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.

Greetings,

In my last post, I said that nightmares and dreams generally “reflect” something our brain believes it has experienced during sleep.  I chose that wording specifically because it speaks to the basic nature of the processes in brain function producing those sleep experiences.  Understanding the precise nature of the processes of brain function has been at times a nightmarish pursuit for me because it required me to accept some basic truths about those processes and, ultimately, about myself.  I would not recommend pursuit of this topic for those who are not prepared to accept some basic and empirical truths about themselves.

One basic truth of brain function is that its primary imperative is homeostasis, which is essentially our brain’s effort to maintain its metabolic stability.  Understanding how homeostasis drives brain function will eventually require acceptance of how its functional instability drives our behavior and ultimately belies the concept of mental stability. Homeostasis in the brain is basically about maintaining a continuous and stable flow of the nutrients its cellular matrix requires. In my view, how our brain maintains that flow involves the neural equivalent of a convection process set in motion by the continuous sensory experiences affecting our brain’s core—the thalamus.

Other than olfactory, the thalamus is where all neural pathways ultimately traverse in and out of the brain.  From my perspective, our brain’s functional matrix basically comprises neural exchanges between just two primary constituents--the thalamus and everything other than the thalamus. The sensory stimulus our thalamus experiences via its incoming neural connections causes a continuous wave of neural resonance from the thalamus into surrounding brain structures and those brain structures respond with waves counter to that resonance.  Those waves are what produces the behaviors we engage in response to conscious experience. Nightmares and dreams in general are responses in sleep to the neural resonance of the thalamus.

Greetings,

Following up on my last comments, I said that nightmares and dreams in general are responses in sleep to the neural resonance our thalamus emits during sleep.  What most of us don’t realize is that all dreams are essentially nightmares because they are all responses to the metabolic imbalance arising from the neural affects radiating from our brain’s core (thalamus) in sleep.  Specifically, dream experiences are an effect of the lingering and continuous impact life experience has on our thalamic function; thereby, our psyche.  It’s analogous to meteorites and craters—our experiences are meteorites and dreams are indicative of the mental, emotional, and social craters they cause.

Much like those rocky projectiles from space, life experience can impact our psyche significantly and insignificantly.  Relative to brain function, nightmares particularly suggest the larger, more significant impact of those experiences on thalamic function.  Make no mistake, all dreams are meaningful in that they comprise the wave of neural responses our brain generates to suppress the linger impact that our actual life experience has had on the core of our brain function in sleep.  Rather than describe or interpret our actual experience, dream content describes and interprets the impact of those experiences—they describe and interpret craters rather than meteorites.

I welcome your thoughts.