i wish we talked about our dreams more

2023-10-01

Moi ça fait deux semaines que j'ose plus m'endormir parce qu’à chaque fois que je m'endors je fais le même rêve, horrible. Mais bon c'est relou les gens qui racontent leurs rêves. Vous voulez qu'j'vous raconte?

[Me it's been 2 weeks that I don't dare sleep because each time I fall asleep I have the same horrible dream. But well it's annoying when people talk about their dreams. Do you want me to tell you about it?]

• Ben Mazué in the song-story "Qui a kidnappé Benjamin Biolay?"

To practice writing and thinking about more topics, I thought it would be fun to follow Inktober prompts for this month, writing a little post about each one.

The first prompt is "dream".

Who hasn't wondered at some point in their life: why do we dream at all? Every night most of us fall asleep and we hallucinate wildly on topics around our experiences.

vivid dreams and talking about them

I have periods of time where I constantly experience vivid dreams.¹ Sometimes, it's really fun! I go on wild adventures through a jungle or watch musicals from the front row. Other times, I wake up and I feel I have done something dreadful. When I was 6, I would have nightmares about dying from dinosaurs or falling into the subway rails. I used to fear death. Nowadays, my dreams tell me my biggest fear is losing my friends.

One of my worst nightmares happened a decade ago. In it, I had sex with one of my best friends. By itself it would have been fine, but I knew in the dream that I was cheating on my girlfriend with him. The guilt felt so real that, when I woke up, I felt terrified for the next few hours. How could I have done this? I would lose my girlfriend and one of my closest friends! Then, as I was walking to work, it finally hit me that none of this actually happened.

My friend told me she once had a series of terrifying dreams with giant crows and dead babies. In a lab meeting, she suddenly remembered one of her dreams and almost cried.

Sharing dreams feels both intimate and bizarre. I don't subscribe to the Freudian interpretation of dreams as our deepest desires, but nevertheless they do seem to convey a state of our mind, however jumbled. For me, they mostly reflect my fears and obsessions. Nevertheless, like Ben Mazué says, a full recollection of a dream can feel annoying to listen to. It's often a story with no coherent narrative or conclusion.

Still, a few tasty morsels of a dream can be surprisingly satisfying to take in. You can really see this in this subreddit where people share wack dreams. I wish I could hear just a bit more about the dreams of people around me.

neuroscience of dreams

It is one of the few common questions where neuroscience promises to provide answers. Yet, the answers have proven elusive. Some scientists have speculated that sleep helps clear out toxins. Apparently, cerebral spinal fluid flows freely while we lay asleep. The flow of this fluid correlates with brain activity. So do we dream simply as a byproduct of needing to flush out spinal fluid? Seems quite unsatisfying...

From a different perspective, neuroscientists have been looking at what the neural activity during sleep actually represents. They found that, across a variety of animals, the brain replays the animal's path through space, sometimes even anticipating the animal's future trajectory. People speculate that it's about consolidating memories, but we don't really know. Certainly animals generally navigate better after their brain replays their experiences.

So maybe dreams help us process our past. Still, we often toss them aside as we come back to reality.

lucid dreaming

Most of us aren't fully conscious while we dream. We let the dream carry us where it wills. Yet, a few people somehow realize they're dreaming. That's lucid dreaming.

I have been fascinated with lucid dreaming for years from multiple perspectives. What does it feel like? Is someone in a lucid dream more ... conscious?

For a while, I desperately wanted to lucid dream. Then one of my friends told me that she regularly lucid dreams, but doesn't like it. She ends up losing track of what's real. That happens to me with particularly vivid dreams, so I understood. After hearing her perspective, my craving for lucid dreams vanished.

Still, I find lucid dreaming fascinating as a way to explore the neural correlates of consciousness. People who are lucid dreaming are literally more aware in their dreams. Where does that manifest in the brain? We totally could image the neural activity of someone while lucid dreaming and compare it to a regular dream. Only one study has done it though, and only with one subject, according to this review. I think it's been understudied, as lucid dreaming is a fringe topic in neuroscience for whatever reason.

I wish dreams could be taken more seriously.

#inktober #neuroscience #reflection