Complex Numbers

R.E.M. Minders

I've written here before about my lovely experiences with sleep paralysis and its accompanying nightmares. But those are relatively rare; like most people, the majority of my somnolent experiences are just dreams.

When you think about it, dreams are weird. I don't just mean that the dreams themselves are weird, but also that the concept is strange.

As I understand it, we don't really know why we dream. Or sleep, for that matter. What evolutionary advantage is there to be unconscious for a third of the day? Or even more, if you happen to be a feline. The benefits to survival must outweigh the risks of being caught napping by a predator or a tax collector.

Sleep does seem to play a role in processing and organizing experiences, turning them into memories, and it's probable that dreams are key to that - a time for the brain to integrate the latest inputs into one's consciousness, or to discard the unimportant bits. Like a defrag routine for a storage medium, maybe, though it's not really accurate to compare organic processes with electronic ones.

Those of a more mystical bent might interpret dreams as messages. Perhaps it's a time for the subconscious to alert us to something important. I know that there have been many times I've gone to sleep after banging my head against a problem, for instance a spreadsheet solution that has eluded me, and woken up with the key to working it out. This is, I suppose, why sometimes you're urged to "sleep on it" when something's bugging you. But I've also woken up with ideas that turn out to be dead ends - though even failures are useful if you can learn from them.

I have to wonder, though, what role lucid dreaming might play in this kind of explanation for dreams, though. Lucid dreams, as I understand them, combine the knowledge that one is dreaming with the ability to control the dream. And just typing that sentence is enough to send me down the rabbit hole of a discussion about free will, which is not something I'm prepared to go into here just yet. For the sake of argument, let's say that one is in control when one believesone is in control.

For myself, I feel like I have some degree of control most of the time once I realize I'm in a dream. Usually when that happens I verify the hypothesis that I'm dreaming by willing myself to levitate. Since I can't levitate in real life, if I find myself starting to leave the floor or ground or whatever, I know I'm dreaming (of course, there are flying dreams that I don't initiate, but that takes the "will" out of the situation).

As for what I do then - well, let's just say this blog doesn't have a high enough content rating, and leave it at that.

I think it was Dave Barry who said something to the effect of "The holodeck [from Star Trek: The Next Generation] will be humanity's last invention." In their purest form, lucid dreams are like being in a holodeck simulation. Not only do I see and hear, but I have also engaged my other senses. The surroundings seem real. If you have control over not only yourself but your realistic surroundings, why would you ever go back to a world where random crap can happen to you, you have bills to pay, and the car needs new tires? I suppose some would, but not me. I'm always disappointed when I wake up from a lucid dream. Not that my life is horrible - far from it - but the dreams are just more interesting.