Dreams plots

It has created poetry and music, planned and executed horrific wars, and devised intricate scientific theories. It thinks and dreams, plots and schemes, and easily holds more information than all the libraries on Earth. 

And the answer is yes if we emphasize the way the new findings enable us to revise Freud s necessarily speculative dream theory and replace it with one that gives a detailed alternative account of dream phenomenology and eliminates the very dubious disguise-censorship idea, but still retains the crucial concept of emotional salience as a major element in dream content elaboration. The model does not now specify regional shifts in neuronal activity and/or blood flow, but if both derive from the neuromodulatory ratio shift, then factor M would predict the enhancement of emotion in dreaming and its central role in shaping dream plots. 

What does seem clear from the new data is that dreaming is driven— strongly—by forebrain systems subserving primary emotions, and that these emotions, are potent shapers of dream plots. The activation of the amygdala, shown by PET studies, is entirely consonant with the phenomenological fact that anxiety is, by far, the leading dream emotion. But anxiety was not a wish for Freud. It was, instead, a symptom caused by... 

When we elaborate dream plots, we are telling ourselves stories, fibs, white lies, and myths about ourselves. In fact, we are so convinced that these myths are about the real us that we rarely, and then only reluctantly, reach the conclusion that we are delirious when we dream. In this view, it ought to be considered at least possible that dream content is as much dross as gold, as much cognitive trash as treasure, and as much informational noise as a... 

Without disguise-censorship, what is there left for an interpretation of dreams using a psychoanalytically constructed theory If the dream-inducing instincts are not disguised and not censored, but entered into the dream plots directly, then the manifest dream is the dream, is the dream, is the dream ... 

Similarly, Shan on in The Antipodes of the Mind tells us that the ayahuasca visions are not really like dreams in which the dreamer is the protagonist. Instead, objects—like beings or palaces—seem as if they are revealed to the user to behold, admire, and study. Most dreams involve people the dreamer already knows, and revolve around the dreamer s concerns, present and past—like taking a school test or meeting a friend. DMT visions have nothing to do with the psychonaut s life, and they are not as chaotic or illogical as the plots of our dreams. 

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. 

The basic hypothesis, for which evidence was previously consistent and positive but not impressively robust, is that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep subserves consolidation of memory. This hypothesis is appealing because the brain is activated and dreams are composed of memory fragments. This hypothesis has been borne out by recent experiments, although it now appears that non-REM (NREM) sleep is equally important. More interestingly, the dream-memory plot has thickened in two important ways ... 

The other caveat is that the human mind is designed to see dream causality even when it could not possibly be present. How do we know this By means of an experiment called dream splicing that was conceived by Robert Stickgold and carried out by our lab seminar group. We took 10 dream reports and cut them apart - with scissors - at the point of dramatic scene shifts in the plots. The resulting 20 dream fragments were then spliced . We reassembled them so that one half were assembled as reported and... 

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