The human brain does not distinguish between dreams and reality. Real dreams Social values and lucid dreams
Dreams give a person information that is already sitting somewhere in the depths of his subconscious. They often indicate what that person needs to grow, achieve psychological harmony, healthy relationships with other people, etc. They help you choose the right path and remind you of unfinished business. Dreams are real factories for the production of meaning. And they never lie.
Writer Tom Robbins once said that dreams don't come true - they are reality. And when we talk about dreams come true, we usually mean the fulfillment of our ambitious plans or desires.
Sleep is most directly related to the moment of awakening. When the “soap bubble” of our sleep bursts, we momentarily have the opportunity to look inside our own subconscious and extract from there some images relating to what we should be. Our brains seem to work tirelessly to realize our potential, day and night.
There are things that cannot be seen during the day in bright light - stars, for example. Some things require darkness in order to see. We can rack our brains over a solution to a problem for a very long time, and then it comes in a dream – on a silver platter. It turns out that trying to solve a problem without the information that is stored in our dreams is the same as if a judge made his verdict, ignoring half the facts in the case.
Many of our dreams are worthy of being called “masterpieces of metaphorical communication.” Once, for example, I dreamed that I received a plump wad of hundred-dollar bills, and then discovered a deception - only the first bill was real. In another dream, I lost my wallet with all my ID cards. In the third I found a golden calf, badly dented and chained to the ground with a thick chain. In the fourth, my boss invited me to an extravagant pool party at his estate, but the pool was empty.
The meaning of all these dreams was quite clear to me.
Dreams carry real information, real impulses, real emotions. And if you ignore them, the consequences will also be quite real.
The Senoi people live in Malaysia, where there is a real cult of sleep. Every morning these people get together to tell each other what they dreamed about the previous night and discuss the meaning of those dreams. All important decisions are made taking into account dreams. The Senoi believe that when something or someone is chasing a person in a dream, it is an ally rather than an enemy. Therefore, you need not to run away, but to turn your face to the pursuer and find out why you are being pursued, what they want to tell/warn/remind.
And, by the way, the Senoi do not even know what depression, neuroses or psychoses are.
In one of the earliest experiments our research group conducted, we tested the traditional idea that the perception of time in dreams is different from the perception of time in reality. According to the technique we developed, we asked subjects to make an eye movement during a lucid dream, then after a 10-second pause (counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, etc.) to make a second eye movement. We found that in all cases the estimate of the time interval in the lucid dream coincided within a few seconds with its estimate in the waking state and was thus quite close to the real time between signals. From this it was concluded that the estimate of time in lucid dreams is very close to real ones, that is, it takes almost the same amount of time to perform any action in them as in the waking state.
This conclusion may come as a surprise, since many of you may have lived years and even lifetimes in a dream. I believe that this effect is achieved in dreams by the same stage trick that creates the illusion of the passage of time in the cinema or theater. If the lights go out on a screen, on a stage, or in a dream, and the clock strikes midnight, and a few moments later the bright morning sun shines through the window and the alarm clock rings, we assume (we pretend without realizing that we are pretending) that many hours have passed, even if "we know" that it only took a few seconds.
The method of using the eyes to signal a person in a state of lucid dreaming has demonstrated a strict correspondence between the change in direction of gaze during sleep and the actual movement of the eyes under closed eyelids. Researchers who did not use lucid dreamers in their experiments had to rely on the likelihood of a correspondence between the subjects' eye movements and their reported sleep actions. As a result, they tended to obtain only weak correlations between eye movements during sleep and during waking hours. The reason for the strong connection between eye movements in sleep and in the waking state is that we use the same visual system our body. One of the most bright examples The connection between physiology and sleep activities is sexual activity during sleep. In 1983, we undertook a study to determine the extent to which sexual activity during lucid REM dreaming was reflected in physiological parameters.
A woman was chosen for the experiment because women were more likely to report orgasm in their dreams. She observed various physiological indicators that are usually affected by sexual arousal: breathing, heart rate, vaginal muscle tone and amplitude of vaginal pulsations. In the experiment, she was required to give a special signal with her eyes in the following situations: when she realized that she was sleeping, when sexual activity began (in her sleep), and when she had an orgasm.
According to her, she fulfilled the conditions of the task exactly. Analysis of the recordings revealed a significant correlation between what she did in the dream and all physiological indicators except one. During the 15 seconds that she defined as orgasm, her vaginal muscle activity, vaginal pulsation amplitude, and respiratory rate reached their highest levels of the entire night, and were significantly higher than during the rest of the REM period. The heart rate, contrary to expectations, increased very slightly.
After this, we conducted similar experiments with two men. In both cases there was a sharp increase in breathing, but again no significant changes heart rate. It is noteworthy that although both dreamers reported intense orgasm in their lucid dreams, neither experienced ejaculation, unlike the common adolescent wet dreams that are often not accompanied by erotic dreams.
Activities during sleep directly affect the brain and body
From the experiments described above, it follows that the events in which you become a participant in a dream have an effect on your brain (and, to a lesser extent, on your body) that is in many ways similar to that of similar events in reality. Additional Research confirm this conclusion. When lucid dreamers hold their breath or breathe faster during sleep, this is directly reflected in their real breathing. Moreover, changes in brain activity caused by the transition from singing to counting (singing involves more right hemisphere, and when counting - left) in the waking state, are almost exactly reproduced in lucid dreams. That is, for our brain it makes no difference whether this or that action is performed in a dream or in reality. This finding explains why dreams seem so real. To the brain they are indeed real.
We continue to study the relationship between human activity in dreams and his physiology in order to obtain detailed diagram interactions between mind and body during dreams, for everyone physiological systems, measurable. Such a scheme could provide great support to experimental sleep psychology and psychosomatic medicine. Indeed, the direct influence of dream activity on physiology makes it possible to use lucid dreaming to improve performance. immune system. Anyway, physiological effects, caused by dreams, show that we cannot distance ourselves from them, as from the illegitimate children of our imagination. And although our culture tries to ignore dreams, the events experienced in them are as real as in real life. And if we want to improve our lives, it would be right to do this with our dreams.
Social values and lucid dreams
You can often hear complaints from people interested in lucid dreams, to isolation, because, as one of them writes, “I can’t talk to anyone about this: everyone thinks I’m crazy and looks at me like I’m crazy when I try to talk about what I do in my sleep.” Our culture does not provide for any social support for those who study various states consciousness. This aversion is probably rooted in the behaviorist approach to psychology, which views all animals, including humans, as “black boxes” whose actions are entirely dependent on external influences. The contents of an animal’s “consciousness” are considered immeasurable, and thus not subject to scientific research.
What influences our dreams? Why are images from reality so intricately intertwined in them? Researchers have been able to identify a number of patterns related to the content of our dreams and determine their causes. It turns out that there are rational explanations for everything. A prophetic dreams, which many believe are just coincidences, scientists disappoint us.
For example, sometimes we have so-called “strange” dreams. In them, the realities of our lives are intricately mixed with each other. For example, you might dream that you are sitting in a restaurant with your high school football coach, the chairs are made of jelly, and your dog is serving you food.
Dr. Robert Stickgold, one of the experts in the field of dreams, believes that such dreams are the brain's attempt to sort through various memories in search of connections between them. Thus, the memory of a dog is compared with memories of a trainer and a trip to a restaurant. The brain looks for cross connections that sometimes coincide with reality, sometimes not.
At the same time, other studies have shown that "strange" dreams occur when increased activity in the right amygdala, which is also responsible for the formation of memories. Apparently, the more difficult it is for the brain to find connections between different memories, the more bizarre the content of our dreams.
In the 1960s Medical Center Maimonides in New York decided to test whether dreams could predict the future. During the experiment, participants were divided into two groups: members of one of them were awake, concentrating on a specific image, and members of the second were asleep at that time.
After waking up volunteers from the second group while they were in REM sleep, the researchers asked them to report the content of their dreams. It turned out that the majority saw in their dreams the images that the subjects from the first group contemplated!
According to some researchers, so-called “prophetic” dreams are nothing more than coincidences. We just dream about the connection different images, they say, and sometimes this coincides with reality.
But, on the other hand, very often the number of such coincidences exceeds the probability percentage. For example, people often see in their dreams various tragic events that are about to happen.
On October 21, 1966, a coal mudflow hit the mountain village of Aberfan in Great Britain, which covered and destroyed many houses and public buildings, including school. The day before, nine-year-old Eril Jones dreamed that she was going to school, and instead of the school building there was some kind of black mass. Eryl died along with other children who came to class that fateful day...
But other people hundreds of kilometers from these places also had dreams predicting a terrible catastrophe in Aberfan. One woman dreamed that a child was running along an unfamiliar street, and a black stream was rolling behind him, another dreamed of a child screaming in horror in a telephone booth, which was being overwhelmed by an avalanche of dirt. To some person - a herd of black horses racing from the mountains to the village. Another simply heard the word “Aberfan” in a dream, although at the time he did not even know what it meant. A certain Miss Milden watched in a dream as diggers pulled out the bodies of dead children from under the rubble. Three days later she saw the episode on TV. A resident of Kent received information during his sleep about the date of the upcoming terrible catastrophe. True, he did not know what exactly was going to happen...
In some cases, it is possible to give such phenomena a rational explanation. According to psychologists, our subconscious is capable of capturing and “accumulating” various factors that are not recorded by consciousness. Thus, our brain is able to subconsciously record visual or auditory information and draw conclusions. In a dream, they can transform into “ready-made” events. Let's say we can subconsciously detect a malfunction in a car, say, a change in the sound of the engine, but this does not reach our consciousness. But at night we dream that the car has broken down, and soon there will actually be a breakdown or an accident...
Various natural disasters have their own signs, such as atmospheric changes, animal behavior, and so on. Particularly sensitive people again perceive them on a subconscious level...
Although, of course, the content of “prophetic” dreams cannot always be explained by the work of the subconscious. Still, there are still many mysteries in our psyche that are still inaccessible to scientific understanding.
Tell us what you dream about at night and we will tell you who you are. This is how we can roughly describe the meaning of dreams. Because dreams are an essential part of our life. By the way, they can treat, indicate Right way. In a dream, the transmission of subtle matters occurs. "God created dreams to show the way to the sleeper whose eyes are in darkness."
The turn of the millennium became a turning point in the history of the world. Collapse of the USSR, Internet, computers, mobile connection... Nowadays the virtual component of life (dreams, daydreams, memories, projects) is 80 percent, and the real component - actions, actions - 20 percent. Time hid in dreams. They are like street cleaners, sweeping the streets of our soul so that it is cleaner in the morning.
Dreams are as familiar as breathing, so we do not value them, although they occupy a special place in the structure of human wealth. “It is not surprising that in dreams everything happens to people that they do in life, that they think about, care about, and see and do and plan while they are awake.” (Cicero, “On Divination” I, 22). Alexander Pushkin wrote down his dreams in which he composed poetry. Mendeleev “saw” his famous table of elements in a dream.
On the Internet, when you click “Dreams of Philosophers, Poets, Artists,” “God Ex Machina” returns hundreds of thousands of pages. Dreams are a concentration of a person’s creative abilities. Magicians consider dreaming to be the art of tempering energy body person. They are convinced that in a dream a certain volatile part leaves the body to travel in the noosphere, arosphere, and overcome time and space. One day I dreamed of England. An international dream competition was announced there.
They showed on special dream screens best dreams peace. Therefore, I propose organizing a dream competition among readers. This will also have therapeutic value. Even those who suffer from insomnia will be able to concentrate and remember their “sleepy series”. In the near future, sanatoriums in Russia will offer therapeutic dreams and “custom-made dreams.”
Mikhail Gorbachev once admitted that his wife Raisa Maksimovna dreamed about such things every night vivid dreams, each of which could become a story or novel. You cannot know yourself without knowing your dreams, for they are God’s pointers.
Creativity, as Marina Tsvetaeva said, is a controlled dream, and poets differ from each other only in the plots of their dreams and their verbal embodiment... For her, sleep was one of the embodiments of life and at the same time a mystical connection between life and death. The dream opened the door to the other world, to immortality. A dream is a fulfillment of desires.
Imitating Marina Tsvetaeva, I write down many “flights in dreams and in reality” in a diary called PM - “Paradoxical Muse”. Dozens of PM notebooks, written over fifty years, store dreams-tests, dreams-construction, dreams-roads, erotic dreams... PM are my cosmodromes for launching rockets into “parallel space”. Sometimes I see “from there” invisible connections between people and phenomena. God created dreams to show the way to the sleeper whose eyes are in darkness (ancient Egyptian text).
Dreams keep the secret of time! They burn years in a minute. The world survived because he fell asleep on time and dreamed. Philosophical dream: During a snowstorm, the prophet speaks to me mysterious words: “The time that has passed is coming, and the time that is coming has already passed.” I wanted to know the truth. I found out, but forgot - I woke up and can’t remember. It's a pity! Sleep is a builder, teacher and doctor human soul. In our dreams we “repair the roof” and restore Time. Dreams are excursions into the Past, which we transform into the Present and the Future.
Hello, I am 23 years old, not married, no children.
For about seven months I have been worried about this problem - I have very real and strange dreams, I cannot distinguish a dream from reality, several times during the day the question arises: “Am I dreaming now?”
And sometimes I spend a lot of time trying to figure it out: I remember the chronology of events and how I got to the place where I am now; I observe the behavior of people around me and try to find something unrealistic in what is happening.
I have dreams every night, but sometimes it happens that I don’t remember the whole dream, but only fragments. But usually I remember the smallest details of a dream, even little things down to the smell in the room or the color of my manicure. Constantly I wake up in a dream, then wake up again and again. I don’t know how to explain it correctly, so I’ll tell you about my dream today.
I dreamed that I was walking down the street with my dog, there were no people on the street and very hot weather. Then I noticed the silence around, the absence of passers-by, and I realized that now it was actually winter, I realized that this was a dream. I wake up, go to the kitchen, drink coffee, go to the store, there I start talking to some people, but I don’t see their faces, just voices, together with me they return to my home and there are more and more of them, I’m scared here too I notice that I am in my old apartment, from which I moved four years ago, and I understand that this is a dream. I wake up from the phone ringing, my mother calls and says that I urgently need to come to her, that she has some problems with the plumbing and everything is flooded, I decided to sleep for another five minutes before going to bed, set the alarm clock and fall asleep already when it’s light. Only after calling my mother did I realize that it was a dream and that she had not called me.
And so every night, I wake up in my sleep many times, there are very strange multi-colored and completely unreal dreams, there are scary ones, and there are also completely ordinary ones like walking with a dog.
I wake up even more tired than I fell asleep, my head hurts from eternal thoughts about sleep and reality. And it has been going on there for more than six months.
About a year ago, my beloved person passed away, now I have almost recovered from this, I don’t know whether the dreams are caused by stress from the loss or something else, but I never dream about my beloved person. There are dreams like that I’m waiting for him from work or, for example, I’m trying to call him, but I’ve never seen him in a dream.
I didn’t tell anyone about this problem, I thought it would go away with time, but I’m already very tired, I can’t sleep, it feels like I’m not sleeping at all.
Please advise me something.
Psychologist's answer:
Hello Irina!
Yes, indeed, sleep disturbance is most likely caused by the psychological trauma that occurred due to the loss of a loved one. The death of loved ones and loved ones is always a serious stress for a person. If the departure of your loved one was somehow connected with you, or you feel guilty, then the influence of grief is very strong. As you know, grief goes through certain stages, as a result of which a person comes to terms with the loss and perceives it as the past. These are the stages of shock, denial, searching for those to blame and reasons, a deep feeling of loneliness and depression, which ends by the year and the person begins to see his future separately from the deceased, and memories do not cause pain, but only bright, good feelings. If you linger at any of the first stages, then grief turns into severe mental disorders, For example, anxiety disorder, intrusive thoughts and actions and depression. Sleep disturbance is one of the striking symptoms of these disorders. Your dream is precisely a sleep disorder. Perhaps simple sedatives before bed will help you fall asleep soundly and not dream. But in fact, it is important to understand what exactly led you to this disorder and which one (anxious, depressive, OCD).
To do this, you need to contact a psychotherapist who, combining psychotherapeutic sessions and drug treatment, will help you find the cause and overcome the problem. Perhaps personal meetings with a psychologist, personal consultation and conversation will help. But most likely, you will need exactly medicinal assistance which can only be provided by a doctor. In any case, write to us.
The "movies" that people watch while they sleep are sometimes called virtual reality, parallel world, entertainment for the brain, mini-death But the questions remain: where does consciousness get plots for dreams and why does it need these inventions? Moreover, if this is not just fiction, but something more? What other tasks are solved by the body during sleep, besides the obvious physical rest?
As it turns out, the simplest part of the answer is purely physiological. Experiments show that the need for sleep at this level is determined primarily by the higher part of the nervous system - the cortex cerebral hemispheres the brain, which controls all processes occurring in the body. Cortical cells get tired quite quickly. And inhibition acts as a means of self-defense, protecting them from exhaustion and destruction. nervous process, delaying their activities. When it spreads throughout the cerebral cortex, a state of sleep occurs. And during deep sleep, inhibition also descends on some underlying parts of the brain.
During seven to eight hours of sleep at night, the brain enters a state several times. deep sleep, each lasting between 30 and 90 minutes, with the ten to fifteen minute intervals between them called REM sleep episodes. Towards the end of the night, if a person is not disturbed, the duration of slow-wave sleep decreases, and the number of episodes of REM sleep increases. Dreams during these episodes are accompanied by bursts of electrical impulses. This is where the actual anatomical details end. They don't tell us anything about the connection between dreams and reality.
The mysterious world of dreams has attracted philosophers since the times of Ancient China and Ancient Greece. Enough to remember famous story about the dream of one of the founders of Taoism, Zhuang Tzu, retold, for example, by Borges:The equation of dream and reality plays an important philosophical role in Taoism: life should be treated as a dream, but sleep should also be treated as reality.
Beautiful philosophical illustrations to the problem of the relationship between reality and dreams were invented by the founders of philosophical voluntarism, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900). The first called history a boring and incoherent dream of humanity, and the second considered sleep a rest from the cruel clarity of reality. Schopenhauer's Peru owns many bright aphorisms, illustrating both his attitude to dreams and his attitude to life: “A dream is a piece of death that we occupy in advance, preserving and renewing with it the life that has been exhausted during the day” or “Life and dreams are pages of one book, read them in order” means to live, scroll through at random means to dream.” That is, dreams (and therefore the very creative thinking) this is something like a waking dream, with open eyes.
Sigmund Freud (Sigismund Schlomo Freud, 1856–1939) not only began to view dreams as something directly related to the functioning of the brain during wakefulness, he suspected that dreams are some kind of encrypted messages from the subconscious to the conscious. However, the methods used by the father of psychoanalysis for such decoding seemed to many, and not without reason, to be completely arbitrary and worthy of little trust. It may seem that Carl Jung (Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961) went even further in the interpretation of dreams, but the role that he attributed to them is completely different. For him, sleep is not an individual, but a collective unconscious experience, that is, using the usual Marxist-Leninist dichotomy of the subjective and objective, a dream, subjective in Freud, turns out to be objective in Jung.
The psychedelic hobbies of the late 19th century were reflected not only in the teachings of philosophers and psychologists. The meaning of images born in the imagination when consciousness is asleep has become increasingly interesting and ordinary people. The English writers of the sixties, Colin Wilson and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), called for stepping beyond the boundaries of everyday experience and plunging into the wrong game of hallucinations. And with the advent of Carlos Castaneda in literature, a new motive arose: this line can be made thin and insignificant. To do this, it is enough to first learn to carry some small objects from reality with you into your dreams - at least coins clenched in your fists. The whole point is simply to remember them in a dream, unclench your fists and look at the coins
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In Buddhism, the question of true existence is resolved ambiguously, by many different ways. Thus, according to Satprem (Bernard Enginger, 19232007), Buddhism presupposes an endless ladder of mutually intersecting and simultaneously existing realities. This idea, surprisingly, finds quite unexpected support in modern physics. In one interpretation of the equations of quantum mechanics, proposed in 1956 by Hugh Everett III (1930–1982), quantum effects are explained by the presence of different layers of reality and interference between them. Its main idea can be formulated as follows: the present is determined not only by the past that really was, but also by the one that could have been. This means that the possible past is also in in a certain sense really.
Everett expressed these ideas in his dissertation work, which was sharply negatively received by the physicists of his time. He went into military engineering and never studied physics again. However, the idea did not die: over time it was picked up and acquired many more modern variations. In one of them, proposed relatively recently by the Moscow physicist Mikhail Borisovich Mensky, true existence is the complete wave function of the Universe, in which there is no difference between what actually happened and what could have happened. This division is produced by consciousness. When consciousness sleeps, this distinction is erased. Psychology merges with physics, and dreams with reality.
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The main problem of this virtual life, in his opinion, is its separation from the one that takes place consciously. He, like Castaneda forty years earlier, needs to learn not to forget, when falling asleep, what he wanted to do in a dream, and when waking up, not to forget what he dreamed. The proposed recipe is quite simple: you need to train your mind to ask yourself more often, “Is this really happening?” “The most surprising thing,” writes Zealand, “is that such a simple method works.” Sooner or later, a person will be able to “catch” the moment of sleep by asking a key question out of habit.
It is very important to learn not to forget about safety precautions. According to the author of “The Rustle of Morning Stars”, it also exists here: a dream is a journey of the soul in the space of options, and having felt unlimited freedom, the soul can lose caution and “fly to God knows where.” In case of “non-return”, death is stated in a dream.
Another adherent of the practice of lucid dreams, also a graduate of the Moscow Physics and Technology Institute Gennady Yakovlevich Troshchenko, considers the belief that you can do anything in a dream to be naive. A dream leaves an imprint on real life, because as a result of a person’s actions in the dream world, the physical and biochemical structure of his brain can change - only in real life. Therefore, if we are to explore the Multiverse through lucid dreams, then do not forget about prudence and the possibility of waking up in a completely different reality from which the dream began.
This extreme “objectivist” point of view is not shared by everyone. Most psychologists are still inclined towards more traditional “subjectivist” theories. “I think that dreams are a movie for our consciousness,” explained British professor Jim Horne, who has been studying sleep for many years at the Loughborough Sleep Research Center, in his popular articles. They entertain our brains while we sleep.” He disputes any possibility of being cured in a dream or even receiving it in a dream. positive emotions: “Many of us believe that dreams are good for us. mental health, they help decide internal conflicts and in some way “heal the soul”. But no serious evidence can be given to support this attractive theory of Freud and others. In fact, dreams can even harm a person. For example, depressed people tend to see sad and scary dreams, which can only worsen the sufferer’s condition the next day.” So it’s better not to dream at all, or at least try to forget them as quickly as possible.
Of course, anyone can object that sometimes people do things in their sleep. important discoveries, something like insight descends on them. Thus, Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) saw his periodic table in a dream, and the German chemist Friedrich Kekule, having seen in a dream a snake biting its own tail, guessed about the cyclic structure of the benzene molecule. And it’s impossible to count all the composers who saw this or that work of theirs in a dream, which all that remained was to be written down on paper when they woke up. But even in this case, Jim Horn and his associates have an objection: it is almost impossible to verify all these stories. Moreover, all of the listed heroes recalled a dream they had in their youth, already being very old people.
Needless to say: the prospect of building your own City of the Sun, visiting different parts of the world or living through the most varied, even unimaginable, situations without leaving the confines of your own bed is very tempting. Almost every person has managed at least once in his life to feel the “controllability” of his own sleep (or maybe this is just an illusion?), but one usually only hears about the fact that this process is “put on stream” from the authors of books and methods. In the meantime, there is a debate among philosophers and ordinary people about whether it is possible to fly in a dream and how often, others are trying to derive practical benefits from dreams.