Hi Mactombs,
You raise some interesting points.
There are a few myths about dreams, and the limitations of dreams. Dreams are so little understood, but still the sleep scientists and sometimes the psychologists try to tell us one thing or another about them, when really they don’t know.
Did you know the entry for dream in the penguin dictionary of psychology reads as follows:
“ A lot of people have wrestled with this one; let’s define it simply as ‘imagery during sleep’. Dreaming appears to occur in many organisms and is intimately related to rapid-eye-movement or REM sleep.”<br>
A very honest definition, not very informative, but really that is all they know, for fact, most of what we hear about the limitations and causes of our dreams from the scientific world is mere speculation.
A Myth:
Modern sleep scientists have two badly supported, or very ignorantly evidenced theories that are generally now being written as fact.
Many modern sleep researchers are claiming that dreams have a non-linear causality.
A linear causality simply refers to something that makes temporal sense, or is ordered logically along a time line from start to finish. For example most stories have a linear causality, as do our waking lives, they run from start to finish with no jumps. For an example of non-linear causality we could look to the movies and you may have seen the film Memento, it jumps about backwards and forwards, and its temporal order is all over the place, that is a non-linear causality.
It is claimed now that our dreams follow this pattern. What really annoys me about these, so called cutting edge scientists, is the way they phrase things. They say that dreams have a non-linear causality, not that their dreams have a non-linear causality, I do not remember them asking me.
Those elite scientists in the know claim to have proved this ‘fact’ by splitting up a series of dreams into separate scenes and asking another person to try to rebuild all those mixed up scenes into the original order of the dream, apparently it is impossible.
Nearly all of my dreams make perfect sense from start to finish, no strange scene transitions, no temporal or reality fluctuations. I have had dreams that have lasted for weeks and even years within the dream world, and each and every day comes and goes and the temporal order is exact.
Another much overlooked aspect is lucid dreams where the dreamer is perfectly aware of everything, but of course If we were sleep scientists funded by the government and taking home huge pay checks we would easily forget about things like that to, after all its only a scientific experiment the results of which are being preached to the world as fact, who cares if it was a thorough, concise and controlled experiment or not. It seems to me that many of these scientists are so desperate to prove materialism that they ignore anything that may indicate anything else.
This next myth is another great one. This is a classic!
A bit of background information so that you may grasp the gist.
In 1960 a Swedish neuro-anatomist Kjell Fuxe discovered the presence of brain stem cells containing the neuromodulators noradrenaline and serotonin. A neurotransmitter is a type of molecule that carries signals between neurons (nerve cells) at synapses in the nervous system. Neuromodulation is a special kind of chemical neurotransmission that allows the brain to change its state globally.
Sleep scientists now believe that the change in brain state from waking consciousness to sleeping consciousness is caused by the absence of the two modulators noradrenaline and serotonin. Noradrenaline and serotonin output is reduced by fifty percent during N-REM sleep and is completely shut down during REM sleep. Both of these modulators are present during waking consciousness and have been attributed to such faculties as memory, reflection and attention. It therefore issues forth that the dreaming consciousness is operating with two of its major chemical systems disabled, which is the explanation provided for the reduced mental faculties whilst dreaming.
And now for the crunch!
The sleep scientist and Professor of Psychiatry Dr J Allan Hobson has the following to say on the bases of this discovery:
“Now the emphasis on the power of the formal approach to the study of dreaming should become clear even to those who still long for the mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation. We can see that when the brain self activated in sleep, it changes its chemical self-instructions. The mind has no choice but to go along with the programme. It sees, it moves, and it feels things intensely but it does not think, remember or focus attention very well. This, in turn, shows clearly that our so-called minds are functional states of our brains. The mind is not something else – it is not a spirit, it is not an independent entity. It is the self-activated brain whose capacity for subjectivity remains to be explained but whose form of subjectivity can now be understood.”
(Dreams, An Introduction to the Science of Dreams. J Allan Hobson)
Dr Hobson is not alone on this supposition, it is rife, and every time you hear a sleep scientist on the television you will hear something very similar. What Dr Hobson is implying is that the chemical foundation within the brain changes when we go to sleep, and this forces the mind to act in a specific way, there fore the mind is at the mercy of the brain – albeit the mind is nothing more than a part of the brain – nothing exists beyond flesh and tissue.
Ok Dr Hobson, have you ever considered the fact that generally we choose to sleep? We are not forced to sleep, unless we are extremely tired and flake out through exhaustion we choose to sleep, we decide yes I think I will go to bed now.
Unless I am very much mistaken narcolepsy is very rare. Now they may have found a chemical state change in the brain that occurs during sleep, but all that tells us is that certain physical brain functions are required to be shut down, when the body is doing what ever it is that it is doing. It does not imply ownership, because the brain changed state does not mean it controls the mind, how about considering that the mind told the brain to do it, and then the brain issued the chemical change on that request.
If we move our arm, chemical changes occur within the fibres of the muscle of that arm, but this does not imply that the arm made that decision, the arm is not in charge, we decided to move the arm.
I can hardly tolerate the ignorance of these people.
In all their assumptions they fail to look at research offered by respected investigators such as Celia Green and Robert Crookall, more like they ignore it, because it does not fit in with the statistical results that they require for proving their fictional point.
Both the afore mentioned investigators did huge amounts of research into OBE and the brain state, the results were that subjects had so many differences that no clear pattern could be found between their brain states, but it was clear that the start of an OBE does not coincide with any abrupt physiological change.
This shows that the mind can function in full conscious control, and in a full mental faculty, regardless of the state of the brain.
I rest my case.
And end my rant.
