Sept/Oct 2009
the zen of science

by Marc Ringel

The Dream Life

Every mammal takes time out to snooze, as do many other vertebrate phyla, including fish. But there’s a problem with defining sleep in species other than homo sapiens. Do they have to show similar brainwave changes as humans do when we sleep? Must they also go through a phase involving rapid eye movement (REM)? Depending on how you define sleep, there is pretty good evidence that even fruit flies regularly engage in a little shuteye (metaphorically speaking, because the insect actually has huge compound eyes and no eyelids).

No matter where you draw the snooze line in the animal world, by the time you get to human beings, there’s no doubt that every one of us must sleep in order to survive. When you deprive us of sleep we get tired, cranky, eventually psychotic and finally, with extreme deprivation, even dead.

We know what happens when you don’t sleep, but still not why you have to. It’s logical in a general sense that our bodies need time to regenerate and repair the toll that daily living extracts on the finely tuned central nervous system. Sleep, by temporarily disconnecting body systems from the brain, assures that the hull remains in dry dock long enough to scrape the day’s accumulation of barnacles. Thus, when dawn comes, we can sail back into the waves of life in a seaworthy craft, prepared to earn our keep among the sharks and flying fish.

But human sleep is way more complicated than that. It is not just a simple time-out for physical self-repair. There are a number of different phases of sleep through which a normal sleeper passes, sort of like a diver descending to the depths and ascending almost to the surface, multiple times over the course of a night. The most interesting phase is REM, which is when dreaming occurs.

If we don’t understand sleep very well, we really don’t have a clue about dreaming. Sigmund Freud broke new ground in the modern age with his work, Interpretation of Dreams, in which he showed how to use dreams as pointers to what’s going on in the unconscious mind. Freud was picking up the threads of traditions from all corners of the world. In virtually every culture, dating back to before the written word, people have used dreams as guideposts to other worlds, whether called the world of spirits, of the gods, or of the unconscious.

From a reductionist, biological point of view, some scientists label dreams as epiphenomena of sleep, a mere byproduct of the real work being done as the brain unwinds. One of the proposed physiological explanations of the role of sleep in the brain is that it serves to detoxify and redistribute neurotransmitters that accumulate in nerve tissue in the course of waking life. Another theory is that sleep deepens the grooves of nascent neural pathways, turning recently acquired experience into learning and memories.

According to this purely materialist line, dreams are like bubbles that rise to near the surface of consciousness, bearing little bundles of data that are mixed up and randomly thrown off by the real work of detoxification, redistribution and memory incorporation that occurs mostly in the deeper structures of the brain. These bubbles stimulate neural pathways and are experienced as dreams.

When it comes to most anything, I try to find a middle way, including in constructing my conception of the purpose and meaning of dreaming. I don’t have a firm conviction about the real existence of a spirit world. Nor do I believe that dreams are merely random little videos tossed off by the computer in my head as it clears its .tmp files. I suspect the real truth is that dreams manifest aspects of existence unavailable to our conscious minds, as well as being the product of a sort of neurochemical housekeeping.

I’ve had plenty of fascinating meaningful dreams. I am certain that these nocturnal experiences have provided, and will continue to provide me with strong indications about what’s really going on in my psyche, free of the sorts of rationalization that my waking, intellectualizing mind so nimbly dances around. My balance and mental health depend on connecting my conscious mind and my unconscious. Dreaming is one of the crucial ways I nurture and maintain that connection.

Now, here’s the issue, the one I always seem to get around to in these columns. It’s about finding a middle ground to stand on, a position that does justice to both the hard materialist world of the scientist and the woo-woo world of the spirit. As a healer, I partake of both
worlds when I do my job. My position that dreams serve as mediators between the conscious and the unconscious gives me a purchase on a wide range of human experience to be addressed in my medical practice.

There’s just one problem with this theory of dreams. It’s based on undefined terms. What is consciousness anyway? Or, the unconscious, for that matter?

I have the firm belief that, if we ever do come up with an answer to the question, “What is consciousness?” that satisfies most Buddhists and scientists (and maybe even some Muslims, Christians, Jews and Australian Aborigines) it will have to explain dreaming too. Meanwhile, given how little we understand about it, I will continue to enjoy myself speculating about consciousness, playing around in broad, wide-open fields that range from neurochemistry to computer science to phenomenology to meditation to quantum physics. There’s so much room for imagination. And for dreaming.

Marc Ringel has spent the majority of his career as a family doctor working in rural communities, including the last 12 years in Brush, Colorado. He has written extensively, for lay and professional audiences, about rural health, medical informatics and healing.