NREM in Action

20/05/2015: 2 hours later... 
IMAGE: Vugrin et al.

Success!! After a relative period of dream recall inactivity, I have been waking up with startlingly vivid images and autobiographical memories of my nights experiences.

On this account, it was not so much a dream in the classical sense (which I would associate with REM) but an NREM dream. Whether these are indeed dreams or not is currently subject to debate, but I will say that NREM can be both dream like in a phenomenological and neurophysiological sense without strictly meeting the definition. Then again, wasn't it David Chalmers who demonstrated that all verbal disputes could be reduced to a disagreement over the definition of a single word? Perhaps the issue here is that nobody can actually say where the boundaries of dreaming consciousness lie in the first place, because like our own waking consciousness, they are necessarily fluid.

I remember my NREM dreams very rarely. They are indeed strange: Repetitive, visually weak going on non-visual, often just auditory or streams of thoughts. It is like having your brain stuck on a slowly evolving automatic loop, and I can only describe it as what it must feel like to be having an acute episode of psychosis, without the unpleasantness.

The night before, I had replied to a text message from a girl then went to sleep. I have met her only a few times, and we had organised a date of sorts but distractions and general ambivalence saw that I never followed through to actually meet her again. That was a month ago, and yesterday she contacted me out of the blue. I was curious what her response would be to my response. Anger? Surprise? Elation? I went to sleep on this thought.

At around 9am I received my a silent vibration from my beside table, indicating a response. I was sound asleep, but I noticed it. This is when the NREM loop begun. I would reach across and pick up the phone, and read her message (which would elicit strong emotions). This would not last long, for just enough lucidity would intervene for me to realise that I was visually blind; all I could see was a feint blue-grey fog. I would then understand that I was not indeed awake, and that the message I was reading was just an apparition from my dreaming brain; and I was simply experiencing a thought-loop. I would slip back into a thoughtless rest again, but it would not be long before I would arouse and grow curious, fictitiously reach out for my phone and thus generate another round of this NREM loop.

How many iterations did I experience? Probably 4-6. Each response was drastically different; ranging from hostile rejection to calm platonic reason to seductive enticement. I probably cycled my way through every single extreme possibility that theoretically existed, within the confines of my applied waking imagination. Except I was not awake, and my brain was doing this all of its own accord. I am not so interested in the how or even the why of all this, a least not for this entry... it is relatively self explanatory and entirely consistent with the emerging scientific literature: REM essentially resolves/beta tests hypothesis and synthetic learning operations, while NREM encodes the outcome, or so my theory goes. What my dreaming brain was essentially doing was unconsciously preparing me for what I would have to face when I woke up, so that I would not have to face unexpected emotion unprepared and unhabituated.

For me the question is, and almost always is: Why did I remember? I can only speculate that in going to sleep literally minutes after sending my reply, having had the whole day to think about what I was going to do, I was just plain curious. And in giving this curiosity oxygen; I had unknowingly engaged in a kind programmed auto-suggestion that saw aspects of my higher cortical functions come into states of activation when theses specific cues were detected. The NREM content would have been pretty much the same no matter I had done, I would probably say... for I am a light (yet very sturdy) sleeper and seldom awake unaware of what has transpired in my cognitive absence. So I would say that my own conscious engagement played very little part in mediating the connection between the vibration of my phone and the subsequent cycle of NREM mentation.

Where my consciousness did play a part, for certain, was in the fact I came back to a state of wakefulness with these memories in my very possession. I would probably say that once aroused, my own consciousness (primary) was just far too interested in what was happening to let itself go back to its intended state of disassociation, like a child who spots his parents hiding away his Christmas presents and cannot help but ruin his own surprise by investigating their contents.

Which brings me to return to the original statement of this entry: Was this actually a Dream? This I will leave to the reader to decide. However I am inclined to say that before we can answer this question, we have to ask ourself what the phylogenetic purpose of dreams, particularly recollection, are in the first place. This NREM encounter felt very much like a case of the brain tricking its own biological parameters, creating these memories but achieving very little in the process except potentially undermining its own intended function by creating the contents of this report. In settling this debate, I think it is important that we ask ourselves what role our own consciousness plays in our mental processes, and where we draw the line in separating unconscious mental content, from the mental content we make conscious, from mental content we are powerless but to perceive. From the experience of this entry, I am inclined to say that NREM exists somewhere between the first two, and REM somewhere between the latter two.

The birth of the esoteric

12/05/2015: 25 Years Later... 
IMAGE: RolandtheIllustrator

The following is a dream from my distant childhood. It is probably the first in my colourful accumulation of unusual dreams; and marks the commencement of my long journey into the search for psychological meaning through dream introspection. And like all of these colourful dreams, I have simply never forgotten it. The dream in question took place when I was approximately 5 years of age; yet I remember it as clearly now as I did upon waking in the late 1980's.

I have been rather busy of late, and sleeping irregularly. Short of having any new dreams worth writing about, I thought it might be good to use this brief opportunity to write about the 'classic' dreams such this one, from my early life.

The dream itself was very haunting, and emotionally intense. I am not quite sure how it started, except it involved me standing among a crowd, at a large night market with my father. As I wandered through the crowded space, I gazed at the many stalls and experienced emotions that I had no words for and had almost certainly never experienced in my waking life. It would be many years before I would experience them at all outside of dreams.

These emotions could best be described as an intense curiosity, interwoven with a lustful desire to consume and the strange magnetism that comes through the pursuit of the extreme esoteric and the taboo. I do not have a word for this emotion, for I experience it in waking life so rarely. I have probably had more of it, pound for pound, in this dream than I had in the sum 20 years after, and this is why I can never forget it's etching-like visuals.

The market was enclosed at all sides, perhaps like a large circus tent, and there where people everywhere. The stalls themselves were aesthetically reminiscent of medieval Japan, and they were selling all manner of martial arts equipment: various powders and explosives, magical goods, blades and clothing. Looking back it had the distinct feel of eastern romantic meets high fantasy, although being at the age that I was I doubt I would have had a particularly well established concept of either to draw upon in my construction of this dream. I am, in this case inclined to say that the emotion was entirely endogenous, and that the vivid dream imagery perhaps only resembled the aforementioned themes post-hoc, as I was able to reproduce similar emotions in established aesthetic styles. For this reason, I may never know what I was actually perceiving at the time.

I walked around, approaching stalls but never being able to penetrate the dense crowds, only ever getting a small glance and the curious contents before me. At some point I turned and noticed that I was not with my father any longer. Perhaps he was lost, or I was lost, or he had simply left me on some account? I noticed now that the market stalls no longer had their quaint attraction, and were now just regular market stalls selling entirely uninteresting wares. I scanned with my eyes, and felt an intense longing for that emotion; that strange and secretive desire to witness and posses the truly special and exclusive, but found nothing in any of the stalls that held any value. I continued searching for my father, and noticed a diffuse crowd gathered around one stall in particular. They were playing a strange kind of carnival game, and were throwing rings or balls onto an angled wooden structure, with holes or maybe pegs on its surface. The game board, several meters large, was covered in painted illustrations of what I can describe now as hooded ninja. Staring at these illustrations, and loosing all focus on the mundane crowds around me and their unremarkable gambling activities, a flicker of lost memory came over me and the images seemed to speak to me from another dimension.
 

Part II

I was sitting on a large fortress-like platform, made of wooden logs. My father was standing behind me, but I was too absorbed in what I was doing, focused on this strange object I was holding. It was a rectangular toy, about the size of a cereal box, and no thicker than an inch. It had a bright yellow and red surface, with black masked figures illustrated all over in various poses. It had small holes all over its surface, with chrome metal ball bearings inside, contained behind a glass screen. I was not so much playing with the toy but just staring at the illustrations, somehow they aroused in me feelings that I could not escape. My father spoke to me, but I was too focused on this strange thing. It was not very remarkable in itself, but something about the illustrations just reached out to me, and I could not remember where I had seen them or what they had meant. As I put down the toy and turned to my father, a faint emotion begun to leave me. It was that same emotion of mystery and taboo but it was so faint that I did not mourn its departure, and I let the distractions of the present moment take over.

We set off down the platform, down a crude wooden staircase and across a muddy dirt field to a road where we walked without end. As moments went by, I would return my thoughts to the strange toy; conflicted on the one hand in focusing on the present moment and at the same time, mourning the loss of mystery and meaning that seemed to have left me. As we continued walking, we encountered other such wooden fortresses along the pathways and stopped to investigate them. In each case, I would hope to find some relic or some totem that would bring me this feeling; but I would always be disappointed. There was something to primal, so distinct about the way it made me feel it was like having a sense of smell for it and simply smelling nothing. In every case I was disappointed, and my distress grew.

After some time, I was alone in the dream and I was wandering all by myself. I had resolved to find my way back to the original wooden structure, and relocate this strange toy, alas I found myself was wandering aimlessly across vast and labyrinthine muddied pathways, and finding nothing. I begun to fill with panicked intensity, that this object was potentially lost forever, and I turned back and forth at a great crossroads between ambiguous and indifferentiable pathways. I came out of the dream, and I found myself lying awake in my bed. I could remember everything about both dreams, but the panicked feeling of loss survived. For I was a 5 year old child; and I had still no such toy.

๑๑

 

Analysis...

 

So, where did I find these emotions later in life? It was not for many years, and only in very small quantities, during rare and unexpected moments. My first memories of this feeling in waking life was in playing early RPG video games on a SEGA console, and would usually come when I entered an in-game store selling weapons, magic and armour. Needless to say, I was an extremely ardent consumer of high-fantasy and cyberpunk themed video games, maybe for exactly this reason, and they always held a particular place in my dopamine releasing neurons. I also recall, around this same time, experiencing such an emotion when my father found an unspent bullet by the side of the road on a family holiday, and put it in my hand and showed it to me. Another time, I experienced this while canons were being fired, on board a restored naval schooner at a tourist destination.

Later in life, I would find small droplets of these emotions when first acquainting myself with Bit Torrent software, and suddenly finding the worlds entire digital entertainment catalogue at my fingertips, remote and free of charge. About the same time, I experienced similar emotional feeling downloading and learning to use various hacking utilities and auto-scripts from a secret website I had found, alas the 90's washed this all away very quickly and technological progression saw that I never went on to become a hacker of any significance.

I experienced this feeling again in my early twenties, when first walking into an Airsoft shop during my first trip to Japan (Replica firearms that fire painful plastic pellets) and spent nearly half a day playing with inspecting the several hundred items they had on display, before finally purchasing one and carrying it out of the shop proudly. I would again feel this feeling several years later, when shopping for my first spear gun, having just found myself living in a tropical location indefinitely, and seeing/holding one for these devices in my hands for the very first time. I continue to feel this emotion today, when using online websites to browse and order equipment related to free-diving, spearfishing and camping.

I think this dream speaks very much for itself. Humans have strived for the esoteric, the powerful and the magically profane for as long as we have existed. It has produced religious belief in magic and superstition as much as it has produced gunpowder and quantum cryptography but it is ultimately all one and the same: the drive to maser ones environment through the discovery and the attainment of sacred power. If I was to reduce this emotion one label: I could call it the military incentive for the attainment of technology. I encountered this very early in my dreaming life; I might even go so far as to say that my dreaming brain discovered it for its very self. It was probably lurking there in my epigenetic memory in some capacity, and dreaming brains are very good at uncovering things like this.

Through the years my mind has often wandered back to this dream; and relived the desire and wonder for whatever it was being sold at the strange stalls in the market. This emotion is still there, but I now associate it more with actual life. If generations of evolution has left me with an instinctive desire to craft a sharper spear point, in a world where this is exceedingly a counter-productive behaviour to act out, I suppose in the end its just a price we pay for having evolved ourselves so fast. I am only glad that there are fantasy computer games and fishing sports to fill its wake.