What is a Dream?#
Johannes Siedersleben, Oxford, June 2017
We spend one third of our lives sleeping. In that state, the thalamus, a filter between our senses and the brain, is almost shut, limiting perception to exceptions such as strangury or the ringing of the alarm clock. According to neurologists, sleep is divided into the REM phase (rapid eye movement) and the rest, called NREM (no rapid eye movement), which is subdivided into four categories of slowwave sleep phases. Brain activity is low then; we are not dreaming. The REM phase lasts one to two hours. As the name suggests, the eyes are moving rapidly, brain activity, measured in terms of electric current, is almost as high as by day; we are dreaming. Waking during REM degrades mental and physical wellbeing quickly, much more than waking during NREM. Taking 1.5 hours as the average REM duration, we spend about 6% of our lives dreaming, whether we remember it or not. What do we dream about and why? There are at least two dream types.
Dreams dealing with the dreamer’s experience, hopes or fears. This is the realm of Freud, Jung and other psychoanalysts. What they say is that positive and negative experiences get stored in our subconsciousness, are processed little by little and occasionally reappear in our dreams, unveiling secret thoughts, wishes or fears. Reality is often distorted or squeezed: a manager might dream of sitting exams he passed successfully years ago, a professor of a huge audience awaiting a talk he has failed to prepare, a husband of desperately wooing the woman he has been married to for decades. On waking up we discover often with relief that it was but a dream, and tell at breakfast what nonsense we lived through last night. A famous dream of this type but with a very real content is that of Richard III on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth, when he is haunted by the ghosts of his eleven victims. When Richard starts out of his dream, he is in black despair: “Have mercy Jesus!” he laments and then goes on to a painful self-analysis. Dream analysis can indeed be helpful to understand one’s own personality and sometimes even to heal psychic diseases. This approach has given rise to the theory of subconsciousness. Freud and others have shown that experiences, in particular painful ones, get buried in our brain, lie there for days, weeks or decades, and are digested by subsequent dreams serving as a self-healing device. They are fuelled by our conscious experiences and thus always connected to a previously perceived reality. No supernatural mechanism is required for their explanation. Can blind people see or a deaf ones hear in their dreams? They certainly can if they could see or hear earlier in their lives, but otherwise cannot unless some mystery comes in.
Revelation dreams come out of the blue. They are hard to explain by standard arguments of logic or physics because they convey information not available otherwise. Their existence is not generally accepted – there is no way to verify a dreamer’s report, a grave objection to the seriousness of dream research. Martin Luther King’s famous dream reveals a beautiful vision but only he himself knows if he really had that dream – and the vision’s beauty wouldn’t suffer if he had it invented. A terrorist might claim to have got an order from his God in a dream, an argument unfit to convince the judges, let alone to comfort the victims. Let us take revelation dreams for granted for now, and were it only for the sake of the argument. Dreams are reported to have witnessed concurrently happening events, possibly at the very same moment, the event being often undesirable, such as a grave accident or the death of a dear friend. A traveller might dream of not taking a particular flight which effectively crashes with a hundred less lucky passengers. On waking up from a revelation dream, the dreamer would ask himself if his dream is to be believed and, in the affirmative, take according measures, depending on the dream content, the dreamer’s faith, mood and other non-measurable parameters. The Bible abounds with examples of relevation dreams containing order, advice or warning: Pharaoh’s dreams in Genesis 41 about his cows and his ears of grain, both forecasting seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, Abimelech’s warning (Genesis 20), Jacob’s dream when he is told to return to the land of his fathers (Genesis 31:10-11) and Laban’s warning (Genesis 31:24). It would, by the way, be interesting to know on what conditions God bothers to appear personally as in Genesis 22 with the testing of Abraham, or when his mere appearance in a dream will do.
Are revelation dreams just fiction or in any way real? The answer depends on what we mean by reality. Many identify reality with what can be consciously perceived, with George Berkeley going as far as pretending that reality depends on being perceived: things are real as long as they are perceived and unreal otherwise. By whom, one is led to ask: is a human being necessary to grant existence or would an observing dog or a microbe suffice? And what about extra-terrestrials with completely different senses, not perceiving what we do, and perceiving what we don’t? At any rate, the perceived reality is paramount for what we are used to calling real, which is quite useful in everyday life, because conscious perception can be shared among different observers and thus be confirmed. Natural science is all about confirming observations by means of repeated experiments, developing theories and predicting the outcome of future experiments. However useful this notion of reality might be, it is dangerously subjective and human centred. Extra-terrestrials would have a different reality, and there might be objects perceivable by strictly no one and nothing: no microbe, no human, no extraterrestrial.
I suggest two new terms: p-reality is the perceived reality in the usual meaning, x-reality includes p-reality and whatever might exist beyond, perceivable or not. The x stands for extended, extra-terrestrial or the Unknown. A subtlety of p-reality is the distinction of the perception and the perceived. A person’s feeling hot may be due to an overheated room, in which case the heat is real, or to the person’s fever, in which case the heat is unreal, but in either case the perception of heat is real. In fact, perception is, beside tautologies, the only incontestable truth we command. The difference between p- and x-reality cannot be overstressed. Humanity is but a spark in the Universe, confined to an infinitely tiny part of space and time. Our ability to perceive depends on the senses evolution has happened to fit us with and is thus an extremely weak indicator of what might or might not exist in the Universe.
If dreams can open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, they might also be able to open a window, however small, to x-reality. We can only speculate about what we perceive when dreaming. But there is worse to come. We don’t even know from where we perceive as a simple reasoning shows. If we can dream that we dream there is no way to prevent us from dreaming that we dream that we dream and so on. We thus find ourselves in a stack of arbitrary many dream levels with no idea where our customary p-reality we believe to live in is positioned. We cannot tell whether our conscious life is in any way more real than our dreams. As there is a subconsciousness below our consciousness, there might likewise be a superconsciousness on top we are not aware of. A different reality could be going on up there, unknown to us, and what we see as p-reality would be but our superconscious dreams. And these were just three levels of consciousness out of arbitrarily many. We have no idea of what’s happening, and we never will.
References#
Kelly Bulkely: Big Dreams. Oxford University Press, 2016
Heiko Luhmann: Alles Einbildung. Was unser Gehirn tatsächlich wahrnimmt. WBG, 2015
Bertrand Russell: History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, 2004
Evan Thompson: Waking, Dreaming, Being, Columbia University Press, 2015
Link verified on 11 June 2017 http://overviewbible.com/infographic-dreams-bible/