Greetings!

Imagine that…DrmDoc had a nightmare? Yes, indeed I did:

I dreamed about leaving a classroom to visit a nearby store to satisfy an urge for something sweet. Arriving at the store, its layout was Cracker Barrel-est.  There was clothing for sale up front, snack items behind a display case further in and, oddly, a deli/butcher counter.

Looking around, I was a bit put off by several unruly children running around without parental supervision.  As I turned to leave, some of them took notice of my displeasure and followed me out.  I took that as an opportunity to impart some wisdom to one of my followers on the value of edification rather than disruption…but he had another interest.

Approaching a street crossing, I felt the poke of what seemed like a gun barrel at my back and it was then that I realized my rowdy follower’s intent was to rob me.  I wasn’t alarmed as I knew I could easily disarm him.

If this dream doesn’t seem very nightmarish, that’s because it wasn’t a nightmare. It was an otherwise unremarkable dream experience I had subsequent to a recent nightmare I thought about sharing and discussing in this science forum. Interestingly—at the very least to me--this unremarkable dream explains both my motivation and hesitation for wanting to discuss nightmares here. My discussions regard the science of brain function and, unfortunately, psychology now holds very little interest to me without a clear and reliable basis in that function.

Greetings,

Relative to brain function, nightmares are like any other unremarkable dream experiences in that they are basically a byproduct of the glymphatic processes occurring in the brain during sleep.  Those processes decrease the toxic brain chemistry that impede and suppresses our brain's wakeful activity such as the removal of beta-amyloids and tau, which are waste byproducts of our brain's metabolic activity.  As that toxicity diminishes, our sleeping brain becomes increasingly sensitive to stimuli. But even as byproducts of basic brain processes during sleep, nightmares and regular dreams aren’t any less meaningful in that they reflect something our brain believes it has experienced during sleep.  Rather than random neural firings as some scientists propose, dreams are meaningful, which is even more so suggested by nightmares and their alarming content:

I awoke to the presence of relatives--my deceased mother and stepfather--in my bedroom.   But what was most alarming to me was the presence lying next to me, in my bed, beneath my bedsheets.   Pealing those sheets back slowly revealed a sleeping man underneath with an unnervingly large and elongated head.  I shouted, “Who is this?!” and woke immediately.

That nightmare occurred a few week back and was the result of revisiting nonsensical theories about the nature of mind and consciousness espoused by Edgar Cayce who, in his day, was popularly refered to as The Sleeping Prophet.