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.

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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. 

Paradise with a friend

17/4/2015: Two days later...
IMAGE: Gazornonplat

This is a reoccurring dream I have had, possibly 3 times or more. I loose count, I literally forget every time but the memory becomes stronger somehow. Now I have had this dream enough times I am brought to the point where I can write about it. 

The dream starts out a variety of ways, but I am always brought to a place from my childhood. It is (in real life) along a river bank near my childhood home, right between a horse paddock and a golf course. There is a hidden path that link the two areas; across a gorge caused by soil erosion and a fallen tree. It was always a prime place as a teenager to sneak away and smoke mysteriously acquired cigarettes and other exciteful contraband. I have no idea why my dreams keep revolving around this place, but they appear subtly different every time. The following is an account of the most recent.

In the most recent dream, I had come across this place as always.The sense of awe and mystery that invariably accompanies the discovery of a childhood place was certainly there the first time, but has been fading in every subsequent instance. More recently, it has been replaced by a creeping lucidity that I am about to have 'one of those pathway dreams'. And on this instance it was just strong enough to arouse some mild excitement. I jumped across the gorge and went exploring, wondering what the dream would have in store for me this time.

The dream was very vivid, as were all my dreams that night. They were also exceptionally repetitive, which I put down to all the cheese I had eaten the night before and the subsequent 5-hydroxytryptophan synthesis while I slept. I remember walking back and forth along this path, to collect a friend for some meaningless, unimportant activity. It was a very euphoric dream, despite the repetition. Eventually I came to a crossroads at the end of the path, that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the actual path in real life. It contained on the one side, a field of marijuana plants, and on the other a stony uphill pathway. I had in my possession a BMX and decided to explore the stony uphill path, aware at some basal level that it was the better of two options but entirely oblivious as to why. In all my dreams to date I have followed this path, and all have had the same positive conclusion.

At the end of the path I found myself at a spectacular sight: It was an epic landscape of rolling green hills that progressed at steady declination into the horizon far bellow. These hills were somehow far up in the clouds, despite being at ground level only moments ago, and were saturated with bright warm sunlight. In some of these dreams I begin exploring, either running up and down or lying down and relaxing. A persistent feeling came to me: "I have to bring this friend back here, she would enjoy it so much". At this point, I am usually filled with a very strange kind of reverse lucidity, I say to myself:

Me: "I know I am not dreaming so I will certainly remember to take her back here. If I was dreaming then I would just enjoy this by myself, but since this is real I definitely have to remember to tell her!"

Most of the rest of the dream is split between me enjoying the experience and being so anxious not to forget to tell her; I don't enjoy it much. Eventually I work my way back down to ground level, and the dream starts changing. I then become aware that I am, in fact dreaming and feel a momentary pang of double disappointment: I will not be able to take Chantal to this amazing place, and I also forfeited much of my potential pleasure remembering the location of a place that did not actually exist. And so the dream changes, and I eventually wake up with no memory to recall except for a trace of a hint of something that never actually makes it to conscious awareness.

In this instance I think I worked out that I was dreaming before the green hills came to an end, and thus I was able to bring this memory into waking awareness after the fact. Curiously: rather than enjoy myself, the anxiety was replaced with something else. I was stressed that the bike I had been given, the BMX, was not my usual mountain bike and I would not be able to handle the hills as effectively as I could otherwise. I made my way down to the bottom in equal measure of euphoria and dysphoria before once again the dream moved on.

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Analysis...

 

This dream is interesting for several reasons. It seems clear to me that this whole phenomenon is an exercise in training myself to live in the moment, to abandon anxiety, and the tendency I posses that sees me walk away from real happiness just for the chance I may have to improve it. And clearly I fail, time and time again. What makes this more interesting still; is the gradual eventuation of dream lucidity that ultimately sees me aware of the paradox I am in, but does not make one shred of difference, in that I still end up divided and anxious over some technicality of the dream itself.
 

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned in all this: about the pursuit of happiness. If you are searching for more happiness than you have, you probably can't be happy as an ipso facto. Lesson number two: bringing a problem into hyperconsciousness is not necessarily a viable solution to such dilemmas either. In either case, I suppose I have not been a very well behaved dreamer. In waking life I have no difficulty reprioritising my thought process to achieve high states of happiness... it seems in my dreaming state this talent is lacking.

Then again, if the purpose of the dream was to take my friend back here, then perhaps all the anxiety was not ill-spent: I have now remembered the dream and have a chance to transport here to this place through my writing. It may not be the same, but I hope it will be enough. And perhaps now, I can simply enjoy these dreams for what they are. A beautiful place, just for myself.

Religion and Insanity

2/2/2015: 10 days later...
IMAGE: BeadMaster7

This was a dream I had while on holiday in New Zealand. I would probably have to say, this is the best dream I have ever had in terms of its ability to seed my curiosity. If ever I felt that dreams could be not only auto-creative, but creative to an extent that it equals waking experience, it is after a dream like this.

The dream begins with myself and a good friend Liam exploring the suburb of my birth, Northcote. In this dream (as in real life) there is a rather large and strange radio antenna, that as a child I had always contemplated the purpose of (seen here from street view) and we were advancing upon it in the dream with some notion that it held military or secret intelligence significance. The next few moments of the dream escaped my usually sharp dream-recollection abilities, for reasons that will soon become extremely apparent. However several minutes later I found myself alone, in a strange Church at the base of this antenna, walking through the darkness.

I walked up to a group of people kneeling and chanting, with their eyes closed. They were repeating mantras in another language, and I felt myself appalled at their religiosity and dedication to such pointless ritual. In real life, despite my atheism I am deliberately understanding of religions practices such as these, as I can typically rationalise them on their sociological or psychological merits. However in this dream, I was full of arrogance for what I witnessed.

I listened to what one of the chanting women was saying. It was in another language and yet, no sooner had I turned my attention to it, it was suddenly within my comprehension. And they were saying something that went like this:

Acolyte: "All life exists in the purpose of transcending its organisational structure and its hierarchy, not via ascension through competition but through an ability to form higher structures that subersume these hierarchies"

...

Acolyte: "As biological life forms we are just a single pattern consisting of other patterns under our control. As we identify higher order patterns from which we are, in turn subject to influence... we may assume this influence for ourselves and ever closer we become to the source of all things"

It was fairly non-controversial new age content, typical of Spiral Dynamics, some branches of Buddhism and possibly all religious doctrines once you dig into their theology. This is not to say that it is wrong, or even contrary to scientific knowledge... however I would argue that such ideas are a little too abstract to base ones ethical compass on, or even to take too seriously... and that's more or less the extent of my criticisms.

I remember thinking at this point "all these words might make sense, but are so much richer and more meaningful when accessed through a scientific/rational perspective". And interestingly enough, a multitude of emerging scientific fields are actually producing ideas consistent with these. It was probably my post-hoc knowledge of them that allowed me to so quickly reverse engineer the language of this dream in the first place. Since dreams are so deeply emotional, in waking life it was simply a matter of searching for the sentence that produced the same emotional valence, which I found by applying a particularly sensationalist filter to some of the more common ideas to emerge from complex systems. This is my favoured technique for detailed dream recollection. So there I was, accepting of the message but critical of the way it was being delivered and the significance with which it was being interpreted. I immediately felt sorry for the kneeling acolytes, for they were essentially being seduced by scientific concepts and lacked the self-reflection to know it.

 ๑

Sanity Lost... 

 

It was about this point that the dream changed and revealed its major surprise. As I stood back, quite aware of the conflicting interpretations of the contents of the chanting voices yet resolute to take my hard-headed view of things, something inside compelled me to join the chanting to experience it for myself. I did this, and as I let my scepticism go for the slightest moment, a gripping feeling emerged from deep inside and I felt something that was almost half way between the feeling of laughing, crying and having an orgasm. And as I chanted the words, the feeling grew and grew. It was not that the words held any more significance or that I understood them with any more depth: it was simply that their detached meaning seemed to reach right inside and take effect at a truly emotional level. The affinity I felt for the ideas contained were almost like the affinity one has for a close relative, and I felt personally attached to the meaning behind the words.

It was about this time that something truly broke through, and the words turned to music. I had grown so detached and non-conscious of the chanting that it has become automatic, and now that automatic sound production had shifted into an entirely different form, and the music started to grow louder and louder. It was the second time my brain has produced truly notable in-dream music and this time it was humbling in its clarity. It produced the same emotion to the chanting of the mantra, and by that I mean the emotion did not change, but it was now mapping directly onto a musical sequence and not spoken word. It was at this point that I kind of lost myself, and started to open my eyes. All the people in the room who were previously chanting were now staring at me: I had been screaming in a kind of zeal and realised that I had made quite a commotion. I was momentarily unsure if they held me to be a crackpot or an messiah or how they could even tell the difference (a criticism continue to hold regarding religious belief derived from prophetic sources). This curiosity gave way and it was not long before the internally generated music burst through, leaving me in a state of hysterical laughter and without self control. The emotions were just that strong.

The acolytes dispersed and shortly after that, my mother entered the room. I was prone on the floor, struggling to stand up, with the music still projecting loudly from inside my own skull. I tried explaining to her what was happening to me from a scientific perspective, to restore my credulity and alleviate the shame of my state of being. But as if a hysterical child; all I could convey was more hysteria and all words and logic evaded my grasp. She looked down on me with disappointment and pity and I knew at that point, I was truly lost. The music kept on playing and I was paralysed by its beauty, and destroyed by this loss of control. I was unsure if I even cared, but part of me certainly did.

 

UPDATE

I have produced this song from memory, with great assistance from Marc :)

 

Feel free to listen while you read!

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Psychodynamic Neurology

Can you ascertain the physiological dynamics of this dream might have come down to? I certainly can't, but I still enjoy the challenge. In my view, this dream more or less reduces to my own brain wrestling for the interpretation of a single idea (metaphysical transcendence). The perspective of rational/scientific interpretation would most certainly have emanated from various sections of my Orbitofrontal Cortex (Specifically BA11 and BA10) and perhaps the Left Hemisphere more generally. I say this because the sheer act of 'standing back' and manipulating an concept in its abstract representation seems to be a preferred cognitive style of the Left hemisphere, while detached reasoning and logical analysis, both conscious and unconscious, appear to emanate from BA11 and BA10 respectively. It is also a reasonable assumption that my Superior Temporal Gyrus, specifically BA22 was also heavily involved as part of this network, given that it is primarily responsible for the 'output' of internally generated language.

From the perspective of the religious ecstasy, I have a lot more fun trying to decipher what might have taken place. Plenty of evidence to date points to the Right Temporal Lobe being at the epicentre of religiosity in the brain, however have come to consider a more detailed picture involving feedback between the Amygdala, the Insula and Visual Cortex as holding more intricate clues. This especially comes into focus when one joins together the role of the Precuneus in Religiosity, and the role of the Visual Cortex more generally. Factoring heavily into this is also the role of interoception and the Insula, as well as the veridicity of internally generated experiences.

Taken together, I have come to conclude that brain ultimately seeks to generate a cohesive reality from a substrates of interdependently competitive brain regions/networks, and will generally settle on some compromise between what is internally most coherent, and most externally (socially) sanctioned. In my own case: the entire dream was an attempt to see things from the other side of my own tribal theological outlook, and this I did with great success. Despite the euphoria of experiencing my own scientific world view through in such a profound and intense way: my own shame at being drawn into religious tradition left me with mixed feelings. As much as an indictment as this entire piece may be on ritualised religious practice, in the end the dream was just as much an indictment on the atheistic convention of striping away emotion from the pursuit of knowledge.

I do not think these feelings are in of themselves harmful, just as I do not see the Amygdala or the Insula as in of themselves 'worthless appendages' in the phylogeny of the human brain. However it is clear that, as a society we may need to have a deeper conversation about what exactly constitutes 'human experience' and critically analyse such experience before rejecting them out of hand.

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  Waking up, Sanity Gained

 

After waking up, I think I commenced what was probably the most intense race to produce a post-dream memory I have ever undertaken, and my efforts were entirely focused on remembering this song. Why? I wanted to know (somewhat objectively) whether my brain had actually experienced spontaneous creativity or whether the entire experience was distorted through the emotional amplification of the Amygdala and Insula, attributing the song with qualities of intensity that it did not actually have. Thankfully, I am now relatively good at committing post-waking dream memories into longer term memory and I was able to recall key aspects of the song I was hearing. I am working with a friend with music production experience to have the result made real; and I will publish it soon.

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.

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.

I dream of JulieAnne

25/11/2014: 12 hours (and one tea) later...
IMAGE: tommykane

This is a dream I had about a person who is very special to me. Unlike so many of my other entires, I will not attempt to explain the meaning of this dream. It may speak for itself; in fact I actually hope that for the individuals reading it does indeed say something. It is not a particularly complex dream; in fact I would say that it is refreshingly simple as far as my dreams go. It touched me deeply and this is why I now take the time to write it up.

In my experience: some things in life are just too precious and delicate to survive intellectual deconstruction, and the interactions with the ones around us are probably a very good example of this. So whoever you are, I hope that you enjoy this entry simply for what it is, and what it has to say from your eyes.

The dream started rather abruptly, with myself sitting on a circular raft or wooden board, floating in the middle of the ocean. The water was warm; and it would gently rise and fall but overall was calm and pleasant. Thought I could not see the bottom; I intuited that the entire ocean was no more than waist deep. It stretched on endlessly; and the horizon was bordered at all sides by a range of beautiful mountains emerging out of the water itself. Sitting there in front of me, straddling another floating wooden circle, was the person mentioned in the title of this entry.

JulieAnne and I were talking about life, ourselves and general random nonsense. The words themselves were not the focus, and only with effort could I sense they were there at all. I am not even sure it had any language attached; it was just an expression of emotion and human connection and the syllables were nothing more than subtle diagnostic beeps that indicated both organisms were functioning as normal. We talked and talked; but what we said did not matter. We were just there, as ourselves and that was all that existence was.

I turned my attention to the wondrous mountains that surrounded us. They seemed to just emerge out of the backdrop like icebergs, and though distant, towered over us from the impossible horizon. I imagined one collapsing: the tidal wave it would produce would surely reach us; with the water so shallow. It would wash us away. It could kill us. An intense anxiety ran through me and I became transfixed with the idea that we had to leave this place.

"Aaaaa  aaaa aaaaaa?" JulieAnne asked. It had no meaning, but it told me to come back to reality. I rejoined the conversation and the familiar relaxation and calm came over me. we continued talking. Before long my attention creeped back to the mountains, and once again I worried about what might happen if they started to crumble and fall into the surrounding ocean. And once again, I came back to the calming conversation and forgot all about it. After a time; I decided that the collapse was inevitable and we should really leave at some point. I told her this, and we agreed to swim back to the shore.

We paddled back on our boards slowly, arms and legs hanging over the sides, and continued our conversation, savouring it for every last second. As we headed back our dialogue had started to resemble language once more. It still bore that calming feeling; that representation of the interpersonal connection we both shared, but as the linguistic meaning came more and more into focus, the emotional magic of the exchange drifted ever into the background. We began talking about what we would do once we were back on shore. She had to work, and did not look forward to it. I had to work too; but not till much later. I did not dread it as much as her. We were now almost at the shore line, and people were standing around a wooden landing that was level with the rising and falling waterline.

Back on shore, there was a distance between us, and we both looked out into the ocean; realising we would rather be back out there, floating in peace. The collapsing mountains now seemed like a distant and empty concern, and I am not even sure we even believed it was going to happen any more. We talked about our stresses and our everyday lives, she had patients to treat and I had to sort out what I was doing with my elaborate plans. We parted ways, and I went about the rest of the dream. That anxiety of the mountains collapsing never quite left me: in fact it ghosted me for the remainder of this dream in a very subtle form, and I woke up feeling it too. It had nothing to do with impending doom, I think it was just the feeling of drifting away from another being, and it was the feeling of being alone.

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I hoped you enjoyed reading this. Some dreams are best left to intuition, and for once neuroscience has nothing it can tell me that I did not already know. And while that is becoming a rarer and rarer thing for me these days; it is something I continue to search for. Sometimes there is more to be said without an answer than with one.

Northcote Tip: exploration and exploitation

6/11/2014: Three days later...
IMAGE: caoimhghin

The following is a vivid dream I had some nights ago. It took me well back to my childhood, in the sense that I have not had a dream like this in quite some time. If I had to explain it: I would probably put it into the category of pure adventure.

The dream basically consists of me exploring a place that is familiar to me, and very much rooted in every day life. When some arbitrary boundary is crossed (such as a doorway or fence) and the dream takes a dramatic change, and reality goes out the window. This boundary bridges the dream world with the fantasy architecture and psychedelic form of the imagination itself. And the endless discovery of the unreal brings with it a kind of pure unadulterated excitement with every dreaming step that reliably evades description. I will now attempt a summary of the dreams events and what they mean to me.

I was in my back yard at my old childhood house in Northcote. This can be a very strange and almost dream-like suburb in its own right (anyone who grew up here in the 90's will know what I mean) but for the purposes of this dream, I was a child again in my childhood home, and everything was normal. I was exploring my back garden, when suddenly I walked out past my back fence into the bluestone laneway behind my house. These are another curiosity too: originally build so that horse-drawn carts could take away human waste by night; some Melbourne suburbs have simply preserved them and they serve no known human purpose that I know of except puncturing bicycle tires and scaring the hell out of young children. The laneway behind my house always served as a mystical curiosity to me, growing up... you never knew what out would find in one. They each had their own curious personality; and they allowed you access to the proverbial underbelly of the quiet suburban streets all around. A friend and I used to explore them on our BMX's on school holidays and probably increased our emotional intelligence by a decade in the process.

So back to my dream! I stepped into this laneway, and reality gave up on itself. It was a little like peering into the fridge in the original Ghostbusters; except that I did not scream but was overcome with an intense sense of curiosity, euphoria, and awe mixed in with a discrete foreboding and a creeping lucidity that this should really not be here. When I think on it: this dream is very much part and parcel a homology of a much older recurring dream I would have, involving zombies. This dream takes a very different flavour however; it is almost always set during daylight hours, and almost always involves either my own house or the house of a close relative. Otherwise, I suppose the two dreams are very much the same.

Instead of looking into my laneway: I found myself gazing into a sprawling post-apocalyptic / Mad Max-esque complex or compound. Some voiceless narrator told me "Aaah, so that is Northcote Tip. Too bad it burned down". Another brief piece of inner-north history: Nothcote once had a brickworks with accompanying clay quarry. By the time I was old enough to know any different; all the clay was gone and it was now used for landfill (non-colonial types might know a tip better as "rubbish dump"). If laneways scared you as a child: then the tip was probably Hades itself. I was never so brave to explore it myself, though I went to school with those that would. They were mostly refugees from the 91' invasion of Kuwait or Khmer Rouge holocaust survivors so I don't hold myself too harshly for this.

As I started to explore the fabled and forbidden Northcote Tip at the end of my back garden, I became immediately aware (in the sense that you can become aware, but not actually know it) that this was not the tip at all, but actually a sprawling thrift shop. At one end, people would deposit their junk, and at the other end, there was some sort of showroom for refurbished furniture, vintage collectables and all manner of things. In a sense then it was a tip. In the middle section, were a series of workshops where the owner would restore and categorise the junk for later sale. Sections were, true to in-dream cannon, burned down or otherwise destroyed. Various couches and motorbikes lay spread all over the workshop floor, in varying stages of deconstruction and repair. The narrators voice picked up once more: "The owner went crazy, and burned it all down. Such a shame" and a sadness it me. I had only just discovered this marvellous institution and already it was gone and never coming back. The speechless voice continued... "Then again, you would have to be half-crazy to run this place to begin with"  and my emotions shifted to a kind of easy come, easy go mentality. Indeed the voice (and by voice I mean some temporarily discrete agent of my own stream of consciousness) was entirely right. But this is a dream blog, not a sociology one so I will skip this thought for now.

Neuroscience time! I have had these dreams regularly enough; and so do other people. My brother has often recited the delight he has experienced in reoccurring dreams involving discovering hidden rooms in his apartment and the the subsequent joy and excitement of exploring them. I started having dreams like this when I was probably 6 years old: I would recurrently dream that there was a secret toy shop in the wall behind a strange mirror in my parents bedroom. Each morning I would run in and look behind it; and each morning I would be disappointed that the room was not there. It did not even matter that behind this wall was nothing more than a garden pathway and a thicket of bamboo; nor even that my primitive child-like spatial perception should and did know this to be true: the emotion of discovery was real enough (or had been real enough) in itself that my mandate to check went un-contested. It's not even like the secret room was all that great: it was simply the joy of discovering it against the odds that would send my dreaming brain into overdrive.

True enough; these later dreams are something of an advancement of these earlier ones in that my lucidity is aroused when discovering the in-dream anomaly, alas it pushes itself down (or is pushed down) to allow me to continue to explore, despite my better knowledge. And on this note, I do have a theory. Since the early battle taking place is between my curiosity and my better knowledge, this whole exercise could be nothing more than a case of my prefrontal cortex working out at what point curiosity kills the cat. And by this I mean: how euphoric an event can reliably be before judgement is suspended and emotion takes over. Useful training in real life for countering confidence men, sex workers, asshole supervisors and god knows who else. I probably never have fallen for the antics of any of the above precisely because my dreaming brain prepares me so rigorously. But is this why I have these dreams?

I think that rather than determining at what magical point emotional pleasure will drive me out of secondary consciousness, the purpose of these dreams is rather to train my curiosity and remind me of what it is like to explore and discover. Much has been publicised recently about the crucial role of curiosity in learning and positive cognitive function. I could always have told you this over beers but it's nice to see it in published science too. I conclude that such dreams are intended to keep curiosity alive, so that it is not forgotten. And this is achieved by engineering dreams with infinite pay-off sums that produce impossible and unfathomable rewards, with euphoria to match, through the act of exploring the ever day and the mundane. And thus an upper-bound in a homoeostatic range is defined and we can more realistically make spot judgements in regard to the exploration exploitation dilemma when ultra-high pay-offs with minimal risk are concerned.

We may not wake up the next day and literally expect a phantasmagorical realm to unfold before our very eyes, when we open that cupboard door or venture beyond the outgrowth of our gardens. We are awake, we are conscious and we simply know better. But at some deep, basal emotional level, we still retain the feeling of what it would be like. And that part of us gives us hope; and makes sure that we do not forget. And despite our pesky narrators voice: it keeps us searching for something we have yet to find, and probably never will.

★★★

Sleep paralysis and the Frontal Cortex

7/10/2014: Six months later...
IMAGE: MatthewMeyer

My previous entry (well one of them) was one of the most Euphoric dream I had ever had. I think it is appropriate that I now take the time to describe the most terrifying. I think this dream happens to particularly stand out in the sense that I was able to avoid the worst of what was in store for me, through a kind of hybrid in-dream lucidity. Until now, I simply could not have explained this: it was phenomenally unique but lacked a framework for further exploration. However, some recent research produced by an associate has thrown me just over the threshold of compression and I can now suspect what might have happened. Exciting stuff, for a dream researcher of any creed or colour.

Sleep Paralysis: a simple enough phenomenon. When coming out of a deep stage of NREM sleep, you sometimes find yourself experiencing a kind of false awakening, and confusing the resulting REM artefacts for waking reality. A menacing presence is then felt, usually as some form of monster or ghost. Sometimes it is a loved one who approaches; before turning sinister. Lying there awake in bed (though not actually awake) the urge to run and flee is met with sudden bodily paralysis, making the whole ordeal ineffably more terrifying still. The genuine belief that the dream stage is over, and that this experience is waking reality then lifts the terror to extreme levels. You finally wake up (this time for real) with a heart rate high enough to give an Olympic athlete a cardiac arrest. Or were you always awake, and just hallucinating? The whole question of whether it was a false awakening or just dream content (hypnagogic hallucination) creeping through into waking reality for a number of seconds is very much of a moot point here, believe it or not. In these cases, the normally sharp distinctions between waking and dreaming reality are blurred to become part of two overlapping systems. Welcome to sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Succubus. Kanashibari. Many names: one singular, perplexing phenomenon.  

Such cases are potentially unique in that you experience a kind of false positive lucidity. A false what? Well think on this if you will. When we are awake, we can reliably question ourselves "Am I awake?". If you can answer this (or indeed if you can even ask the question) the answer will probably be yes. Ask yourself right now... you will probably know the answer! As for why we cannot ask ourselves this very same question while we sleep; there is quite a delicate explanation that I will leave the hungry reader to follow in their own time. But it does involve the parts of our brain that allow us to stand back from ourselves (our frontal lobes) and their diminished state of activation during sleep. In the cases of night terrors; it is quite curious that one actually thinks one is awake but secretly is not. Not simply assuming wakefulness, but they can actually pause and can say "thank god that dream is over and my day has started. Wait, that's an interesting monster trying to disembowel me!". This is virtually unprecedented, and throws the whole notion of dream/wake logic on its head. It screams, of course, of a renegade frontal cortex. The following was my experience.

I was dreaming some forgettable dream about something; then woke to find myself lying in my own bed. I pondered with whether I should get up or go back to sleep, and lay there balancing the proposition. I relented, and decided to return to my slumber. To hell with productivity, I am a university student! As I slowly drifted off to sleep, I heard the wind blow through my kitchen window and rattle a bamboo strip mural of the Chinese kitchen God that normally hangs on the opposite side of a brick wall that borders my bedroom. This snapped me to attention, killing my slumber and started to I grow frustrated. But the wind had stopped now. So, once again I let myself drift back into sleep, and alas, once again the wind picked up and rattled the wall hanging. This time, however there was a quaint whispering noise that accompanied the wind and I came to attention violently. This was weird. Fuck, that was scary whatever that was!! I thought as I lay there on edge. Was this all in my mind? I had no idea. I paused for a moment. Aaah, to hell with it. And back to sleep I went. It's not like I even believe in ghosts anyway.

This time, as I drifted off to sleep, I was pulled into a relaxed slumber quicker than I had imagined. It was like rolling down a hill on some kind of wheeled device and not entirely appreciating the magnitude of the gravitational acceleration. I resisted falling into it, pulled out, then allowed myself to fall back in... existing on the edge of this event horizon like riding a strange sine wave. It was quite fun, like suppressing a sneeze and then encouraging it again; the thrill of control mixed with the pleasure of relinquishing it, well the best of both of them really. And though I could control it, there was an ineffable lag to how this control operated, and whatever my volition produced was a few seconds late in its effect. Yet the siren call of the slumber operated on my willpower in real time; making the whole exercise uncannily dangerous: I could ride the sine wave down with enough leeway to pull it back up, except might find myself wanting to change my mind when the time came to escape. And all the while, the deeper into the relaxed comatose I drifted, the louder and more lifelike the haunting whisper and rattling wind became. And it scared me in a way I cannot describe, but so long as I was master of this game there was just too much enjoyment to be had in surfing the uncanny valley between these stages of the unknown.

After a while curiosity won me over. I decided I didn't really believe in ghosts anyway, so I might as well just fall asleep and see what happens. Or perhaps I simply just loss of control over the physics involved (in whatever I was indeed manipulating) and simply crashed the whole thing through the very diminished state of cognition I had put myself in. Either way; I let the feeling carry me over a little too far and the haunting chattering whisper grew to a loud curdling breath. And it was unmistakably horrible. Think of that fog horn sound in Inception; this sound could have launched an A grade Christopher Nolan film (and a dozen counterfeits) had I actually had the means to record it. Then again I was dreaming; so who actually knows how good it was and how much the Amygdala was simply pitching in. I could hear the sound radiating from somewhere inside my kitchen, and as it grew louder it would simultaneously move laterally along the kitchen wall towards my doorway, always halting before coming into view (as I pulled back from the edge).

Now, it was coming through my doorway and approaching me. And it was black. Formless. It was pure evil. In a state of sheer terror, and with every bit of willpower I could muster, I tried to force myself back awake. And yet the lag was now so profound I could not make the ghostly entity back off, it kept advancing as my brain struggled to accelerate back to life like a 10 ton truck. And then I finally experienced it: I was lying there completely paralysed! And the ghost was upon me. And I was now past the threshold of awareness and falling fast asleep while on the surface of reality, the ghost was free to do as it pleased. It felt like what dying must feel like. With one last effort, I forced myself back to attention and the black ghost did finally back off, the wind died down and I woke up. I was lying there with my heart racing, in a pool of my own cold sweat. Somehow I had won.

And so I got up, got dressed and went about my day. Some time later (after what felt like hours) I seemingly woke up again. Yes, readers... just like my I dream of Anima entry, I had actually experienced a false awakening the first time and did not know it. The ghost approaching me was synchronous with my entry into a dream within a dream though thinking I was awake, I did not know this. Which possibly explains why it was so dangerous and terrifying: my brain did not know how to handle such a paradox without taking some very sensitive and delicate physiological information partitions and essentially smashing them. So what was going on? Emergence delirium and sleep paralysis alike would seem to both involve functional connectivity changes in the frontal cortex during reorganisation of the brain's self-reference networks. Both can involve a kind of intense fear or paranoid delusion however in the case of sleep paralysis; the negative emotions are granted visual manifestation too, making matters considerably worse for the recipient. Given it is is the job of the frontal cortex and associated posterior parietal regions to produce visual images out of virtually nothing in the dream stage (and some would argue: during waking life too) this is entirely understandable. However what strikes me very clearly with both cases is that the frontal lobes have a lot of explaining to do.

What and why they should explain, is a question that I keep asking myself. Over-active brain regions, bordering on seizure threshold can produce some very interesting cognitive changes indeed: Temporal lobe epilepsy would have to be the gold standard. The research by my associate has linked these phenomenon to something that certainly appears to resemble a frontal lobe seizure. Beyond that, I could only speculate. But it does tempt me to ask if the functionally separated frontal networks (experienced during REM sleep) could be failing to properly re-integrate on wakeful emergence, and in the process, to excuse my language... freaking the fuck out. Of course, the brain is actually very good at this (freaking out). Phantom limb syndrome, amphetamine psychosis and PTSD are all prime example of what the brain can do when its afferent inputs do not make for a congruent experience.

And what would a primary consciousness, rooted in the hard integration of Limbic system and Thalamus, make of a frontal cortex that was quite literally loosing its cool? I expect something along the lines of this. As these two divided entities of our dreaming consciousness self re-enter a state of mutual information sufficient to be recognisable as the waking thought, the reciprocal nature of feedback between the two would reliably ensure that the emotional centre was bombarded with confusing and manipulative signalling from a frontal cortex that had utterly lost control of itself. For this is what the frontal cortex does best: micromanage and inhibit our emotions, and these seizure like impulses would have to be interpreted by the limbic system at least in some kind of sense. I suspect the intense fear and emotional association of approaching supernatural entity is exactly how an awakened primary consciousness would interpret a minor seizure emanating from the frontal region.

This network would in turn produce negative recurrent signalling back to the frontal cortex, that might very well (in its over-active state) interpret these emotions to bring about a hallucinatory visual reality to match. Which of course would make plenty of sense: for again, this is exactly what the frontal cortex does so well in waking reality. I admit I know little enough about seizure and the EEG measurements that quantify them to proceed further; but watch this space. I'll be coming back to this subject soon.

Unlike my other dream entries to date, I have little in the way of soft philosophical ramblings to end this piece. I know I am dealing with things I do not fully understand and yet have experienced myself in their full phenomenal intensity, making the problem a frustrating one. This simply drives me to understand, and bring my comprehension to new heights. And this is what I will now do. If there is one thing I draw from all this: do not mess with the frontal lobes; for whatever it is they are doing, they mean serious business. And while I still don't fear ghosts; I may just grow to fear the brain parcellations that so effortlessly creates them in my dreams. Because those really can scare me if they want to.

Images and the sense we give them: the search for the psychadelic

24/10/2014: 12 hours later...
IMAGE: Charlize Cape

This was a simple enough dream, but I have been thinking about it the the most part of the day. It has really hit me where it hurts: like the best dreams that I have, it has left me with something completely indescribable. This time it was not a steel-string guitar piece or an emotion or even a romantic encounter, it was simply a moving image.

And it was at once so personal and so powerfully alive, it remains alive in my memory even now. I have no idea what this dream means to me: all I can do is try to describe it.

The dream was very basic and short. It consisted of me and two friends, Dexter and Andrew. We were sitting in a steel room, possibly compatible with the set of a science fiction movie or even just a university laboratory. The room contained a screen or monitor, mounted on the wall, and we were watching it and talking.

The screen started to display an image: and this is where words will probably fail me. It was simple enough, a red and blue cycling gradient of background colour with an orange ring that grew and rotated in the centre, sprouted hubs, begun spinning on its axis while parts would break off and change then rejoin the centre once again. An vocal exchange between the three of us went approximately like this: 

Hereditary: "See the genesis of the human imagination, expressed in visual form. What we are watching is the psychedelic experience. Such compounds cause human ideas to become experienced as mental images."

Dexter: "But with such intense emotions, and understanding. It is not just images, but the raw feeling that the idea gives too"

Andrew: "......"

Hereditary: "Yes, but the feeling of comprehension and the perception of the image are two aspects of the same thing. You cannot separate them"

Dexter: "So they lack specific causality?"

Hereditary: "Precisely"

Dexter: "And yet the image is there. It is tangible. Why do ideas have so much function but so little form? Even music can be expressed symbolically"

Hereditary: "They can be expressed symbolically too. That is what we are now studying"

Dexter: "Interesting..."

  

Andrew: "I still don't get it"

I continued to watch the image, expand and grow and resemble the life form that it did. I then went through some other dreams and woke up shortly after. I drank my coffee and jumped into the shower. That is when it hit me: I was still thinking about that damned image! It was just there inside of me, evolving through itself over and over, bringing my focus back to itself from whatever else I had been doing, or indeed trying to. I begun to think not about the exchange about the image itself. It was haunting my thoughts as I prepared for my journey to work, and it would not stop.

At work, I decided there was simply not much too it. I had seen the image a thousand times before, from many examples in my life: A Simpsons episode, where homer eats a chilli. Beetles music videos. That "Sick, sad world" TV program that seems to be the only thing on when a television is featured during Daria episodes. These are proverbial tropes of the psychedelic experience are so common in our popular culture they could not have had to work hard to embed themselves in my subconscious for future recall. And yet, on arriving home after work my curiosity got the better of me, and I endeavoured to find this image, or one like it. I had to know from where it has actually come. Three and a half rather painful hours later, and I did not so much as come close. There was nothing on the whole internet that I could derive this image from. Nothing!!! And even worse: the images I could so easily recall that bore its resemblance turned out to look nothing even like it. It was as if those memories themselves had been overwritten and falsely associated by this recent creation from my dreaming imagination. This image was indeed my own and that begun to scare me.

So where had I seen it before? Probably nowhere. For all I know it actually was my own "endogenous idea generation process" (as referenced in the dream conversation) breaking through into my dream reality; and the guise of studying the psychedelic experience had simply thrown me of the trail, with the image eventuating to be a lot less psychedelic than I thought. I have, of course long suspected that the generation of internal imagery played a crucial role in how the cerebral hemispheres integrate information. The thalamus is simply too crowded to represent an entire cerebral hemispheres worth of computations while the limbic system is uniquely ill-suited to convey much at all except for basal evolutionary emotions super-serving the fight/flight responses from the hypothalamus. The corpus callosum, meanwhile has scarcely little to do with information exchange at all; and exists predominantly to enable one cerebral hemisphere to facilitate dominance over the other during the selection of cognitive strategies.

However the psychedelic experience reliably does cause these images to break through into the sensorium. That does not mean that these images are innately psychedelic; as evidenced by this dream and my whole experience in writing this entry. Perhaps the network changes brought about by the psilocybin ligand simply allow the contents of the thalamus to accept internally-generated information from the occipital cortex, that would otherwise be gated from waking experience (in addition to whatever other qualitative changes they produce in one's though process) and in our haste to classify we simply confuse the two. I have suspected this much in the past as well.

All I do know is that in focusing on this image, that has burned itself into my mind ever since, I am overcome with a kind of intense pull into my own visual thinking, and before long I find myself using my own visual thinking to think about visual thinking. From there (as I experienced in the shower) I am free to visually think about just anything I want, and I happened use the occasion at that time to decode a particularly complicated interpersonal relationship I had been rather uncertain what to do with. It worked quite well, then again my visual thinking always does: It is how can think in systems, and in large part how I have picked up so much on the theoretical neuroscience that I have.

Of course, shockingly little has been published (in contemporary times) about the neuroscience let alone the psychology of visual thinking: if you read my bio, you may well suspect that I intend to be one of the first. I had long suspected the power of visual thinking, but I was proverbially made a convert a little earlier this year at a friends wedding. Waiting for the formalities to commence, a particularly sprightly Google programmer was challenging an immunology professor to solve the Sleeping Beauty paradox. The programmer had read some number of books on the subject and was quite eager to leave us all in a state of 'benign bewilderment', as he himself had been for some time. And as he continued on, quoting mathematical arguments for and against I just shut my eyes and let the images take over. 

A web of coloured balls, connected by strings. Strings branch off from the balls, and new balls, with new colours emerge. The set of balls of a single colour combine and collapse. New strings. They have colour now too. Aha.  

...Opening my eyes again, I came to my conclusion:

Hereditary: "It all comes down to whether you believe we exist in a single universe, or as distinct entities in the multiverse doesn't it?"

The expression had virtually deserted the programmers face. All he said was "Yes, that's right". It was especially validating, as I had absolutely no idea what I had just said. Image and emotion: the language we use can only hope to interpret. In a way it was not even that difficult, it was just a neat hack to quickly put intuition into words. Of course I do not always slip into visual thinking so easily, it takes enormous concentration and it rarely comes to my rescue even when I call for it. It thinks with a mind of its own, and it's intrusive interruptions to my field of consciousness are necessarily limited, for countless aeons of evolution have effectively gated this presence in the great evolutionary battle against insanity. This cognitive maginot line is not breached for any old thing (unlike the real maginot line) for the protections are just too strong: It takes a truly powerful idea indeed, or perhaps a little psychoactive substance. Or even just a very interesting dream.

So was this dream of mine simply a vehicle to deliver me this self-referencing totem of my own visual thinking, that I may enter that wondrous trance of inter-hemispheric meditation that little bit smoother? Or was the dream itself essentially self-referential: in that the image was literally a visual analogue for the verbal discussion simultaneously taking place (about the nature of the image) suggesting the validity of image, exchange and dream in one great open system? I wish I could say. But the image I saw still speaks to me. It has a sound and a voice of its own, and it talks to my emotions and my mind's eye in equal measure. And if I had to put its strange message into words, as the exchange it generates refracts within my head, I would probably put it like this:

Image: "Think about what I am"

Hereditary: "...but you make me so curious"

Image: "And that is the secret"

 ★★★