Where do dreams come from?

[epepke]

Or, rather, how are they made with such an amazing amount of stuff in them? I've read that dreams don't really last longer than five minutes or so, but they're amazingly detailed.

Here's a dream that I had last night. It was an office dream, and I've had a lot of those recently, because I'm unemployed and don't like it. They all end with the same punchline, when I realize that they aren't paying me any more.

The office was in a room, longer east-west than north-south. The entrance, a darkish wooden door that opened in and south into the room, was on the west wall. On the north wall was a single window in the center, an old-fashioned wood slide-up window the same color as the door. The panes had been covered with a reddish brown adhesive material that was peeling in places. The walls were covered in aging and faded posters.

On the east wall were several filing cabinets upon which had been piled papers and some of those trapezoidal wire baskets. There were four desks in the room, two near the north wall and two near the south wall. The north desks faced south, and the south desks faced north. All four desks were made of that grey-painted steel with a dimple finish that was so popular in the early 60's, with that black rubbery coating on the top that gets sticky after a while. It had the look of a room in a University, where they haven't had the money to buy furniture in a long time.

My desk was at the southwest corner. Sam's desk was at the northwest corner. Sam resembled a Sam that I knew in real life, but his face was wider, and his hair was more unkempt, a kind of cigarette-stained blonde. Tom's desk was at the northeast corner, facing mine. I had to think to remember Tom's name, because he was a new guy. He had bushy black hair and a black beard and was wearing a black, gray, and white sort-of-tartan flannel shirt. I don't remember Tom from real life. Sam was wearing a white shirt with horizontal tan sewn-in stripes.

We had just finished a milestone, so we had each been rewarded with a glass of white wine. I looked at mine on my desk. It was in a plastic frame cube, molded whole but looking like 12 hollow parallelopipeds in a cube frame shape. The cube was a reddish brown. It had obviously been molded cheaply, as the surface was slightly concave except at the edges and had that streaky quality of cheap moldings. Also molded into the cube was a support for the base of the glass, and a circular socket. In this socket was the other part of the support. A vertical cylinder of plastic, with at the top a rotatable piece with a flat flange on the top to grip and a flat flange that rotated and went under the top frame of the cube to hold it in place. Also on a hinge coming out from the top was a short stick of plastic with a cap that sealed over the top of the wine glass. All of this was made out of a slightly flexible, greenish cyan, almost fluorescent plastic. I thought this was pretty clever. I knew in the dream that there was a regulation that wine could only be poured in the cafeteria. This arrangement allowed glasses to be stacked in the wire cart that they used to deliver the mail, which I knew was delivered usually by a tall, stocky, fiftyish woman with salt-and-pepper hair.

I opened it up, took the glass of wine out of the box. It was a 3 oz. rounded glass, with that opalescent finish that some wine glasses had. The wine was a white wine, a bit dark in color. I tasted it. It has a very bright taste, redolent of high alcohol content and was quite acidic, but in body it was like a Vouvray.

All this time, I knew I was dreaming, as I almost always do. I noticed that the long cylindrical part, when it was on my desk, was a bit longer that would fit into the cube. So I examined it. I saw that the long cylindrical part was actually two pieces, with an internal plunging spring (which I could see when I pulled it apart). I could also see the helical spring that made the cap come down over the wine, and on the underside of the cap, I could see a black O-ring recessed in the groove around the lip.

I went over and thanked Sam, and it was at this point that the ever-present punchline came. I actually wasn't being paid by them, and so I decided to go. I looked for my personal books to take home. They were under the desk. There were no drawers on the desk, but there were two shelves, made of thin sheet steel (with that same paint) and curled over and crimped at the front lip to make it safe. Neither shelf was full, so books were slouched over (to the left). I recognized one book, which was an Oracle manual, about 9 cm thick and 8 1/2 by 11, a paperback, but the logo was not the usual one, but rather something in a square, patterned in red, blue, and black. I took that one and another paperback, thinner but the same paper size, and left.

I have taken great effort not to reconstruct details here but limit it only to what I directly remember. I cannot remember what was on the desks (except that there were no computers). I cannot remember the lighting, or whether the floor was tile or carpet. I don't know how many drawers each the file cabinets on the East side had. I don't know what the chairs looked like.

But still, that's a hell of a lot of detail for my brain just to invent in five minutes. I'm pretty sure that I couldn't invent that much detail in five minutes while awake. I'm not an artist, and I generally have a great deal of difficulty making up these kinds of things.

So, how does this happen?

I used to have the hypothesis that, in a dream, there isn't actual detail, but mostly the illusion that detail exists somewhere. That's why, in a dream, I try to examine the most unusual part and see if I can find detail.

I also had the hypothesis that dreams were just pastiches of things that one had seen before, just put together in odd ways. However, the details of this room, as well as other things I've dreamed, fit into the overall "design." Someone would make a set just like this for an old University setting. In the past I've dreamt of modern office settings, where charcoal-grey cylinders and clear glass windows at angles were the architectural theme. I've also seen shopping malls, in verdigris green and bronze, giving a sort of "gay 90s" quality.

I also had the hypothesis that dreams didn't really have the detail, but only the impression that there is detail there. That's why, in a dream, I always make an effort to examine something. In this case, it was the wine box and the wine. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that in real life before. It was quite detailed, and it was also a good design. I could build a prototype of that, and it would work, and even though I've never farmed out anything for injection-molding, I'm pretty sure that it's possible.

So I have to wonder if, during dreaming, the brain is actually working terribly hard and really doing all this lighting and modeling work. But that seems a lot of work for a brain to do. Any ideas?

 

[Darat]

I'll need longer to digest your post but one thing immediately caught my attention you say "I have taken great effort not to reconstruct details here but limit it only to what I directly remember." but all memories are reconstructions aren't they? If that is so then perhaps dreams are not at all "detailed" rather it is our reconstruction that adds the details?

 

[Molinaro]

Here is what I think (personal opinion only).

The parts of our brain that process sensory inputs cannot be 'turned off' while we are asleep. Those processes continue to operate using inputs from memory instead. Otherwise, maintaining a link to existing sensory inputs would preclude the ability to remain asleep.


Now here's an interesting 'moment' I once had in a dream:

I was in the highschool gym ready to take an exam along with a bunch of other students. I was sitting at a desk and the exam was on the desk in front of me face up. I was not paying much attention to it, but did notice that the top page consisted of a paragraph, then some space for an answer, then a 2nd paragraph for the next question and another blank spot for it's answer.

I (the me who is 'watching the me' who is experiencing the contents of the dream) had a sudden idea! What if the 'me' in the dream were to read the 1st question of that exam realy carefully so that the 'me' who is watching the dream unfold can then review the question in the morning to see if it actualy makes sense?

So, I direct the me who is sitting at the desk experiencing the events of the dream to carefully read the 1st question. So now, the point of view of the dream shifts to the me at the desk and I turn my eyes to the page and start to read... and my vision goes blurry and I can't read a word!!!!!

I turn away from the page and my vision clears up.. and then I turn back to try and quickly read a few words.. but the 'dream-making' part of my brain again blurrs the page!

It was a very interesting experience. I am always.. 100% of the time aware of my dreams as they occur. I experience them as the 'self' in the dream, as well as the 'self' who is thinking about the fact that I am dreaming and thinking about the 'me' who is actualy in the dream. I can change what I do within the dream, and I can even 'rewind' to an earlier point in the dream, or end it. I cannot in any way change what hapens in the dream.

I am anxiously awaiting my next oportunity to see if my dreams will let me try to read something to see if it makes sense.

 

[epepke]

I'll need longer to digest your post but one thing immediately caught my attention you say "I have taken great effort not to reconstruct details here but limit it only to what I directly remember." but all memories are reconstructions aren't they? If that is so then perhaps dreams are not at all "detailed" rather it is our reconstruction that adds the details?

That's possible, but there's only a limit that we can go for this, before deciding that all memories are wholly or mostly fictional. Besides, my waking memories are really quite good, except for names.

In any event, I reported on the dream as quickly as I could. So there's only a limited amount of time that I had either for "original detail" or reconstruction.

Whether you want to call this original detail or reconstruction, it doesn't matter. I'm not an artist, and I'm not a set-designer. If, when waking, someone asked me to come up with as detailed a description of a fictional room with stuff in it, it would have taken me a lot longer to come up with it, even if I had paper for sketching and a 3-D modeling program. Maybe even a couple of days.

So there was something happening while I was sleeping that created, very fast, much faster than I can create while awake and fully conscious. So there's something happening here, and I'm interested in figuring it out what it is.

 

[Belz...]

But still, that's a hell of a lot of detail for my brain just to invent in five minutes. I'm pretty sure that I couldn't invent that much detail in five minutes while awake. I'm not an artist, and I generally have a great deal of difficulty making up these kinds of things.

So, how does this happen?

Not much of a mystery, really. I mean, every element of every dream I can remember seems to come from experiences or thoughts that were, at the time of the dream, fairly recent. It's only natural that we would rehash recent memories in order to index them properly. Like a big, biological defrag of some sorts.

 

[epepke]

Not much of a mystery, really. I mean, every element of every dream I can remember seems to come from experiences or thoughts that were, at the time of the dream, fairly recent. It's only natural that we would rehash recent memories in order to index them properly. Like a big, biological defrag of some sorts.

But, as I pointed out, there were some elements that weren't like this. The wine box, for example. I hadn't ever seen anything like that before. The wine, even. I've avoided wine since my first bout of pancreatitis this year. The shelves under the desk. Tom's appearance. The look of the windows and doors.

There were many other elements that I could connect to recent events. I saw Dubravko the other day, and that reminded me of academia, though not the academia that he was associated with. I've seen steel gray desks before, but many years ago.

But the design of the wine box gets me. It was quite novel. It would work. A very unusual application (plastic molded products to avoid some esoteric University regulation). None of that is recent.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Interesting about the attempt to read. I usually find myself dyslexic in dreams. This I find interesting, as my dreams are gloriously visual, with detailed, hyper sharp focus and graphics to make George Lucas weep tears of envy.
Yet when awake, I'm seriously short sighted with no ability to mentally "visualise" anything at all. It seems clear that my sleeping and dreaming brain is a very different system from it's waking equivalent.

I recently had a dream in which the omniscient "I"-or another dream character, which is the same thing really, warned me to cover my eyes, just before a flare exploded with incredible brilliance. (I wish I had woken up to check for phosphene after images.) Now does that mean "I "had the script and knew the flare was coming, or did I add the flare to explain the "cover your eyes "warning?

Most odd.

 

[epepke]

Interesting about the attempt to read. I usually find myself dyslexic in dreams. This I find interesting, as my dreams are gloriously visual, with detailed, hyper sharp focus and graphics to make George Lucas weep tears of envy.

That's interesting. I don't recall ever reading in a dream beyond recognizing single words and numerals. It sounds like your experience is much like mine.

What astonishes me is the sheer amount of visual detail. Your experiences seem to be similar to mine.

I recently had a dream in which the omniscient "I"-or another dream character, which is the same thing really, warned me to cover my eyes, just before a flare exploded with incredible brilliance. (I wish I had woken up to check for phosphene after images.) Now does that mean "I "had the script and knew the flare was coming, or did I add the flare to explain the "cover your eyes "warning?

Most odd.

One think I've noticed is that in a dreaming state, funny things happen to the order of events. I've had many dreams in which there was a long lead up, seeming to last about thirty seconds or so, culminating with the alarm going off, and this noise integrated into the dream with the lead-up. Clearly, unless my internal clock is a lot more accurate than I think it is, I would have had to perceive the ringing of the alarm before constructing the lead-up. So perhaps the actual semi-conscious perception is delayed until the set-up has been made. Or perhaps memories are re-ordered in time. In any event, it happens extremely quickly.

I've had similar experiences in a semi-dreaming state. Usually while watching television and after having had some sweet, strong English ale, sort of dozing. I will hear and note some highly unusual phrase. Then I will perceive a commercial break with three or four commercials. Then the program will restart, and I'll hear that phrase again and wake bolt upright. When there's a rerun of the show later, I listen for the phrase, and it only appears once. Experiences like this might give some the idea that they are precognitive. It seems to me much more likely that the entire experience of hearing the phrase, hearing commercials, and then hearing it again is constructed in the split second between hearing the phrase and waking. It should go without saying that I've never been able to wake up during the commercial break and write the phrase down, so there's no evidence that my perception reflects the actual sequence of events.

Richard Feynman once wrote about not being able to satisfy his curiosity about dreams, because whenever he looked up stuff about them, it was all Freudian mumbe-jumbo.

 

[UrsulaV]

Now that's odd, because I've dreamed in text before.

Seriously. I was playing a lot of text-based games at the time, and I have a tendency, when I'm playing a game, to start dreaming in that interface. Peculiar when it was "Diablo," a little weirder when it was something like "Sim City," but probably the oddest were a set of text-based dreams.

Still, it wasn't quite like reading in a normal dream, it was like the whole dream was based on reading this text, so...yeah. Not sure.

I don't think the level of detail in dreams is neccessarily that astonishing, though. Have you ever caught a glimpse of something in the corner of your eye, and filled in a whole bunch of detail, and then turned and got a better look, and it was something else completely? For example, I once saw something in the corner of my eye, and it was definitely a lizard. Positively it had an eye and I saw scales and the wrinkled curve of a leg. For a split second, pure, detailed lizard. Actually, it was my sandal on the floor. No scales at all, and the "eye" had been the wink of light off one of the buckles. I'd filled in a surprising amount of detail in less than half a second, all of which had been false. The same thing makes random shadows into monsters and whatnot. The brain is just good at filling in stuff. I think with dreams, it just does it in spades.

 

[Freakshow]

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I suffer from severe primary insomnia (insomnia for which there is no known cause), and can tell you how much of a necessity our dreams are. I can't put it into words, but can tell you that there is some sort of relief that comes from dreaming. Some sort of release of pressure. I have been days before with such poor sleep that I did little or no dreaming. It really is necessary.

When I am sleeping well and dreaming a lot (takes a lot of medication to do that), I tend to have violent nightmares.

So...I have done a lot of investigation into sleep and dreaming. And we don't know for sure why we do either of them.

I like to think that this is correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_synthesis_theory
That article doesn't give a good overview, but the following is from the page on dreams: "The activation synthesis theory developed by Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley state that the brain tries to interpret random impulses from the pons as sensory input."

The reason I like to think that is that it makes my going to sleep at night easier. I hate sleep, and hate dreaming. Even when I don't have nightmares, I hate sleep and dreaming. I don't like the loss of control over my conciousness. So when I can tell myself that my dreams are just some sort of neurological fluke, it makes going to bed at night much easier. Of course, taking a drug that activates GABA activity makes going to bed at night much easier, too.

 

[boeingJr]

About not being able to read in your dreams, well, I tend to have lots of dreams were I read newspapers; I can read it as easily as while waking, the stories are realistic, and always very disturbing (guess if they were not, they wouldn't be news). I almost said they always wake me up, but I wouldn't really know that as I think I only remember the last dream before waking up. Anyway, the events are not something I recently read, but nor do they seem to happen after, either. I do remember playing a computer game on Commodore 64 (Monty on the run), and I was severly stuck, often. On two occations I had very detailed game dreams, dreamt of a solution, tried it, and it worked!! Yay!

 

[1984]

I don't like the loss of control over my conciousness.

The first thing I thought of here is people at a bar, in the small hours of the morning, who are in a state of semi-conciousness and intoxication, nodding off, only to refuse to go home to bed.

For my modest contribution to this topic, with apologies to Robert Todd Carroll for not seeking permission - dreams from the perspective of a "hardline" skeptic.

The thing that gets me about dreams is that they can affect your emotions, whilst having them, and sometimes after.

 

[Schneibster]

Someone with REAL knowledge of psychology will probably step in and stomp me here, but the last I heard, dreams were the "high-level" results of activity that happens when our subconscious weeds through all the short term memories we have accumulated over the course of the day and decides which ones to transfer to long-term memory. IOW, the effect we see semi-consciously from it is only a side-effect; something relatively ordered is going on "underneath" and an important bit of work is getting done.

Here's something to consider: dreams apparently occur once every ninety minutes or so, during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. So how come we only remember one dream? Because if you don't wake up during the dream, you don't remember it! Again, this is what I've heard.

ETA: one of my more interesting dream experiences came after being told that most men dream in black-and-white, but most women dream in color. I decided during a dream to try to see whether this was true or not, and had the extremely odd experience of seeing a particular object in color, but realizing the rest of everything was black-and-white! This woke me up, and every time I've tried the same experiment, it's come out the same way.

 

[Corpse Cruncher]

This is one area I have often thought over. That and why do some foods seemingly create nightmares when eaten late at night?

The explanation of where dreams comes from given to me was: Dreams are a form of defragment program running in the hippocampus area. Depending on what was gained via the stimuli senses the day, possibly before, then gauges the dream. If you were given a lot of, visual film based stimuli your dreams followed suit. How true this is I do not have the expertise to evaluate.

Talking of dreams, what I call my worse dreams. Are those where I dream in binary and mathematical formula's. Neither of which I understand.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I'm a full colour dreamer. I think everyone is as different in their dreaming as they are in their thinking. What I find odd in mine is the contrast between my totally non-visual waking state and my highly visual dreaming state.

Had a bad cold all week. Disturbed sleep and mild fever. Last night I dreamed I was to give a safety talk, but found myself in a university lecture theatre giving a lecture on physics. (A truly ridiculous notion).
So I winged it, as you do.
I only recall one thing I said, which was that "now" is the process where quantum states are collapsed into classical ones and that's why the future is uncertain and the past is known.

Occasionally I have a "great insight" in dreams, which, on waking is trite, banal or complete rubbish. I'm a bit bothered by this one, as it seems to make a certain amount of sense.

Anyone encountered the idea before? I don't think I have, but I read widely and forget most of it.

 

[Corpse Cruncher]

How are or is there an explanation for de ja vu woken dreams?

 

[uruk]

How are or is there an explanation for de ja vu woken dreams?

One explination I've heard is that the sensation of deja vu is caused by an accidental or "miss-release" of a particular neuro transmitter thsat gives you the sensation or feeling that you have a previous memory of an something that you are experiancing.
Deja vu is more prevalent in severe epilepsy sufferers.

 

[athon]

I've only read a couple of the responses here, but I'll do my best to add my view from the reading I've done. I suffered from pretty severe nightmares since I was young, and have done my best to study up as much as possible. I'll put it as simply as I can;

We all make patterns and associations from all of our senses, and store the information as memories. All stimuli are matched up with other stimuli we are experiencing and with prior experiences to create what we call 'perception'. Hence our experiences go towards biasing what we sense in order to make sense of the world.

In day to day life, our brains are summoning up memories to match with experienced stimuli. Conscious thought is essentially a limited form of control we have to select meaning from this 'matching' ability. I say limited, because we have no control over the patterns we form.

In sleep, the stimuli we have while we are awake are essentially dulled, and in most cases completely reduced. Hence 'association' patterns are made without either a lot of external stimulation, and without a lot of conscious input. One memory will stimulate another memory, forming an odd chain that we do our best to make sense of when we regain conscious control. Lucid dreaming occurs when we have a very low ability to consciously evaluate this sequence.

This is why dreams involve recent experiences and why they seem so odd.

Why do they exist?

There are a lot of opinions. Afterall, such an ability takes a lot of energy when we really should be conserving it. There must be a reason.

Dreaming occurs during a certain 'lighter' state of consciousness called 'REM' sleep. Babies have massive amounts of this state. One theory is that it benefits us to be able to take advantage of this low-stimulus time to continue reinforcing patterns we make during our conscious hours, and to break other associations that seem to be pointless. It is a little bit like your brain trying out different patterns and seeing where information can be used effectively for waking hours. Babies need to use the limited amount of experience they gain in waking hours to learn effectively, so perhaps dreaming enhances this.

Athon

 

[Bronze Dog]

Professor Pharnsworth: The dream gets into your brain, just like this liquid gets into this egg. *injects egg with a syringe. Egg explodes.*

 

[epepke]

Someone with REAL knowledge of psychology will probably step in and stomp me here, but the last I heard, dreams were the "high-level" results of activity that happens when our subconscious weeds through all the short term memories we have accumulated over the course of the day and decides which ones to transfer to long-term memory. IOW, the effect we see semi-consciously from it is only a side-effect; something relatively ordered is going on "underneath" and an important bit of work is getting done.

That's the classical view. I saw a study where they isolated a single neuron that fired a lot when a rat learned a new maze. During REM sleep, the same neuron fired a lot.

However, in the OP I tried to explain that this does not explain what I'm talking about. It seems I did a poor job, so I'll try again. I'm talking about the new stuff in dreams. In the OP dream, it would be the wine box. That seemed to me pretty strange and certainly is not related to any of the problems I've tried to solve anywhere near recently. However, it was clever and well worked out, if of limited commercial value. It was either worked out while I was examining it in the dream (which leads to the question, how so fast?) or my brain had worked it out before (which leads to the question, why?)

Here's something to consider: dreams apparently occur once every ninety minutes or so, during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. So how come we only remember one dream? Because if you don't wake up during the dream, you don't remember it! Again, this is what I've heard.

I frequently remember multiple dreams and sometimes dream cycles, with a particular narrative told in a number of installments.

However, memory of dreams is interesting. The night before last, I dreamed a song. It was supposed to be a song by Frank Zappa, but it was out-of-character, and in the dream I wondered why his voice was so high, and in dream-logic I figured that it must have been recorded before he was pushed off the stage in London and had his larynx crushed, which lowered his voice by a fifth. It was an interesting song, with a simple A-B structure in a minor key. The arrangement involved an acoustic guitar, a horn section, and some strings. It was a celebratory song about the end of the Vietnam war and the resignation of Nixon, apparently written soon afterward.

While I was waking, I decided that it needed a bridge and a chorus, so that the structure would be A-B-A-B-D-E-A-B F-G. Then I realized that the whole structure needed to be repeated, to talk about Bush and the Iraq war. Could be a good song if I ever finish it.

But the interesting thing is this. I knew upon awaking that I would lose it if I didn't write it down. I couldn't find pencil and paper, so I got my cell phone and used the voice memo program that I wrote to sing the A-B. The funny thing is that now, I can remember the bridge and the chorus, but not the versus. Fortunately, they're on the phone.

ETA: one of my more interesting dream experiences came after being told that most men dream in black-and-white, but most women dream in color. I decided during a dream to try to see whether this was true or not, and had the extremely odd experience of seeing a particular object in color, but realizing the rest of everything was black-and-white! This woke me up, and every time I've tried the same experiment, it's come out the same way.

That's interesting. Maybe a part of your brain is playing a joke on you, or maybe there's a focused detail kind of thing. My brain has played jokes on me during dreams. One of my favorite dreams was very simple, and went like this. I was at a table in a restaurant or a hotel or something talking to someone. He said, "So, what you're saying is that all your dreams are lucid?" "Yes," I answered, "except for this one."

I always dream in full senses. Color, stereopsis, touch, taste, and smell. I've read that smell is impossible in dreams, but they're wrong. The only times that I've ever dreamt in black-and-white were when it was appropriate in the context of the dream. When I was a kid, I had My Favorite Martian dreams, which were of course in black-and-white, because that's how I saw them on teevee.

There was a dream I had about twenty years ago called "Golden Peacock," which was a documentary about an artist/filmmaker named Potter, who believed in doing art as quickly as possible. There was a black-and-white scene, but it was one of Potter's films. There was one scene where someone was interviewing a critic and asked, "What is Potter, exactly? Is he a neo-romantic?" "Potter," the critic replied, "is a neo-neoist."

I thought that was kind of clever, describing someone who is into novelty for novelty's sake, and over the past two decades, I've used it a number of times.