Rewinding my Dreams

6/05/2014: One week later...
IMAGE: violscraper

As mentioned in my post entry: I seldom feel any anxiety or emotion in my dreams, though there are exceptions to this. The following entry will seek to understand how it is that I am seemingly able to suppress my negative in-dream emotions, and discuss a novel way this process appears to play itself out in my phenomenological experience. It involves an unusual in-dream lucid skill: the ability to turn the flow of time backwards.

There was once a time where, quite reliably, I would have nightmares where very bad things would happen. Not violent things, not surreal things... just bad things. Falling down and loosing a tooth, having a favourite object break. Things that would really upset me in real life, that in the context of the dream world became amplified with such an intense emotion and sense of loss and broken attachment that it was quite reliably above and beyond what waking consciousness could produce. In a sense, the coping mechanisms of real life were suppressed and I would experience such a raw sense of defeat and regret that even the relief of waking would not entirely make up for it. These are dreams I still have, but with one recent innovation that seems to ameliorates the suffering considerably.

It probably started happening about 6 months ago, and they go a little something like this: something terrible happens, a tell-tale dread, anxiety and feeling of loss would start to rise within me, but then a creeping lucidity would enter my thoughts and a resonant feeling or intuition would speak to me from a level of awareness above and beyond the dream world itself. It has no voice per se; though it does seem to speak with one. It feels like integrated sense of understanding; raw unstructured thought, and it has no sound but it talks none the less. It could even be the volition to communicate that precedes the phenomenon of spoken voice by the most infinitesimal fraction of time, but this is all. The proto-voice essentially says to me "calm down, this is not so bad. This is not even real" and for a faint second, without having my dream delusion broken; I feel calm and in control. A happiness and sense of relaxation then flows over me, and for a moment there is nothing in the physical world that can not stop me experiencing this happiness. Alas I am still dreaming; and as far a I can tell, the object of my loss is very much real, and so this emerging cognitive dissonance brings my focus sharply to the problem at hand:I am unhappy, and I do not want to be. Emotion becomes reality and reality changes in my dreaming-mind from the role of hunter to the hunted.

With a feeling of complete control, and no tangible lucidity beyond the realisation that my loss is within the power of my own perception, I start to rewind time. Yes, literally turn it backwards. The dream world spins back, at slightly faster a pace than it has proceeded, and all my emotions are sequentially experienced in reverse. Slowly the unhappiness and loss gets 'sucked up' until the happiness I experienced at the moment of creeping lucidity is all I can now feel. And I am standing somewhere back at the start of the dream event, now perfectly able to avoid the choice that leads to that disdainful consequence.

So, questions: How do I rewind a dream without being lucid? This is something I could only ever only hope to articulate. In many ways it feels like flying (in dream) in the sense that it becomes the most intuitive action possible; like something you could replicate after waking if only you tried hard enough. I have actually lost count of the number of times in childhood that I would learn to fly in dreams by harnessing this exact feeling of control and then wake up wondering if I might fly in real life, if only I could remember that feeling. In the dream world: going against known physics does not come cheaply, mind... you pay for it with raw determination, power of mind, and a strange esoteric memory of how it was done the last time. In a way, rewinding time in a dream feels like the second stage of learning how to fly, in that it is much harder and takes much more of the same substance to achieve but remains quintessentially the same kind of control using the same cognitive process.

So what is actually happening here? I will reserve my analysis of flying in dreams for a future post, I feel it has a lot more depth to it than I can make space for here. But the rewinding aspect I feel is an representation for what might actually be taking place in my brain. An outbreak of emotion, erupting from my limbic system, and my pre-frontal cortex activating and dismantling these emotions one by one, probably in the sequence they were created. In waking reality: this would of course be an entirely conscious process... using mindfulness, deductive reasoning, objective awareness and experience to dissemble ones unpleasant moods in particular sequence, like a puzzle box. Knowing this sequence is thus knowing the emotional state's vulnerability and allows us, through our own pre-frontal wisdom, to overcome our base emotional volition on a daily basis. Except that in the dream world; our pre-frontal cortex is both actively suppressed and also potentially functionally segregated from us. In short: it is not even ours to do with as we like.

I hypothesise that the voice of reason, this whisper from the angels that descends in my dreams to assure me all is well is my own pre-frontal cortex taking some degree of pity on me, trying to survive as best I can without its magnanimous computations to make all right in the end. To fully restore integration with the pre-frontal cortex and its emergent secondary consciousness might end the dream state all together, however it seems simple communication is well within the safety margins. I conclude it thus reasonable that my particular feeling of willpower and control that allows me to both rewinding my dreams/unwind my emotional sequences, and to defy the physical laws of the dream world itself, is simply the act my my integrated consciousness communicating with and taking some degree of control over my disintegrated, and parallely conscious frontal networks. All the relevant theory holds that it may be entirely possible for a brain region to be extremely powerful, and yet not be the object of central conscious awareness or control due to intricacies in how network topology is layered. In summary, I feel that despite such design (at least according to the Hobson model) rendering primary and secondary consciousness functionally discrete; such segregation or integration exists on a 'necessary spectrum' and thus each element can potentially modulate the parameters of this spectrum on which they sit to a very limited extent. This has been my own experience and holds strongly to my own theory of consciousness.

So what does it feel like? being able to call ones pre-frontal regions onto negative emotional states like a proverbial attack dog, instead of having to man the controls personally using raw integrative conscious experience? Pretty nice, wouldn't you believe. It really makes me respect what the pre-frontal cortex does in waking life (or more to the point: what I do with it myself) though I am in the end quite glad that is always there and always a part of me, for I would hate to call for it only to have it fail to come to my rescue. Perhaps this is why I micromanage it; and always keep it a proverbial synaptic hop away from whatever centrally coherent nexus of information integration I call my sense of self. When all is said and done though, I am eternally grateful that when I enter the dream state, and my secondary consciousness gets let off its proverbial leash; it still thinks enough of what is left that instead of bounding off into the sunset and making its escape; it opts instead to have its fun but never so far from its owner that it cannot intervene and assist when the beloved master cries for help. When I think on it like this; the ontological implications questions raised are just about endless.

In a previous post I made the suggestion that 'I am my complexes' and yet I enable these very complexes by accepting and observing their existence in the first place. A slightly more chilling analogy might be that my 'complexes are me' but only so long as they wish to sub-serve themselves to a higher integrated whole. If dreaming constitutes both the planned disintegration of that whole, and the opportunity to experience re-integration in a voluntarily capacity, then sanity is truly an emergent property of protoconscious dynamics. Nothing more, and nothing less, and the agency for producing and maintaining sanity is as much in our own minds as it is in the hands of elements unseen and unknown.

...perhaps this is why I do love the philosophy of neuroscience so deeply. There would simply appear to be no good answers; only good questions.