So I wake up this morning having dreamt a lot tonight, and since I feel a mix of irritation, sadness, and anger, I can tell it hasn't been one of those Hollywood-like "action-love-story-heroine-dream" nights. What I remember is this weird scene: it's my wedding (though I have no clue whom I married) and my brother is there as well (among other people of course), and at one point we're standing outside on this huge porch (like the ones you see on these old, Southern US-style colonial mansions, maybe they're called verandas?) and he starts crying and apologizing, confessing that his boss has clustered him with work and that's why he hasn't been around (we're having a very tense relationship at the moment, as you might tell. In fact, we don't have any relationship at all at the moment, since he doesn't talk to me, though I don't know why). Allright, I'm not Freud and I don't have any intention of analyzing this dream here (I think it has a pretty obvious manifest content, you know: the wedding, the brother, the reconciliation, etc.; and on the latent side I probably just want to marry my father).
What I want to get at and what I've been thinking about is how you live through your dreams so intensely that even when you wake up and you realize you've been dreaming, you still feel bad, or happy, or whatever feeling you were having in this dream. In the past month, I've had two dreams I forgot by now, but what I remember is that in one, I was laughing and I actually woke up laughing, and in the other I was crying in my dream, and I woke up in tears. So the dreams seemed so "real" that my body was having "real" reactions to it.
I'm currently reading this book called "The Echo-maker" by Richard Powers, and it's about a young man who has a car accident and is seriously injured, especially his brain is damaged. Well, I'm not going to tell you the whole story (you go and read the book, it's really worth it), what I'm interested in is this: At one point, this famous neurologists who comes to study Mark (the protagonist) explains about "mirror neurons". In the 80ies or 90ies, scientists were observing the brain activity of monkeys while they were doing certains things, for example, when the monkey would lift its arm, a certain part of the brain would show high activity. So far, so good. But all of a sudden they realised that there was brain activity in this part even when the monkey didn't move a muscle - they were puzzled (or maybe freaked out!) until they found out that the monkey was looking at another monkey who was lifting his arm. So just SEEING another monkey lift his arm made the particular region in the brain active - mirror neurons. They're the reason why we feel emphaty for other people (or maybe: why we theoretically should), why we are able to imagine how other people feel, act, etc. And when you think about it: if this is true, if certain neurons fire away no matter if you really move your arm or not, then - and ta-da! here's my conclusion - that would explain why we feel so intensly in dreams. On the level of my brain activity, it doesn't really matter whether the dream I had this night was "actually" happening (and what is ever "actually" happening, I ask you?) or not. You think I should go and publish this ground breaking thought in the New England Journal of Medicine? I think so too.
What I want to get at and what I've been thinking about is how you live through your dreams so intensely that even when you wake up and you realize you've been dreaming, you still feel bad, or happy, or whatever feeling you were having in this dream. In the past month, I've had two dreams I forgot by now, but what I remember is that in one, I was laughing and I actually woke up laughing, and in the other I was crying in my dream, and I woke up in tears. So the dreams seemed so "real" that my body was having "real" reactions to it.
I'm currently reading this book called "The Echo-maker" by Richard Powers, and it's about a young man who has a car accident and is seriously injured, especially his brain is damaged. Well, I'm not going to tell you the whole story (you go and read the book, it's really worth it), what I'm interested in is this: At one point, this famous neurologists who comes to study Mark (the protagonist) explains about "mirror neurons". In the 80ies or 90ies, scientists were observing the brain activity of monkeys while they were doing certains things, for example, when the monkey would lift its arm, a certain part of the brain would show high activity. So far, so good. But all of a sudden they realised that there was brain activity in this part even when the monkey didn't move a muscle - they were puzzled (or maybe freaked out!) until they found out that the monkey was looking at another monkey who was lifting his arm. So just SEEING another monkey lift his arm made the particular region in the brain active - mirror neurons. They're the reason why we feel emphaty for other people (or maybe: why we theoretically should), why we are able to imagine how other people feel, act, etc. And when you think about it: if this is true, if certain neurons fire away no matter if you really move your arm or not, then - and ta-da! here's my conclusion - that would explain why we feel so intensly in dreams. On the level of my brain activity, it doesn't really matter whether the dream I had this night was "actually" happening (and what is ever "actually" happening, I ask you?) or not. You think I should go and publish this ground breaking thought in the New England Journal of Medicine? I think so too.
No comments:
Post a Comment