PART THREE

PHYSIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY
& PHILOSOPHY

Dreaming the Holy Grail

Eyes shut
Tight
Floating.
Sideways I see
Repeated
Repeated
All of them: Me.

A mirror
A mirror
Reflected
Yet, no …
Open the door
Expand
And Just Go!

Look back
And ponder
The tiniest place
A speck of a planet
From up here,
In space.

Push through
Loud heart beating
Beside all else pale:
Sshhh!
I am dreaming
The Holy Grail!

Chapter 23

Physiology:

The Body and the
Physical Causes of Dreaming

Is It All In The Head?

A small child I know told his mother that his dreams came from his pillow. Later he decided he saw the pictures inside his head. Throughout human kind’s existence, beliefs and theories about the origins of dreams have been as diverse as the human race itself, but few dispute that the dream experience seems to be captured and replayed from somewhere inside the mind or brain.

Some see the mind as being just another word for the brain, one and the same thing, so that the mind becomes something explicable in terms of brain biochemicals. Science has certainly shown the brain to be, at least in part, an incredibly sophisticated biochemical computer capable of directing and controlling the entire physical processes of human life from conception to death. Some 90% of the brain remains unmapped or apparently functionless. These areas may contain ‘back up facilities’ in case of brain damage, be our ‘unused potential’, be obsolete or serve us in ways that are beyond our current levels of understanding. So much about the brain and the human mind is unknown. Can we really comprehend the latent power of an iceberg purely by mapping the details of its tip?

Should we see the mind as a brain equivalent, our dreams as biochemically generated and ourselves as amazingly awesome cybernetic machines? Or should we look beyond the present limitations of scientific observation and scan the metaphysical horizon for a more holistic, intuitive understanding of our existence .. and of the source and meaning of our dreams?

The Scientific Brain Work Begins

Although the centuries have been filled with conjecture and philosophising over the role of the mind or brain in dreaming, very little was achieved in hard brain science terms until 1953. This was when the Chicago based sleep scientist, Nathaniel Kleitman, accompanied by his student, Eugene Aserinsky, observed sleeping babies. Aserinsky noticed bursts of rapid eye movements (REMs), discernible below the infants’ closed eyelids, which seemed to appear at regular intervals and he wondered what this eye activity signified. The two scientists attached EEG type machines to the eyelids of sleeping adults as well as EEG machines to monitor their brain wave patterns throughout the night as they slept. When they compared the print-outs, they saw a correlation between the REMs and a specific brain wave pattern. There before them, in ink traces on paper, lay the burning question: Could these eye movements and brain wave patterns be related to dreaming, and if they were, could they be used to pinpoint exactly when their volunteers were dreaming? With such a ‘dream indicator’ tool, science would at last be set to answer the big questions: how many dreams do we have each night, how long do they last, what happens to our bodies while we dream, what is happening to our brains, what, how, why, when?!

The definitive test was simple. Aserinsky and Kleitman woke people up at various critical points during the night and asked them if they were dreaming, and, if they were, to describe their dream. People were woken in REM and in ‘non-REM’ (now known as NREM) periods. The two researchers found that 80% of REM wakings were associated with recall of vivid, detailed dreams, compared to only 7% of NREM wakenings. In scientific terms, this was more than enough evidence to conclude that REM sleep was probably indicative of vivid dreaming. They continued to work in this field, as did others, to refine their findings and further research the relationship between dreaming and the brain. The results of several decades of this work are summarised in the next section.

Physiology and the Dreaming Brain Today

The Sleep Cycle

All mammals have sleep cycles that become obvious when their brain waves and REMs are measured during sleep. As humans, we fall firstly into a very light sleep known as stage 1, which lasts about five minutes, where the brain waves are very similar to our waking state. At this point, as we are just drifting off to sleep, we may experience ‘hypnagogic’ images: flashing, ‘slide show’ images which may or may not be ‘true’ dreams. We do not have REMs during this hypnagogic sleep which science has described as ‘random images accompanied by thought’.

As time progresses we fall through stages 2 and 3 and finally enter stage 4, where sleep is said to be ‘deep’ because the brain waves resemble those observed in a coma. After some time, maybe as long as half an hour or so in stage 4, we then come up through stages 3 and 2 and, as we enter into stage 1, our rapid eye movements start and so, apparently, does our first dream. This whole cycle, from falling asleep to experiencing the first dream of the night, takes around 90 minutes for human beings and less for creatures with smaller brain stems. The correlation between the width of the brain stem and the length of the sleep cycle does seem to suggest an underlying physiological mechanism to the pattern of sleeping and dreaming.

We generally stay in this first dream state for five or ten minutes, before going through the cycle again, although we tend to spend less and less time in the deep stage 4 sleep, and sometimes miss it out altogether after the first cycle. The second time we emerge into stage 1 from our next dream, we tend to stay there for around twenty minutes. As the night continues, so do the cycles, but we commonly spend less time in stages 3 and 4 and more time in stages 1 and 2 as morning approaches. Although the time in each stage varies, the overall length of each cycle remains around 90 minutes, so for an eight hour sleep, we generally experience four or five stage 1 dream state periods, each longer than the previous. This is why experimenting with setting an alarm clock at roughly 90 minutes periods during the night can help you to recall your dreams, since the chances are high that you will be rudely awoken in the middle of a dream with the experience fresh on your mind.

These cycles do vary from individual to individual, but we generally spend about 12% of a seven to eight hour sleep in deep stage 4, about 50% in stage 2 and roughly 25% in stage 1, the dream state stage. Whether we dream throughout his period is unknown.

NREM SLEEP: THE ‘NON-DREAM’ STATE

People woken from NREM sleep do report some kind of mental activity. This ranges from vague thinking, or a persistent, night-long single thought to a non-visual dream. Some people report visual dreams during this period, but they are rarely of the vivid intensity experienced in the REM periods. In general, NREM experiences seem to be more like chewing the cud than seeing the action.

This period of less exciting dreams, or perhaps of dreamless sleep (depending on your definition of dreaming!), has been tentatively identified with the process of physical renewal. Increased growth hormone is released into the circulatory system by the brain during stages 3 and 4 of NREM sleep. This is the hormone largely responsible for growth and repair of body tissues. People who exercise in the afternoon or those who produce too much thyroid hormone (which, like exercise, causes a high metabolism) spend more time in these stages of sleep. People with thyroid deficiency (who produce no natural thyroid hormones) do not experience stages 3 and 4 of the sleep cycles, but when they are injected with the hormone, the normal cycle is restored. These kinds of observations have led scientists to propose the NREM phases of our sleep are periods of physical regeneration and growth.

So what is the purpose of our REM dreaming sleep?

REM SLEEP: THE ‘DREAM STATE’

Some researchers call this REM dream state ‘paradoxical sleep’ because we are harder to wake while we are in stage 1, yet, according to our brain wave patterns, we are only sleeping lightly. As well as the rapid eye movements that often seem to correspond with what we are dreaming of watching, scientists have detected small movements of the inner ear which they believe may be related to ‘hearing’ in our dreams. Our pulse rates fluctuate as does our blood pressure and rate of respiration. The brain consumes more oxygen while we dream and males tend to have full or partial erections during most stage 1 sleep. It is believed that women may secrete vaginal fluids during this stage too.

During all this activity, our major muscles remain flaccid, with only minor twitches breaking through. A part of the brain (pons) switches off the signals which are normally sent to the muscles to make them move. This body paralysis, or ‘sleep paralysis’ as it is known, is a safety mechanism to stop us acting out our dreams. French researcher, Michel Jouvet, found that making a surgical cut in this area of cats’ brains resulted in the cats ‘acting’ in their REM periods as if they were awake. They would suddenly move as if enraged, afraid or in pursuit, often making the experimenters recoil in surprise! Jouvet was left to conclude that they were acting out their dreams, and that the pons normally protects against this. Sleepwalking and sleeptalking do not occur in stage 1, the dream state, and we tend to turn over or move about in bed in stage 2. We do indeed appear to be ‘riveted’ to the action during dream time!

In sleep laboratory studies, lucid dreamers have been asked to perform actions in their dreams such as singing, counting or holding their breath as soon as they realise they are dreaming. The results showed that when a lucid dreamer dreams of holding his breath, he also does so with his physical body. The brain cortex is divided into two hemispheres. The left (in 95% of right handed people and in 70% of left handed people) deals with rational functions (what we have called male-side or Yang qualities) such as counting, whereas the right (female-side, Yin) deals with the more creative functions such as singing. When a lucid dreamer counts, the measured brain waves show the left brain is involved in the dream action, whereas when he sings, the emphasis shifts to the right brain. All of this is true, of course, for people who know they are dreaming. Whether it is valid to assume the same physical responses follow our non-lucid dream experiences is another question.

Newborn babies and congenitally blind people also have REM periods during sleep, even though they have not ‘seen’ anything in the waking world. While people with strong beliefs in non-brain dream sources would probably see this as a physiological response to whatever is causing the dream (a side-effect of the brain’s experience of the dream), scientists tend to view this observation as suggestive of a physiological cause of dreaming. The thinking goes: ‘Whatever physiological mechanism is responsible for the eye movements must also be responsible for the sensation of dreaming.’ The scientific notion is further supported by a series of experiments performed by Michel Jouvet in 1959 and by William Dement in 1960.

Dement allowed people normal hours of sleep, but woke them up every time their REMs started. So, they had plenty of NREM sleep, but, supposedly, no dreams or REM sleep. The more his volunteers were deprived of dreaming, the more they attempted to make up for lost time. Their sleep cycles would change and, as the deprivation continued, they would fall straight into REM sleep without going through the other sleep stages first. After only a couple of days of dream deprivation they would be fatigued, irritable and often have slight memory loss. The next night of undisturbed sleep would be filled with more than the normal amount of REM sleep and they would awaken refreshed again. The ‘control’ volunteers who were awoken just as often, but in NREM periods so they still dreamed, were unaffected. REM sleep and dreaming, he concluded, had physiological purpose and both were necessary for mental stability.

Jouvet found that he could manipulate REM periods and dreaming in cats through injection of chemicals such as acetylcholine. When nerves send electrical impulses to and from the brain, they have to ‘jump’ the coded impulses across the gaps (synapses) between one nerve fibre and the next. This is done by releasing chemical molecules such as acetylcholine from the nerve tip which flows across to the receiving end of the next nerve cell in the chain and attach themselves there temporarily. This causes that second nerve fibre to generate the required electrical impulse which carries the message further on its journey to the brain for decoding or action. These communication molecules are known as ‘neurotransmitters’. What Jouvet discovered, then, was that dreaming is probably switched on or off by the balance of chemicals in the nervous system. The sleep and dreaming cycle is now believed to be controlled by a kind of continuous competition between excitatory nerve chemicals and inhibitory nerve chemicals.

Many scientists see the study of the dreaming brain as the key to understanding mental illness (presumably in biochemical form), since many of the signs of mental disease, such as hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, disorientation, amnesia and delusions, are the common stuff of dreams. This was the motivation behind much of the earlier work with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs that apparently switched on a dreamlike state without switching off consciousness.

In the month or two before birth, babies spend up to 80% of their total sleep time in REM sleep and this is also known to be a time of fast brain growth. Senile people spend less time in REM, and their brain size is also known to shrink. Mentally defective people have reduced REM sleep periods. These observations suggest a correlation between REM sleep and brain growth that is, perhaps, necessary for learning or laying down memory.

There seems little doubt that sleeping and dreaming are necessary for our health, both physical and mental, and that the dream state may well be a bodily phase during which various brain and nervous system regulatory functions are carried out. This still leaves us with the question of the source of the actual dreams. Many see the dreaming brain as totally turned in on itself, generating its own sensory perceptions and creating its own dreams, but science shines no light here. This idea is like a television or radio that turns itself on, creates its own programs from its electronic insides, screens them, then turns itself off again. Much of this may be true, but I wonder what proportion of our dreams invisibly fly in on the wind, much like television or radio signals, generated by some distant source and requiring only that the brain be tuned in at the right frequency?

The Brain and Perception of Alternative Realities

The experimental observations with lucid dreamers who counted or sang their way through their lucid dreams under the eagle eyes of brain monitors (see above section) suggest that the brain (or, at least, the forebrain) is activated as if the dream is actually happening. It appears that the brain cannot distinguish between a dreamed and a ‘waking’ event, and that we are, perhaps, only protected from acting out this alternative reality by the pons area’s sleep paralysis phenomenon.

It seems paradoxical that these assumptions about the brain’s commitment to the reality of the dream have been based on observations of lucid dreamers who obviously do retain an objective awareness of the brain’s apparent delusion! Is this lucid consciousness of the dream located in the brain, the mind, the soul, or elsewhere?

Consider the Colorado experiment where Dr J. Stoyva fitted volunteers with spectacles that turned the world upside down. They had to wear the glasses for several days, and, during that time, they gradually saw the world the right way up again. The brain could not match the incoming visual information with other incoming information (such as touch or sound), or with its ‘internal model’ of what the world should be like, so it simply changed its perception and turned the images upside down again. When the volunteers’ spectacles were taken off again, guess what? They immediately saw the world upside down again, this time with their own ‘bare’ eyes. Within a short time, the brain adjusted by inverting the incoming messages to make everything fit in with the expected view.

This is, in fact, what happens after birth. The physics of the eye is much like the physics of the camera. The retina, at the back of the eye, is like the photographic film in the camera, and the world’s image appears inverted on this screen. The message sent to the baby’s brain is one of an inverted world. Trial and error soon gives feedback to the brain that what it sees is not, apparently, what it feels, hears or moves around in. The brain turns the image round accordingly.

So it is seen, from our earliest days, that our brain works to alter incoming messages about its sensory environment if they do not fit in with its expectations. The great magicians and illusionists rely on the brain’s stubborness in seeing what it expects to see, rather than what it actually does see! Such is the art of deception. We cannot necessarily trust the brain with what it deciphers and concludes about the waking realities of our environment. It does an incredibly good job, but it does not always get the picture right. It may perceive alternative realities that are not there at all. Just as often, though, it may apply rational restraint, and cause us to discount its genuine experience of dimensions beyond those of waking life. Can we, then, ever trust our neurophysiological wiring to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’?

Perceptions of the Outer and Inner Worlds

In active waking life the brain is generally occupied with the external world. It makes evolutionary survival sense to be ‘tuned in’ to the dangers around us while we are moving around our environment, vulnerable to attack or accident, or to be on the alert for signs of food, water or suitable mates. We see, hear, touch, taste and smell our way around our environment in search of survival and self-protection. We may tune in to other helpful clues about our external world through telepathic communication or, perhaps, a sensitivity to electromagnetic and other fluctuations around us.

If the external world becomes boring, or we feel safe and in less need of environmental surveillance, we often turn our attention inwards, monitoring thoughts, creatively juggling words, mentally painting pictures, daydreamingly having conversations with ourselves or others or engaging in wishful flights of fancy. Perhaps we drum up a more exciting, dangerous inner world to balance a boring outer reality, or indulge in a little negative self-talk, ruining our self-esteem and setting ourselves up for negative experiences with our outer world. We later manifest some of these inner wanderings as novels, poems, paintings or low confidence, but while we are indulging in a little daydreaming, we are aware that it is ‘not real’.

So what happens at night, when we sleep, to cause us to lose our sense of ‘reality’ and to live the dream as if it is real? Does the dream state feel real because there is little external input to measure it against? Does it feel real because the brain is adjusting the dream sensations to a ‘best fit’ scenario and translating them as being ‘real’? Does the dream feel real because it is an alternative reality? Is there a waking reality and a dream reality and are these both equally real? Does the brain mediate between the two realities, or does it just fail in its analysis and perceptions of its sleeping activities?

Science Explains … Or Does it?

Science:
Sleep paralysis, the process by which the brain inhibits large muscle movements during REM sleep to prevent us from the physical dangers of acting out our dreams, can cause experiences such as Marina’s:

Science:
Hypnagogic images are often seen as we drift into sleep. Described as a pictorial consciousness, they are comprised of consciously perceived random images or thoughts that can last up to ten minutes. Some scientists call these ‘dreamlets’, but they are not classed as true dreams because they are not accompanied by REMs.

If my sleeping and dreaming experiences do not fit what science has proved, who is wrong? I may acknowledge hypnagogic sleep as being accompanied by a different type of brain wave pattern from later periods of dreaming, but if the images I see seem to me to be exactly like the kind of dreams I have through the night, why on earth would I want to dismiss them as ‘random images accompanied by thinking’?

The dream survey research has shown that people can and do experience apparently ‘normal’ dreams within the first 15 to 20 minutes of sleep.

Several people on the survey especially noticed dreams during short afternoon naps, and, in many cases these also had psychic or telepathic elements. One afternoon I dreamed I was lying on a beach in the sun, when four boys suddenly rushed up on the beach carrying a huge black whale-like shape raised on their shoulders, in coffin bearing style, except they were running and making a noise. As they passed me they dropped the thing which made a resounding thump as it landed very close to my ear. I opened my eyes (in the dream) and saw the thing was made of matted grass. Later, when I woke, I told the dream to Glen, who had been out for a cycle while I slept. It turned out that a big truck had surprised him by roaring too close and knocked him off his bike onto the verge of long grass.

Science:
When the brain is still in dream state but the eyes are open, the brain may confuse which images it ‘sees’ are internal (from the dream) and which are external (the view in front of the open eyes). In many cases, the dream images can appear to be superimposed upon the waking scene, so that presences may appear before the dreamer’s open eyes. Scientifically referred to as ‘hypnopompic hallucinations’, these phenomena are described as extensions of dreaming into waking, and may occur because the dreaming process is slow to switch off. This is David’s experience:

Science can explain waking psychic phenomena, whether they be visual, auditory or whatever, as dreamlike hallucinations perceived as being in the waking world simply because the subject’s eyes are open.

This certainly does not deny clairvoyant, clairaudient or clairsentient perception that, in my experience, is an inner perception of an alternative reality. As far as the waking dream is concerned, two possibilities remain. One is the scientific view that the hallucination is the slowly disappearing dream, while the other is that the dream was a psychic experience which the waking dreamer has seen with her inner eye, but which she momentarily perceives as external in the transition to waking. In either case it is important to interpret the experience firstly as a dream to look for any relevant inner meaning.

Science:
External stimuli are incorporated into REM sleep in about half the times they are presented, and are occasionally incorporated into NREM sleep. The external stimuli do not cause the dream, but they do work their way into the ongoing dream.

Dreaming About The Physical Condition Of The Body

Hippocrates (around the 4^th century BC), the father of medicine and a prominent dream interpreter of the Ancient Grecian Asclepian temples (see Chapter 18), made a special study of dreams that indicated physical disease. These were called ‘prodromic dreams’(Greek for ‘running before’). Aristotle (383-322 BC) explained the prodromic dream as being due to small symptoms of an impending illness that are perceptible to the sleeper, but perhaps imperceptible once the person is awake and involved in outer activities.

My research survey results uncovered many examples of dreams that picked up on physical symptoms, for example:

Have you ever experienced, when you are really tired, unwell or in need of a boost of energy, a vision of coloured ‘balls’ coming towards you when you close your eyes? The colours can be quite enlightening, and it has been my experience, along with others’, that different colours impart different energies that are needed for balance. Purple, for example, brings a psychic or spiritual balance while yellow tops up the flagging intellect. Red gives physical energy and enthusiasm while blue brings peace and healing. You’ve got to experience it to know it! Children commonly report the coloured ball phenomena, and knowing what colours they see can give guidance as to what they need in their daily life. Scientifically colours are just visible wavelengths of light energy and energy always dissipates from one form into another, so the experience is not that bizarre!

One morning, several months after receiving this letter, I was reading a scientific paper on lucid dreaming and out-of-the-body experiences, when I came to a single paragraph suggesting a possible connection between susceptibility to migraines and frequency of lucid dreaming. At that moment, my telephone rang, and Jayne S. came on the line and I was able to ask the question. Yes, she is a lucid dreamer! (Incidentally, Jayne only phoned me about twice in that year.)

This chapter has skimmed the surface of the physiology of dreaming, but it still poses the basic question: are we physical, mechanical dream machines, or is there, quite literally, more to dreaming than meets the eye?