Dreaming in Bytes

The brain is like a sponge, absorbing experiences during the day that are either acted on immediately, or are stored more permanently. Knowledge is constructed from this semi-permanent file – if a thing is proved right to us on a scale that satisfies our morals, we accept it as truth. There is a critical factor in this moral scale that might be defined as worry. If something is not right, it worries us and these worries come out in dreams. Dreams are sometimes our brains attempt to file these preoccupations into folders where they are most likely to be accessible for use. When an unsettling replay resists classification, a video player of visual dreaming tries to re-enact a scene to understand what occurred and learn to process an event or impression in such a way that we can pass it to our knowledge base as an evidential cohesive fact.

Some cultures believe that dreams are an alternate reality, and this to me, is akin the theory of a parallel universe – neither proved nor disproved. Some believe that knowledge is passed on in dreams, and to some extent this is true, but waking reality plays a larger part in our survival. Since knowledge is stored in an area that is accessible in dreaming, communal dreaming is possible, but the knowledge that resides there must be acquired in a waking state. It is also possible that dreams do contribute to our knowledge base, particularly when some undigested experience resurfaces in dreams, played out to a point where we understand it better. When we understand, we have knowledge – thus also contributing to the personal and communal database that helps us to survive in our world. The way in which experiences are processed has been described geographically, going back to phrenology, which was once disgraced, into the refinements of CAT scans and Magnetic Resonance Imaging. When someone says that something is “in the back of my mind”, common experience tells us that the brain cells used for storing more permanent knowledge are located deep in the cranial filing cabinet. Frontal brain cells, among other things, control our more immediate facial and lingual responses. When someone says “on the tip of my tongue” it is an indication that the frontal engine is trying to access the dustier reaches of our minds.

Filing cabinets of memory can work like a zip files, remaining compressed, occupying little space until a trigger or command asks for an unzip and the file or memory expands. Often this trigger occurs in dreaming. Memory access during a dream isn’t a perfect search, but all of our memory searches in waking time aren’t always successful. Wide awake an unexpected memory or desire can drift forward at an inappropriate moment. Unrelated events, scenes and people can populate dreams, sometimes causing perplexing combinations. Often we wake from dreams asking ourselves “what was that about?” Unless we can separate extraneous elements from relevant ones, we can’t make sense of our dreams.

Sometimes a dream - more often a nightmare - will wake us up. Before we wake, our body often tries to react to a dreamed event, and we will kick, turn and move our arms, try to speak, grunt, or shout aloud. Sometimes we enter a half waking limbo, where we know we are dreaming, wish to wake up but can’t, and consciously try to move or make a noise that will wake us. Informed by the body of an need, our knowledge base tells us that we are dreaming as the body struggles to overcome sleep paralysis. Our survival instinct knows that remaining in a panic state for a long time it will be damaging to the mind, and therefore signals the brain to push us up into consciousness. This struggle can also be thought of as the workings of the frontal brain and the rear brain to communicate. It is now widely accepted that brain stem at the back of the brain controls the motor functions like breathing, heartbeat etc, so the so-called survival instinct is based here. Since messages travel across protein networks it takes time to assemble the appropriate files to travel the circuits from the back to the middle knowledge base to the frontal cortex. It can take a few seconds to wake up from a nightmare. We are after all, humans, not computers.

Generally our brain tries to do what is best for our body. The body is the vessel of the brain. Included in this instinctual health program, are dreams. Our mind tries to digest our experiences in an automatic defrag which takes place every night. For those unfamiliar with defrag, it is short for defragmentation, which attempts to re-file stray bits of information so that there are more blocks of stable usable space available for new memories. Unless we defragment our brains for a period in every 24 hours, we do not remain effective, rational, or sane in our waking lives.

There are computer programs that suggest the user delete information that is not connected to any usable material or that has not been used for a long time. Much like a computer, our brains sometimes tell us that a certain bits of information are gone, permanently deleted, but this is not actually the case. Microsoft and others would have us believe that deleted information is unrecoverable, but those who know computers on more than a superficial level, know that everything which was once there, is still there. This is also true for the brain. We don’t really forget, we only can’t remember. Sometimes what we thought we had forgotten will return to us at unexpected moments. Sometimes lost memories return in dreams.

Dreams are natural, useful, healthy, elusive things. We benefit by understanding them. The antidote to personal fear is in personal self-knowledge. The antidote to communal fear lies in understanding our world. Dreams help us in all realms.