The Interpretation of Dreams
Waking up
As I wake I often feel a bubble rising through me. I don't know what's in the bubble, but it's full of something - wakefulness, cortisol rising, the reticular activating system, consciousness, joy? I don't know, I've labelled it all of them at different times. Whatever it is, it feels hugely significant. It feels as though if I allow it to rise all the way it could blow the top of my head off. That I might go mad, or become an angel or something, even though I don't believe those things that's how it feels. That there would be no way back from that experience. The inner protective me automatically clamps down on it before it rises all the way, like it tends to do with strong feelings in general. In case it ends up being embarrassing.
Waking up used to feel like being hit by a truck. I thought a quieter alarm; a bit more time; going to bed earlier; a different pillow might help. Nothing did until I stopped having a job I had to get up early for.
Now that I don't have to set an alarm at all, I have time to be aware of my mind starting up in its telling me what it all means. There is a moment between waking and the commentary of my mind, when there is a beautiful clarity where it doesn't have to mean anything, it just is.
Unless I've had an interesting dream of course.
Dreams and their meaning
Dreams show us many intriguing things about being human. For example, I remember so many nights working in the hospital when I would be having a dream about a fire alarm or a bird raucously squawking annoyingly in my ear that would seem to have gone on for hours, only to wake and discover it was my pager. Which only beeps once.
I would check and find there was only one message and that was confusing. I was convinced that my dream experience of time was real. When the plain old truth obvious for all to see was that I had 'known' something about the passage of time that was clearly wrong. That I had, without knowing it, invented the long torture by sound. You have probably had similar experiences. My point is not that the time actually did pass more quickly, it's that we had the experience of knowing something to be true, the certainty of which turned out to be imaginary.
It seems to me, from studying my own dreams, from hearing the dreams of others, and from my reading of Jung and Freud, that dreams have no intrinsic meaning, they are ambiguous mixtures of sensations, images and feelings that are simply the best possible substrate for us to project onto. And maybe those sensations, images and feelings are not even 'made up' in the sense we usually use that phrase. We didn't invent them in our sleep like we invent a story, they were activations of parts of our physical brain that happened spontaneously and all the rest is imaginary.
In other words, our dreams are a reflection not of our sleeping experiences themselves, but of our mind's personal filters. Like a nightly fully integrated Rorsach test. It's only when we see that for ourselves, that we are conferring meaning to our dreams that aren't actually there, that we can see them for they are - a screen to see not what is actually happening, but what our mind is expecting to be there.
Of course, this understanding of mine is also a reflection of my filters. You may have a different one. I would love to hear what yours tell you about dreaming. But I'm sticking with this one for today's blog.
Projecting our filters
If we look at a photo that has been taken with a blue filter, the image is not reality, it is bluer than reality. The blueness doesn't tell us what the photographer was seeing, it tells us what filter they were using. That they set it up so that the camera would be more sensitive to the blue wavelengths of light.
If we look at a dream that has been taken with a 'protect myself' filter, it is more threatening than reality. The threat tells us not about the dream, but about the set-up of the mind that is thinking about it. That it is innocently more alert to threat than it needs to be if it is to see what is really there.
I say innocently because there is no blame in this. Having filters that alert us to potential danger can help us to stay alive. It is not an indication of mental illness or something that needs to be fixed, it is normal and helpful.
The problem arises when we believe that the way we interpret our dreams is reality rather than a made-up world. When we think our convictions and memories and expectations are true. When we think, because of a photo we saw, that the Grand Canyon is going to be made of beautiful layers of blue rock. Or when we believe we need to live on tenterhooks as if everyone we meet were out to get us.
The interpretation of waking life
So, what if it's not just dreams that we are retrospectively explaining to ourselves? What if it is also the way we see ourselves as people, and how we go about doing the things we do? Perhaps there is another filter there that is skewing our idea of what's going on.
A great summary of the long list of things that are not known about voluntary actions
One of the first ideas in this authoritative article* about the brain mechanism of voluntary actions is that 'no general, satisfactory, positive definition of voluntary action exists.'
In other words, the idea that...
we decide to do something
we do it
we see ourselves do it and
we remember deciding to do it
...may not be the way it goes. It certainly isn't as straightforward as our experience seems to be telling us.
Artificial volition
Sometimes during brain surgery, parts of a person's brain are electically stimulated. Depending on which parts are stimulated, the patient, who is awake, can report different experiences. (The purpose of this is to ensure that no important part of the brain is destroyed during the surgery, but it has also been used to learn many interesting things about the brain.) One thing that reliablly happens is that if you stimulate the primary motor areas of the brain, muscles contract, but the person is well aware that this has been made to happen by an outside agency. They know they didn't will it. So far so good.
There are also some areas known as the supplementary and presupplementary motor areas and when these are stimulated, the person tells us that they are experiencing the urge to move a particular part of their body. When the current is turned up, movement happens, but this time the person experiences having had the intention to do it, even though it was absolutely outside their control. To quote Fried et al:
'When such stimulations ...[of certain motor areas of the brain]...evoke an overt movement, the patients experience “ownership” with respect to the movement. This contrasts with stimulations of the primary motor area, where patients clearly “disown” the movement and perceive it as externally imposed. Although it remains unclear precisely which cortical regions are preferentially associated with this “artificial volition,” the phenomenon itself seems robust.'
In other words, knowing that you made the movement happen can be artificially created. Just as knowing how long your dream was can be artificially created.
Later on the authors go on to suggest that '“voluntary action” is a perceptual category in much the same way that “face” or “tree” is a perceptual category: it may or may not refer to a well-defined category in nature.' It may be that, like the concept 'tree', we have a concept of what 'I made it happen' looks like, which is triggered by stimulating one of several areas of our brain, and doesn't actually relate to something real in the way we work. '...what makes an action (our own or that of another) “voluntary” is simply that we perceive it to be so.'
There's more amazing stuff in this article, much of it about a great range of things we don't know about humans. Reading it is a bit like reading early drawings of the human body and seeing how so many of the questions they had about it were coming from their mistaken interpretation of what a body is and how it works. It's easy to believe that our understanding of these experiments would all be a lot less complicated and confusing if we had a very different model of what a human being is.
As they say in their conclusion, “classical” paradigms for studying self-initiated action seem to lack ecological validity.' I can strongly recommend reading the linked article for yourself.
Subjective experience
But if our subjective experience of whether or not our actions are under our control can be false, what does that mean about our experience of being the author of our actions in the world? What does that mean about the use of the word 'subjective' in the first place? What am I, if my experience of being the decider and mover in my life is just another perception without necessarily reflecting an underlying reality? What if my body's actions are being done without my willing it, at least in the way that I usually conceive of them?
What if the whole idea of an 'I' is imaginary?
Blowing my mind with a bubble of significance
So on waking this morning, there was a subjective experience of a rising bubblel; a mental interpretation of what this bubble experience might be; there was a feeling of significance relating to it; there was an expectation of what might happen if it rose all the way to the 'top'; an experience of putting a stop to its rising. These things were registering as involuntary. There were thoughts about it accompanied by a feeling sensation of interestingness that led to me writing this blog post, which was the one thing that registered as voluntary.
And I'm aware that all the words for it, all the ideas, all the expectations and labels are really inventions of a mind labelled as mine. A brain with a perception of subjectivity.
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