What happens to consciousness?

[iNow]

Dreams are quite likely just your logical mind trying to impose a rational narrative on all of the nightly neural reorganization taking place.

[DrmDoc]

 

Yes but what is the driving force? Why does metabolic processes of sleep need byproduct of dreaming? What does dreaming brain serve or do that is needed?

 

If sleep main role is the memories in your brain is being filing away or organized? Some auto immune system, repair or organizing? If that is why we sleep? Why does it require dreaming? What does dreaming serve or do that is needed?

 

People ponder why we need to sleep and dream.

 

Even if dreaming is memories being organized, clean, dumped, stored or filing away!! Why such strange dreams of things I have never seen or strange dreams?

 

Dreaming is a byproduct of our brain's metabolic needs in sleep in that those needs require increased neural activity and arousal in our brain during sleep. When we physically requires nourishment, normally we can't intake that nourishment when we are physically asleep in our beds. Similar is true for our sleeping brain in that its uptake of neural nourishment--serving its metabolic needs in sleep--requires a state of arousal, which is the state that produces dreaming. Our brain is the large consumer of our body's overall energy uptake and its energy needs must be met even in sleep. Our brain engages wakeful activity in sleep to increase the delivery of glucose rich blood-flow into its structure and to metabolize that energy source. The imagery we experience as dreams are a product of this arousing metabolic process in sleep.

 

When our brain awakes during sleep to feed its metabolic needs that wakefulness arouses our brain's cognitive processes while our body physically remains immobile. Those processes merge our unconscious sensory perceptions with thoughts that linger from our conscious experience to produce dream content depicting the mental effect or influence of those conscious experiences and unconscious perceptions. Although our dream content may appear strange and absurd, they are actually perceptions that conform to the nature of thought (mental reality) rather than physical/material reality.

 

We need to sleep because of the evolved nature of sleep. Sleep is mediated by the most primitive structures (thalamus and hypothalamus primarily) of our brain and it, sleep, likely evolved in ancestral animals as a means to conserve energy during periods of rest and between cycles of feeding. Dreaming likely evolved in brain behavior as our brain required more energy in sleep as it evolved more recent structures (cortex) relative to the thalamus and hypothalamus. What people should know is that there's no mystery to sleep nor to dreaming with a clear perspective of brain evolution and neuroscience.

 

Dreams are quite likely just your logical mind trying to impose a rational narrative on all of the nightly neural reorganization taking place.

 

Quite true with dreaming, our brain is certainly attempting to impose a rational narrative on it nightly processes. However, I think those processes may not be as much about reorganization as they are about cleaning house. There's a lot of research and talk about neural reorganization in sleep and quite a bit of that about sleep being the source of the memory consolidation effect we believe we find upon arousal. Although sleep studies appear to support sleep's neural restorative effect, I don't believe that there's any reorganization in sleep that doesn't or can't occur when our brain is fully conscious particularly with memory. The evolved nature of memory formation, as I've described previously, suggests that its neural reorganization and consolidation processes require a waking-state brain that is fully sentient of its physical/material environment and active within that environment. I believe what primarily occurs in the brain during sleep, besides frequent uptakes of nutrient, is suggested by the glymphatic process and its restorative effects.