Dreams deprivation

The good news is that the storm was unleashed. The bad news is that the studies were often driven by the scientifically naive and flawed ideas of psychoanalysis. The history of so-called dream deprivation is a good case in point. As REM sleep was correlated with dreaming, it tended to be equated with it. Deprive the participants in a study of REM sleep and you will deprive them of dreams. True enough, but only partially true. 

In retrospect, none of these studies was morally justified because the working hypothesis was that dream deprivation would, if pushed far enough, drive the individuals crazy. Although I am disappointed with the lack of clarity that still clouds this area of science, I would not myself either submit to such treatment or expose others to it. 

Wilkinson, R., Methods for research on sleep deprivation and sleep function. In, Sleep and Dreaming. (Hartmann,E., ed.). Boston Little and Brown, 1970. 

In my case, none of these uninvited image people promised salvation. They didn t even reveal scientific secrets. But they did, by their presence, make one thing clear that sleep deprivation alone can open wide the Doors of Perception that Huxley celebrated. Had I prepared my mind for specific communications from the beyond, I have no doubt that my visionary visitors would have articulated whatever words I wanted to hear. The point is that you don t need a drug, you don t need a medium, and you certainly don t need a spirit world to have them. Those exotic ginger flowers and that tumultuous ski run spoke so clearly to the shade of Aldous Huxley You are wrong about dreams. They can be both pre-ternaturally colorful and ecstatically animated. Even without mescaline or LSD, and certainly without cocaine, a drug that will almost certainly counteract psychedelic dreaming. 

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. 

When patients are becoming psychotic, for whatever reason, sleep is also likely to suffer, adding the risk of normal dream delirium to that of a schizophrenic or affective psychotic process, because individuals can be driven into states of delirium by extreme sleep deprivation. Think of brain-washing, trance states, and the confessions of treason extracted by political, psychological, and cultural rituals. All involve sleep deprivation. In the end, sleep-deprived individuals will do or say anything in exchange for sleep. 

Nightmares are anxiety-provoking dreams characterized by vivid recall. Treatment is directed at reducing stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation. In extreme cases, low-dose benzodiazepines may be... 

The dream of realism views the trajectory prospectively as the unfolding of a given substantial reality. Metaphysical realists would claim that Tasmania always was what it is, that it was merely discovered and has not substantially changed from the time when it was completely unknown and void of any specified characteristics, to today when it is articulated in great detail. Latour and the metachemistry of science consider a peculiar obsession this attempt to insist that modern tasmania is identical to the eternal timeless substance that, on the dream of realism, must have been there all along.32 One can understand this obsession if one understands that for the metaphysician the timelessness of substances serves as the foundation of the real and that, therefore, the denial of this identity would cast us into the abyss of relativism and deprive us of all reality (cf. Latour 1999, 3-9, 296). 

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