Dreams

I am very interested in dreams. I've been having very long, narrative dreams the past week or so. Luna suggests that it could be hormones. Maybe it's the cold weather. Who knows?

Below are some dream-related links. The top one I saw today, the bottom ones I remember from meeting this guy Matt Wilson at MIT. He showed me a rat and some mice with what looked like old fashioned computer chips plugged into their heads. He said that the rats transfer their maze memories from the short-term to long-term memory storage during sleep by replaying the maze dream sequence in slow motion. They could see the same patterns of neurons firing while the rats slept, and if they woke them up in the middle of the sequence, they performed far worse than controls on the same maze at a later time. (Whether the rats were actually "dreaming" about the maze we cannot know.)

I've certainly had the experience of dreaming about skiing, or playing a video game, or plating cells (I know) after a long day of doing one of those things.

As for dream symbolism, I think that it is largely personal in nature. I think we can interpret dreams by our emotional responses and the stories our brains use to make sense of the random images. I bet there are many different types of dreams - some rat maze dreams, some dreams that are wish fulfilling (e.g. making up with a friend, confronting an enemy, finding something lost), some that are problem solving (similar to wish-fulfilling?), some that are about anxiety or fear (stage fright dreams are classic for me), some that just happen to come from the movie you watched or book you read.

I have classes of recurring dream themes that have certain emotional tones and personal meanings for me, such as: finding extra rooms in my house (positive) or exploring hidden passageways/rooms in another house (interesting but disturbing), elevators that go very very fast (discomfiting), driving cars (when I was little), airplanes crashing (post-9/11), being on a quest for something (very narrative), demon dreams (very scary - usually the "demon" looks very normal but I know that there is Evil nearby), exploring Dream Amalgamation Cities (bittersweet), and musical dreams (featuring singing of known or made-up songs, sometimes dancing, usually exhilerating). Oh, and of course sex dreams! I am not always myself in my dreams; sometimes I vacillate from character to character or to omniscient observer.

I used to write down my dreams when I was a kid but now I don't need to do that. I remember my dreams most mornings, if I try even a little, and some dreams I remember more clearly than things that actually happened. Certainly they are more interesting than real life, anyway.

Memory sources of dreams:
Investigators since Freud have appreciated that memories of the people, places, activities and emotions of daily life are reflected in dreams but are typically so fragmented that their predictability is nil. The mechanisms that translate such memories into dream images remain largely unknown. New research targeting relationships between dreaming, memory and the hippocampus is producing a new theory to explain how, why and when we dream of waking life events.

Rats dream of mazes:
The scientists had the mice perform specific tasks in a maze that produced very distinctive patterns of brain activity. When they repeatedly saw almost exactly the same patterns reproduced during sleep, they concluded the rats were dreaming about running through the maze.
Wilson Lab

Time for a nap now.