Gibberish

On Dreams

In the light of neuron models, it may be interesting to revisit some old questions about dreams. What make dreams happen? What make up dream contents? Is there always a meaning of a dream? Are dreams wish-fulfillments?

As we already know, objects, concepts, thoughts and memories are encoded in the connected neutron networks whose basic units are cell assemblies (CAs) in the brain. There are in general two types of stimuli that lead to neuron firings: external stimuli and internal stimuli. At anytime, as a result of neuron firings, more than one CAs are activated. That is, the neurons are firing in many sections of the neuron networks, and multiple thoughts are active. It was the inhibition mechanisms that help the brain choose which CAs win out and become the dominant thought process. They keep the potentially explosive activities in the brain under control, and make the brain interpret and response to the inputs from the environment quickly and in a meaningful way.

What's going on in the mind when dreaming is essentially the same as what's going on in waking life except that the inhibition mechanisms are at rest, or their activities are reduced.

There can be three sources of stimuli of dreams: 1) external stimuli from the environment (e.g. feet get exposed and feel cold when sleeping), 2) the activated CAs (associated with a dominant thought) in the daytime are still active in the brain (e.g. the dominant thought is still active), 3) neurons firings that were inhibited in waking life become active because of the decreased activities of inhibition mechanisms (e.g. suppressed thoughts in the daytime emerge). The first two are very much the same as in waking life. The third is special in the sleeping state, which adds one more source of internal stimuli to the brain. We shall see the reduced activities of the inhibition mechanisms in the sleeping state is the key in explaining the brain activities and dreams.

The dream contents are determined by the stimuli essentially the same way as what's going on in the brain in waking life except that the reduced activities of inhibition mechanisms render the neurons fire more freely, and therefore allow more fantasies in dreams (sometimes even nonsense). If a stimulus comes externally, CAs that are usually associated with these kinds of stimuli are activated only that the motor systems are not in action. If suppressed thoughts become active in sleep, the CAs associated with those thoughts are activated, and they also activate other connected CAs like a chain of reactions. If the dominant thoughts are still kind of active in sleep, they also spread the neuron activities further because of less inhibition. In all the cases, the neuron firing spreads more widely without the tight control of inhibition mechanisms. These neuron activities make up the dream contents if we still remember them when we wake up (of course, many of them happen without us knowing). Therefore, some dreams don't make sense at all while sometimes a problem can be solved in dreaming. But one thing is sure: all the dream contents are things that are already encoded in the neuron networks (things from our life experiences). It is just that because of lacking control, fragments of life experiences from the past in different times are brought back again in the mind and are linked at the moment to make some new stories (dream contents). So the previous day experiences either dominant or trivial are very likely to appear in dreams though the past experiences can also come to dreams if they are in some way linked to the recent experiences.

Based on the above discussion, it is obvious that dreams may or may not be able to be interpreted as a whole though each small portion can be traced back to our life experiences. If the dominant or suppressed thoughts in the daytime are active in sleep, the thoughts behind the dream may be distinguishable and the dream may be interpreted (at least partly) with a meaning. But it is never a clean story because of other contents attached to it due to the wide spreading of neuron activities. The dreams are not interpretable if the attached contents are too overwhelming. The dreams become even more difficult to interpret if more than one kind of stimuli exist at the same time, and they activate CAs associated with them which are not related at all. But it is a right approach to try to understand a dream from understanding each of its portions which are basically fragments of our past life experiences, represented by connected CAs.

It's also easy to see that dreams are not wish-fulfillments. It's possible that some of the suppressed or dominant thoughts represent some kind of wish, but they are not always so. And even when they do represent wish, we can't say that these dreams are to fulfill the wish because the dreams are simply extensions to and around these thoughts (whatever CAs activated by these thoughts in a chain). Dreams don't have a purpose, and they are simply the results of neuron activities.

According to Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams):

Dreams are wish-fulfillments, and therefore, dreams can be interpreted. Dreams always have some reference to the experiences of the preceding day or an older experience remembered the preceding day. They can also select material from any period of life provided that a chain of thought leads back from the experiences of the dream of that earlier period. Dreams don't concern with trivial experiences which show up in dreams only as a manifestation of dream-distortion though he admits some dreams do make abundant use of trivial occurrences from the previous day. Dreams rarely reproduce a memory unchanged and unabridged. Dreams combine all the sources of dream-stimulations which are offered to it into a unified whole. He favored the interpretation of the dream applied to each portion of the dream content separately not the entirety of the dream. The deeper we go into the dreams, the more often we are put on to the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream-sources in the latent dream-contents. There are three kinds of somatic stimuli in the formation of dreams: the objective sensory stimuli from external objects, the inner states of excitation of the sensory organs, and the bodily stimuli arising within the body. But the richness of the dream contents suggests nerve stimuli are not the only stimuli of dreams.