Dreams elation

The psychosis that least resembles dreaming is that of schizophrenia, because, like mania, it has the paranoia and accusatory auditory hallucinations (which dreaming lacks), and the emotional tone is often flat (about as far away from dream elation as we can get). Anxiety is about the only shared property, and that is not very specific. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the typical schizophrenic psychosis is so different from that of dreaming. After all, it is the neuromodulator dopamine that has been most strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, and that is the only neuromodulator that has not been implicated in dreaming. We will discuss this interesting difference in more detail when we consider how antipsychotic medication may work. 

In fact, normal dreaming is not all that ecstatic precisely because, there too, negative emotion is an unchained demon spoiler of our fantasized pleasure. Increasingly, the evidence from dream studies indicates that plot details are often designed to fit the directions of anxiety, fear, and anger rather than joy, elation, and erotic pleasure. 

Isomorphism demands that my emotional brain has activated in parallel with my visual brain in REM. There must be some important differences between the pattern of emotional brain activation in dream one, when I was only slightly anxious and more elated than distressed by the strange visual alterations of my barn, and that of dream two, when I was very anxious about my inability to locate and control the water pipe leaks and furious about my co-workers lack of empathy. 

When we speak of REM sleep activation of the limbic, paralimbic, and subthalamic brain—and ascribe such dream emotions as elation, anxiety, and anger to it—we may sound a bit Ercudian. When all is said and done, isn t this Ereud s id, getting stirred up in sleep and raising havoc with... 

Now we turn our attention to the antipsychotic potential of drugs that are also useful in treating epilepsy and speculate about the reason for their efficacy in controlling the affective psychoses, especially mania. Manic psychosis is formally like dream psychosis in its delirious aspect we see the ecstatic elation, the grandiose delusions, and the poor judgment leading to social indiscretion in both states. Only organic delirium itself more closely resembles dream psychosis. What could account for these similarities ... 

The most obvious hypothesis is that in mania, as in dream psychosis with elation and grandiosity, it is possible to raise to very high levels the general activation of the brain and the specific activation of the positive emotion generator in the medial septum and other limbic regions. Because this effect can be artificially accomplished by taking amphetamines, it is reasonable to propose that excessive endogenous dopamine release (or increased receptor sensitivity) may be involved. 

Recent studies of dream emotion prove Kliiver and Bucy s point. They support the idea that it is the brain itself—and more specifically the limbic brain—that may generate fear (the number one dream affect), cosmic elation (number two), and anger (number three). To round out the picture, there are reports that an intensification of these same emotions colors the dreams of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Subjects may indeed evince rapid heart action, increases in blood pressure, and rises and falls of breathing efforts in REM sleep, but these are not sensed as part of the subjective experience of dream emotion. 

So dreaming can be a good trip (ecstatic elation as in my second ski run is not uncommon) or a bad trip (with negative emotions like anxiety, fear, and anger always popping up). This means that dreaming is both heaven and hell (or that heaven and hell are virtual realities that are fabricated by us to mirror the virtual reality of our dream experiences). This... 

They are rarely related to the body (i.e. somatic) as they can be in depression (a common feature of which is a mistaken conviction about lost, defective, or diseased body parts). The grandiosity and fearless elation of mania are shared with dream psychosis, although these features are also found in organic delirium, especially in its chronic, post-intoxication phase. 

It may seem to the reader that we are attempting to explain away rather than explain recurrent dreams, but this is not the case. What is recurrent are certain emotionally salient themes that depend on certain formal properties of dreams, and these are deeply repetitive. Every dream is characterized by visual perception and strong emotion, most often elation, anger, or anxiety. With these emotions come our own historical experiences - the experiences that are associated with these emotions are likely to appear in our dreams. 

At the end of the 1960s, the peptide community was elated by reports of the synthesis of ribonuclease A using both classical and solid-phase technologies. The classical approach was labor intensive. Both methods gave low overall yields of the desired protein however, these achievements were milestones in that a protein with enzymatic activity had been synthesized. Emil Fischer s dream had been realized. 

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