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.