Chasing the dream rabbit |
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Where does your mind go when you sleep? Philosophers, theologians and medicos have concerned themselves disproportionately higher on the question of death, the final mystery; as compared to an equally mysterious event which is a part of our daily lives. A human reading this text can recall what they were doing a minute ago, an hour ago. But can you recall what you were doing in the calm hours of the night? Where were you? Your memory begins when you woke up in the morning, attached almost seamlessly to the last memory you created before going to bed. What happened in the middle? As you started falling asleep, where did your mind go? What was it doing for 8 hours? In what ways is falling asleep similar to death? How can our minds construct a whole world of realistic sensations without real physical input? Let us dive into these questions today. Yesterday I performed an experiment where I told myself that I would die when I fall asleep at night. The aim was to see how I would live my last remaining day. It was not a day of pure indulgence, in fact such a thought was out of question. I wanted to get my pending tasks done, first and foremost. I concluded hence, that these things must bring a pleasure far greater than food or entertainment. I overspent myself in exercise, in consumption of stimulating food (a cacao coffee cake that I baked), in work. I dressed nicely. I did not do my laundry as there was no point. I lived so much within a single day. By night I was satisfied with how I spent the last day on Earth. I could have done more, but I was okay since I did not lack in sincere effort. However I did one shameful thing and it itched me as I fell in my bed, waiting for the darkness to take me. However, when I realised that I am going to die now, I could simply change it. I could simply believe whatever I wanted and it would be true. But is truth up to our choice? Truth exists really. The material world exists really. We the observers note its properties down in a way we best understand it, from our limited exposure to the infinite complexity of the material world. Truth is not a matter of personal opinion. The existence of an absolute reality is the reason why we can have sanity. We might not agree on or even know exactly where all of this stuff comes from, but none of us disagree that if you jump of a tall building you fall and you die upon impact. Not messing with material truth is crucial to our survival, physical or social. But if you are about to die anyway? Can truth be anything that you want? There are people whose truth differs from commonly accepted truth, when it interferes with people’s lives; a diagnosis is carried out and a label of insanity is awarded. It is a difficult life. For healthy people not using psychoactive drugs, insanity simply is not a real choice they could make. But what happens to the healthy mind when it approaches death? The majority of people alive today seek out religion. Nobody has access to the real truth about existence; so how can we trust the priests? We also do not have access to the giant particle accelerators, but we trust the scientists who tell us the particles that they have discovered. This faith is essential for forming reality in our heads. Similarly, death row convicts and terminally ill people talk with religious authorities who tell them about the life after death. It is of little importance what is really real at that stage, what matters more is what you want to believe. Last night, I felt that when you are dying, the truth can be anything you want. As I was sinking into darkness yesterday, this thought about death suddenly shone light on the question about dreams that I had been asking for ages. What is a dream? How can a dream be? How do you know that you are not dreaming at the moment? You just know. But while awake, are you seeing reality directly? Look around you. What you are seeing is not the real world, it is rather a well constructed image of the real world. It is a state of the art simulation of the real world. Understanding this fact is crucial. Your brain can construct a dream world because it is used to it, it is constructing one now. It is constructing a world around you which goes through a persistent series of tests, recalibrating itself and staying real. It is our greatest achievement as sentient matter. We access the real world through our sensations. We are able to recreate the real world in vivid detail from the few sensations we derive from it. Let us call this simulation as traum. When awake you are in a waking traum. While sleeping, you are in a sleeping traum, which we shall continue calling a dream. The waking traum is highly calibrated and well tuned for your survival and accuracy. You should not see what is behind you, unless you turn your head. Your brain is constantly taking in real input to update the simulation of the room that you are in. Our mind is “plugged into” the organs that bring us sensations. As long as we are plugged into it, th waking traum performs splendidly. It gives you sanity and performance. When you start falling asleep, however, you unplug entirely from your body. This is now a well understood fact, and it is called sleep paralysis. When you fall asleep, you are in a paralysis, you are unplugged; except for the muscles that move your eyes. If you are unplugged, and you cannot access anything from the real world; you are half as good as dead and anything that you want can be real. An unplugged mind is highly untrained and presently impossible to maneouvre. The closest you can come to getting control over it when you realise that you are dreaming and can explore the dream world as though it were real. You move your hands and legs using the same neuronal circuitry yet your real body somewhere in the real world remains paralysed. If you have taken an unfortunate dose of caffeine, you remain awake in bed for a bit, observing a few steps of sleep before you stop creating memories and let sleep take you. You notice that the important events of the day flash in front of you. They do not flash in chronological order, and sometimes it could simply be someone’s smiling face that your brain fixates upon. When you are falling asleep, your thoughts start running wide and wild, and it starts becoming harder and harder to trace the link between them. At a certain point you feel, or at least I feel, a physiological change, as though a hormone has been released into my blood and I feel safe that I would now certainly fall asleep. It should be alarming to us that we drop down our defenses and let the darkness take us. We enjoy it. Is it not akin to death? We are simply going into unconsciousness and also happy about it. Perhaps because we know that we shall wake tomorrow. I am still in complete darkness regarding where my mind goes soon after you would say that I have fallen asleep. It is lost. Some time later, when I am dreaming, I have found it again, in a functioning state with a fully realised self, most often a body and a personality. Sometimes I am just an observer in a dream. Sometimes I become aware that I am dreaming and walk around in the dream. Dreams are complete hallucinations and you are also deluded while you are in them. And then I wake up, remembering my pending tasks and my routines and get to my business; completely ignoring the fact that I was somewhere else just a while ago, in a world that was not real. The key to exploring where our mind goes, is first understanding that we are always living in a hallucination. In waking state for healthy people it corresponds to the real world, and while asleep in the REM part of your sleep it is created acording to the random whims of your subconscious mind. As for non-REM sleep, it is a matter of pure speculation. Bonus: Now that we are aware of this mind – plugs – sensations – reality connection, could we manually unplug ourselves to enjoy frolicking in the dream world consciously? There are two methods to do that. You may try sensory deprivation. You could go to a deep and dark cave where you cannot hear anything and not a single photon of visible light enters your eyes. You shall find that you begin hallucinating and vividly day-dreaming fairly quickly. This is a middle ground between the two traums we mentioned. Ensure that you have a partner. You may also pay for a sensory deprivation tank experience, which you might find in big cities where even gravity is taken away from you as a sensation. The second is walking into a dream using the Wake-Induced-Lucid-Dreaming method, which asks you to wake up after 5.5 hours of sleep and remain completely still in bed, allow the paralysis to take over and enter the dream state through hypnagogic hallucinations. I have never been able to do it, as my body does not allow me to unplug while being conscious. My body has a few tricks up its sleeves. Previously I used to feel an itch or a presence of an insect on my face which would become increasingly painful that I would be forced to move and scratch it. In an recent attempt it was a strong desire to cough which I was unable to suppress. If you resist these attempts, your body is capable of moving without your consent or will and it is very scary to experience that. Understanding these things clearly now are helping me understand sleep more, and perhaps I should start sleeping better with this knowledge. I recommend listening to Dr. Matthew Walker regarding his empirical research on what sleep is to gain more clarity; in addition to experimenting yourself with this fascinating aspect of life that we move past everyday without a second thought. Sleep and dreams is a fascinating aspect of our lives. It remains as mysterious today as it was to the ancient poets. Onwards to going deeper into our psyche! |