Dream science

Domini, Donatino. Chymica Vannus alchemy or the dreamed science Edizione rilegata 1986 a cura di Donatino Domini, traduzione di Anthony Oldcom, introduzione di Jacques van Lennep. Ravenna Longo editore, 1986. 132p. 

By the time that John Mack published his book Alien Abduction, sleep research was not only clearly established, it was mature enough to provide powerful, credible alternative explanations for many of the fascinating conscious experiences that occur on the margins of sleep. In fact, John Mack is also the author of an earlier book, entitled Children s Dreams and Nightmares, which, even as it expresses the author s psychoanalytic preferences, also reflects his awareness of modern sleep and dream science. 

These reports do, however, have corresponding deficiencies, which need to be overcome if dream science is to be universally valid. To test the generality of the findings and to be sure that I wasn t just making up dreams to fit my theory, we need to have reports from many other sources and individuals, collected under very different conditions. The dream data that we have analysed before arriving at our conclusions have thus been taken from other dream journals, sleep lab reports, and home-based reports. 

With the hope of obtaining the best of both dream science worlds, we have developed the Nightcap, a home-based sleep monitor that allows us to know what state the participants were in before their reports, to compare spontaneous awakening with experimental awakening reports, to obtain abundant data from each person, and, best of all, to obtain reports in natural settings (Figure l). Using this approach we have been able to accomplish two feats that have never before been attempted. 

To introduce the far-reaching implications of dream science to a general science of consciousness, consider the following categories of the mental status exam ... 

In Chapter 4, we take up the question about the dreaming brain that, so far, only our animal collaborators can answer in Chapter 5, we consider the implication for the development of the abundant, florid REM sleep of all mammalian newborns. My point here is simple and descriptive. The first step of any natural history endeavour is to observe (quietly and carefully) and to record one s observations (thoroughly and systematically). It is as embarrassing as it is instructive that this was never done by anyone aspiring to either sleep or dream science before 1930. How many other breakthrough discoveries now elude us because we are conceptually boxed in by gratuitous assumptions that there is nothing to observe and/or that we can obviate direct observation via intuition or speculation ... 

Neurophysiologists were every bit as slow as psychologists to move dream science forwards. They knew about reflexes but they didn t know about spontaneous activation. Instead they assumed that the brain was as dependent on stimulation for all of its activated states as was the mind in sleep. 

Sleep and dream science, meanwhile, has only begun to approach molecular biology in terms of either conceptual ideas or methodology This is both because the descriptive task of sleep... 

This is the most radical assertion of modern dream science. Waking and dreaming are two states of consciousness, with differences that depend on chemistry. Can you digest the proposition Or does it stick in your craw Do you say, yes, but... and fill in the dots with a host of questions that are designed to express your curiosity about as-yet unexplained details, and defend yourself against the humiliation of having your dreaming reduced to a brain state You know that you are more than a brain state, don t you But how do you know that By your subjectivity, you reply (which I haven t yet explained, have I ). So you still have a loophole, but please... 

It turns out that all of these functions suffer when sleep deprivation becomes extreme. The recent experiments of Allan Rechtschaffen and his group, at the same University of Chicago where sleep and dream science began in the early 1950s, made it impossible - or at least very difficult - for one of a pair of rats to sleep. The other rat was free to sleep whenever the sleep-deprived rat was awake. In this way, it was possible to reduce sleep greatly in the one without significant reduction in the other. 

As a result of the conceptual and political split between psychiatry and neurology caused first by the mind-body problem and deeply aggravated by Sigmund Freud s inadvertent dualism, it took dream science an inordinately long time to notice that cerebrovascular accidents (better known as strokes) and epileptic seizures (better known as fits) could cause decreases and increases in the formal features of dreams, respectively. 

Enserink, M. Selling the Stem Gell Dream. Science 313, 160-163 (2006). [An article about stem cell therapy clinics that considers the hype surrounding stem cell therapies.]... 

Wodtke AM (2006) Chemistry in a computer advancing the in silico dream. Science 312 64-65... 

In the fall of 1891 Marie enrolled at the Sorbonne. She had to Hve somewhere - at first in the home of her sister Bronya after some time in a small garret, cold in winter, hot in summertime, but nearer the Sorboime. Paris offered the possibility for studies and perhaps. .. perhaps a career within science. That was an unrealistic dream. Science was something for men. The young Polish woman was however obsessed by her will to succeed. Had not her father, whom she admired so much, believed in her. And who, among the self-confident French students just on the point of going into the Sorbonne, had a personal exhortation of the great Mendeleev to study chemistry. None But she had. 

---