The dog continued to run around, basically acting like a dog, except that he was now rather tall and evidently bipedal. I asked him to come to me, stating that I had some task I wished to show him and that I would appreciate his cooperation.

Dog: "It's no use asking me like that. I won't understand it. Dog's require instruction that feeds right into their emotional aspects of cognition; its what they are genetically hard-wired for. Try calling me with a melodic pitch and a sense of urgency. That tends to activate legacy pack behaviours"

I followed the dog's advice as best as I could; alas it was a bit much and I struggled to keep up with all of his instructions. Shortly after the dream changed its central concept, as the dog was a regular dog again, and was attacking ducks in a pond. Interestingly enough, these ducks seemed to be assembling artistic underwater mandalas made out of coloured fried rice. I briefly through about the idea of sustainable ecosystems, and mused the best way to preserve all of the duck's morale, the beauty of their creation and the nutritious/economic output of their pond when before I knew it, I was in another dream and the bipedal Dalmatian was but a distant forgotten thought.

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Dream Introspection

So what does this all mean? It is a curious situation indeed, a dog giving me spoken instructions about how to best give him unspoken instructions that he may be trained into obedience. And besides the necessary conundrum: this dream spoke to me quite deeply and it did immediately make some sense, at least upon my awakening. I feel that the central concept of this dream shares a remarkable similarity with the mechanisms through which the human brain communicates information inside of its own virtual world (since I have been thinking about this subject for quite some time) and it makes sense that this was how my brain found its way into repackaging my own ideas to myself while I sleep. In other words: we are more similar to the bipedal Dalmatian than we indeed realise, at least so I have gradually come to theorise.

Probably sounds confusing. Indeed it is a little bit much for many people, but in older psychodynamic theory (dissociation) it is more commonly accepted that our mind can consist of several non-integrated voices of agency. When it comes to neuroscience, such functional segregation of volitional agents in the brain-mind are increasingly becoming understood, and this, this and this link will hopefully canvas the progress so far. Since these discoveries are indeed rooted in hard science, not speculation and subjective observation of behaviour steeped in statistical analysis, such approaches will hopefully bear some very tangible fruit once it they reach maturity.

And while this dream, like all my philosophy-laden dreams, did not so much tell me anything that I did not already know, so much as express to me my own ideas in a state of perfection. And this idea was probably most easily expressed as the notion that we exist as a hierarchy of information states, all speaking essentially different internal languages, and that our cohesion and success as continuous beings relies primarily on the capability of one layer to translate its message to the one below. If that message becomes too fractured or too abstract, we loose our ability to know our own minds. Should it degenerate even further, we may even loose our ability to predict out own thoughts and neurosis would be an obvious consequence. Should we ultimately loose our ability to predict our own predictions: we would experience what I would call classic psychosis.

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Metacognition: A Rose by any other Name

If you were to consider where language is centred in the brain, and by that I mean the neural parcellation in which it is most significantly rate-limited; consider then that this parcellation (the Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus) occupies something of a philosophical conflict of interest: it is necessarily responsible for the very language used to describe itself. What does this mean? In my view, the phenomenology of cognition becomes somewhat unreliable when we so heavily depend on our own internal language to form and focus out thoughts, because such language can never entirely express the sum contents of our internal mental state. If I attempt to use language to explain and justify a complex problem, I am thus metacognitively compelling my entire brain to integrate and converge across a single brain region, and probably limiting a great deal of what that brain has to say in the process. And yet, we are still able to integrate this information at some innate level outside of language whenever we are required to, and because we have metacognition.

For the brain to function outside and above language, I feel we have to be conscious at a level that paradoxically evades even our own conscious awareness. I suppose this was the idea that was expressed back to me in this dream. By brining such control into the realm of spoken language we necessarily destroy it to some extent; and thus I have hypothesised the existence of an unconscious agent of cognition that exists (cryptically) above consciousness awareness. It is the disembodied interpreter that reads the will of the conscious brain and feeds itself back into that brain, doing what consciousness cannot do for itself. So far there is very little known about this, though science is catching up and these processes appear to be highly integral to the auto-suggestion that underpins the ability to dream lucidly. And while my own lucid dreaming ability has become incredibly rusty; I have trained myself relentlessly to recall my dreams with a very high state of clarity, and have no doubt this achievement owes its existence to a very similar process. Stay tuned, science is making excellent progress.