Are visions from God, or the Devil or indigestion?

quote:

---

You almost certainly have dreams every night, but you don't remember them. If you were hooked up to a monitor and were woken when you went into REM sleep, you would be able to recount every dream.

---

Here's a funny thing: I'm not sure this would happen. I have a playful - partly serious - notion of why this might not be so.I frequently have dreams which lead up to an unpredictable waking waking event. For example, in my dream I'm driving and I crash the car: I wake up at that instant just as an overloaded bookshelf in my library crashes to the floor. I know many people have similar experiences and find them very mysterious.Yet you are right, too. The "activity" of dreaming seems very real - the REM sleep, the twitching, speaking even.Imagine if it actually happens like this. During REM sleep, during what appear to others to be our dreaming state, our mind is actually just firing off largely out of its normal patter and therapeutically - you could compare it to defragging a hard drive, perhaps. See it as a way of relaxing those neurons that are overused during the day, and exercising the underused ones - the better to ensure that rarely activated, but potentially valuable, neural pathways are still "primed."On waking, we now have our memory in a given state, and critically it likely includes our waking event if there was one.How do we interpret this state? By doing what the human mind always does - we construct a narrative which explains, however bizzarely, how we got there.Think of it like the martian vacation in the movie Total Recall - all the memories of a vacation with none of the inconvenience of actually having one!It would be interesting to consider what experiments might confirm this notion, were it to be fleshed out to a hypothesis. Philosophically there would be an objection, I suppose, to even the possibility of determining that an unconscious subject was dreaming at a given moment. Norman Malcolm, the American logical positivist, outlined such objections in his fine book "Dreaming."What do you think?

Hi DanWhat I am suggesting is that dreaming is the mind's response to neuroelectrical events. I guess that leaves room for those responses to be open to other influences - spirtual, if you will.

quote:

---

I'm speaking of an irrelevant image popping into your mind from nowhere? An example of this may be that you are sitting in a restaurant talking about the war and out of nowhere while in the middle of thought the image of a field of flowers comes into your mind.

---

Oh sure - if you're not talking about hullicinations or calentures, but just images coming to mind. Frequently I try to recapture what the trigger was, but it is often so fleeting. Just this morning in a meeting I suddenly felt like I tasted something from my childhood, for no reason, and I couldn't quite place it - I think it was semolina pudding.It sparks my curiosity, sure enough, but doesn't strike me as spiritual.How's the music, btw? Still going strong?

quote:

---

Subjects get hooked up to an EEG monitor through electrodes stuck to their scalp, they go to sleep, and when REM waves show up on the monitor and they are woken up, they almost always report a dream. If you wake them up during stages of sleep where other kinds of brain waves are going on, they do not report dreams. It's really very consistent.

---

Yes I agree entirely. I am just not sure how one would infer that the dream reported by the user had extensibility in time, rather than being a memory on the moment of waking, as a result of brain non-experiental brain activity during the REM sleep.

quote:

---

Have you recorded the number of times this kind of thing has happened, and is it greater than chance would predict, or are you just remembering the times that it has happened and ignoring all the times that it hasn't?

---

"Frequently" may have given you the wrong impression - I mean a couple of times a month, more or less. However, the present a possible, highly tentative, conjectural [insert hedging qualification of choice here] falsification of the time-extension of dreams during REM sleep.

quote:

---

Nah, it's clear that people are almost always dreaming when they are in REM sleep, and the EEG can tell us when that is happening, and we can confirm it by waking people up and asking them if they were dreaming.

---

But you can't ask them if they are dreaming during REM sleep. As I say, how would you distinguish between a dream occuring during REM sleep and a dream "composed" on waking from REM activity?It's an interesting question, though, don't you think?

Thanks Mike - that sounds really interesting. I'll try to track it down.

Excellent, thanks. Intentional binding seems to be acquiring a canonical meaning in neurosychology these days. It's a very interesting area for philosophers of mind.