3 interesting things about dreaming

1. Dreaming is just like madness.

The William Dement quote about dreaming allowing 'each and every one of use to be quietly and safely insane every night of lives' fits very well. Yu has argued that practically all of the different types of delusion and paranoid suspiciousness including grandiose, persecutory, somatic and erotomanic delusions feature prominently in dreams. 

Hobson points out a number of things that happen in the brain during dream that make it very like psychosis or madness. One of the areas he pays a lot of attention to is the suspension of episodic memory during dreams which Hobson puts down to 'REM sleep aminergic demodulation' and 'the selective deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex'. The loss of self-reflective awareness, disorientation and confabulation that this loss of episodic memory produces he sees as being common to both the actions of REM sleep and waking states of delirium.

Dreaming is like mental illness in another way. There is a hyper-emotionality to dreams. There is unreasoning panic, fear, elation and anger and this is all because of the selective activation of the limbic lobe. So here we are talking about the amygdala, the anterior cingulum and the paralimbic cortex. In this case the actions of sleep are not so much like delirium but rather more similar to the actions of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. TLE is triggered by seizure-like activation of the limbic brain.

Another frontal region that is deactivated during REM sleep is the orbitofrontal cortex.  It is in a prefrontal region which does cognitive processing and decision making but because it is implicated in emotion and reward it is seem by some people as part of the limbic system. The orbitofrontal cortex then seems to interface between emotion and cognition. Its deactivation during REM sleep would suggest that the the orbitofrontal cortex could not be used to control emotional experiences through mechanisms such as counterfactual reasoning as one might do in ordinary waking life.

2.The high frequency with which the word bizarre is used in dream literature and its meaning.

Why is the word bizarre used to describe dreaming in the dream literature seemingly more than any other adjective? Roger M. Knudson in an article looks at this word and wonders where room for the idea of dream beauty is made. 

There was for example Domhoff's  'Bizarre elements in Dreams' scale. Although he later changed this to an 'unrealistic elements in Dreams' scale following the argument of other commentators persuading him that 'unrealistic' was a more suitable word.

In the Oxford English Dictionary the word bizarre is defined as 'at variance with recognized ideas of taste, departing from ordinary style or usage; eccentric, extravagant, whimsical, strange, odd, fantastic' and ' at variance with the standard of ideal beauty or regular form.' Roger points out that in the definition the word bizarre is specifically linked to beauty ie. it is at variance with the standard ideal of beauty. He points out that this does not mean that bizarre does not mean 'not beautiful'. The definition admits beauty though only in other than 'regular' or 'non-standard' ways. Things can be eccentrically beautiful, whimsically beautiful, fantastically beautiful and so forth. Perhaps then this one little word actually does, in one particular construction, capture quite a lot of insight in spite of not admitting any regular or standard beauty in the odder dreams. 

An examination of the etymology of the word bizarre seems to capture some more features of dreaming. Perhaps I am reading to much into the meaning of the word but the etymology internet site has the word as originating in the 1640's for the French as 'odd, or fantastic' and as coming originally from 'handsome, brave'. It suggests that this may have come from the Basque bizar meaning 'a beard'. The idea being that the bearded Spanish soldiers made a strange impression on the French. The etymology here does seem almost to be tailored to the idea of dreaming because it seems like the word is almost riding the feeling of the French seeing these Spanish soldiers for the first time. They view them as 'handsome' and 'brave' but also as unusual and odd. The word presents an ambivalence that imagining strange soldiers seems to resolve or at least make bearable. 

An alternative etymology traces the word to the Italian 'Bizarro' meaning 'angry, fierce, irascible' which comes from 'Bizza' meaning a fit of anger. Here again the etymology of the word seems to be secreting away another part of the dream experience. We talked already about the activation of the amygdala and the limbic brain and this idea of a fit of anger of fierceness seems to tap into a notion of unreasoning or unthinking emotions. 

3. Dreams can inform real life actions.

Dreams can and do inform the waking lives of the people who dream them. Now this can be taken to radical extremes like with the Pintupi aborigines who live 80 miles west of Alice Springs. They feel, or are supposed to feel, only culturally mandated emotions and the fact that directions come from dreams make them not acts of frowned upon private willfulness but merely following dream directions.

 Among some sioux and Yuma tribes there were transvestite dreams. Dreams that they felt could turn a man into a transvestite. In the sioux version there is a dream involving the moon with two arms. One of the arms holds out a bow and arrow whereas the other holds out the 'burden strap' of the woman. These were greatly feared dreams and it was a concern that if you dreamt to much you would become a transvestite.

In other tribal instances the relating of dreams concerning the marital infidelity of a spouse instead of confronting that same spouse with an actual suspicion of infidelity allow for unique ways in which to resolve marital and relationship difficulties. So some cultures invest dreams with a cultural and social significance that completely changes the social fabric completely. This is not an entirely negative thing as it can, as mentioned above, provide a way to broach problems with someone close without greatly offending them or turning to aggression.

However, even this extreme of allowing dreaming to inform you waking life can be brought to yet an even further extreme. Among the 17th century Huron indians there were in some instances a strict adherence to what were felt to be the edicts of even one's negative or harmful dreams. There is a case of a Huron man cutting off a finger after dreaming that enemies had cut of his finger.In another case man was set on fire after dreaming he had been burnt. In that instance the man managed to replace himself with a sacrificial dog to be burnt but only at the last moment.

It is not only these cultures which we might think of as more primitive that allow dreaming to inform there lives. I believe that Abraham Lincoln was a dreamer and that he allowed his dreaming to inform his life and even his politics. There is account of him asking his wife to remove their son's pistol after having had an 'ugly dream' involving him. There is also account of Lincoln telling General Ulysses S. Grant, amongst his other assembled generals, to await or expect important news pertaining to the war on that day. He explained to Grant that he had had a dream of a ship of state sailing at speed across the water and before all of the important events in the war. It speaks even more to the importance of Lincoln's dreams in his decision making that he would share them with his assembled generals.

Just before his assassination Lincoln reported the following dream: -

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.

There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?

I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.


In fact, as a final note I would like to say that having recalled a good many lucid dreams myself I recognize some similarities between this dream account and my own lucid dreams. (Lucid dreaming involves an awareness that one is dreaming while one is dreaming.) This account seems to feature the moving from room to room in a slow way that reminds me of my own navigation in lucid dreams. The sobs and sounds without corresponding people. This similarly reminds me of dreams I have had in empty houses where I have moved from room to room hearing body-less voices coming from another room.