Issue 66, February 2004
A Flagon of Gin
©Jane Teresa Anderson, February 2004
"A flagon of gin?" Michael invitingly enquired, as he turned the key to open our front door. I knew we’d both had a long and challenging working day, but I was surprised at Michael’s proposed remedy. A bit of overkill, I thought.
"Uh?" I muttered, summoning up the entire remnants of my energy.
"A flagon of gin?" Michael repeated, only this time his words morphed ever so slightly and I began to hear what he was really saying.
"Flagging the gym?" it was clearer now, "I’m exhausted, I don’t know about you. We could go tomorrow instead."
"Gin and tonic, then?" I suggested, in agreement.
No, this wasn’t a dream, but this little scenario from last week is a perfect example of how our brains can misinterpret our environment, and, more importantly, how the most bizarre symbols and puzzling events can make their way into our dreams.
Our sensory organs pick up perfect information: light, sound, touch, taste and smell and pass these details along our nerves, coded as chemical nerve impulses. These chemical codes are delivered to the brain where the decoding begins. And that is where the incoming data is changed, corrupted, enhanced or over-written. Why? The brain has more of an executive role in perception. Choices are made. Your brain compares incoming information with what it has experienced before and, if the incoming information doesn’t compute, it often changes it to suit expectation.
Here’s an example:
The lens inside your eye functions in the same way as the convex lens you may remember from school science classes. It turns all images upside down. So when you look at a person, for example, the lens in your eye turns the image of the person upside down. Your optic nerve dutifully carries this perfect information to your brain, delivering a picture of an upside-down person. Your brain knows from past experience that people’s heads are up the top and their feet are generally on the ground, so it makes an executive decision and upends the image. Your brain delivers your conscious mind the experience of seeing the person the right way up.
This is great from an evolutionary survival perspective of course. It helps to know which end of the wild animal is which when it’s chasing you across the plains, or to know how to pick up your baby in one smooth movement.
But brains do not always get it right. After the first days of life the brain makes that one decision to turn all images upside down. Experiments have been carried out where people are made to wear glasses that invert light rays and to keep the glasses on for several days. After a couple of days of nauseous confusion, the brain rights the picture. When they removed the glasses it took several days to see the world up the right way again because it took several days for the brain to decide to undo its correction.
The same applies to hearing. We tend to hear what we expect to hear. We tend NOT to hear the unexpected. Which brings me back to the flagon of gin.
I’ve never thought of gin in terms of flagons. Bottles, yes. Glasses, yes. Decanters, yes. Flagons, no. So why would my brain have converted 'flagging the gym' to 'flagon of gin'?
We are pretty good at sticking to our gym timetable where possible, so perhaps my conscious brain, at that point, was unable to compute the idea of missing out the gym and looked for the next best-fit meaning for those unexpected words. I don’t know. What I do know is that unless I had solved the enigma, my dreaming mind would have had a ball playing around with the notion of a flagon of gin, as it is the job of our dreams to try to make sense of the incongruous sensory input of the day.
But it goes deeper than that.
Every day you are conscious of only a small percentage of the information that your sensory organs pick up. Your dreaming mind also deals with a huge deluge of sensory input that side steps your conscious attention. It makes no distinction between the experiences you were aware of and those you were not. The 'flagons of gin' and all other weird brain interpretations need to be sorted through into best-fit pictures (updating your view of the world) and filed away for future reference by your dreams.
Some of the bizarre symbols in your dreams have their origins in your brain’s misinterpretation of what you see and hear. Here’s how to spot the hearing ones:
Isolate the weird symbols in your dreams and write them down. Then ask yourself what rhymes with the words you have written. What do they sound (almost) like? Flagon of gin sounds (almost) like … flagging the gym. When you hit on a sounds-like that suddenly makes sense of the rest of your dream, you’ll know you’ve got it right. In this way you are helping your dreaming mind solve some of its puzzles by supplying the missing information.
This method works particularly well when you tell someone about your dream. The other person will often hear the sounds-like in the way you speak about your dream, in your intonation, your accent or your rhythm. These are things that can be missed when the dream is recorded in writing only. A variation is to tell your dream to a tape recorder and then play it back. Speaking fast can help in blurring the rhyming words so that your brain has the opportunity to search for the sounds-like options.
It works the other way around too. In dreams the emphasis is often on the visual. A dream might find it hard to picture the concept of flagging the gym (which takes time and a bit of drama) and much easier to substitute an image, like a flagon of gin. Your dreaming mind is a genius at conjuring cryptic visual clues.
If you’re a cryptic crossword enthusiast you might like to occasionally put the paper aside and delve into solving your cryptic dream symbols. Might be just the tonic you need, a brain workout in place of the gin. Um, gym.
Jane Teresa Anderson
|
