"Dreams They're For Those Who Sleep.."

Francis Crick the DNA laureate believes  that dreams serve a cleansing function for the brain.

 

  I've been more aware with time and to me this seems true about dreams. Here I want to add more hopeful improvements about how dreams might cleanse the brain.

Recently it's been found that dreaming is more like a sort of refraction of the basic energy from the base up to the higher level of the brain.

 There's a fish called a zebra fish that has a transparent, sea transparency, and they basically put a chemical in their brain to make them dream and another to light up the neurons. And they watch the neurons energise up from the bottom and up to the top with refraction, not a reflection or a revelation for dreams as some have believed. This has caused many to believe that dreams are a refraction not a reflection or a revelation..And I tend to agree with this..

I think dreams are a refraction and while helping with problem solving they mostly are about cleansing the brain with this refraction. It says in Scientific American October 2020 in the article about COVID dreams, that replaying fragments of experiences is one example of a functional role that researchers widely described to R.E.M. 

Here I quote a bit more from the article..

 "It's believed that sleep and dreaming help us solve problems. Others believe that the value of sleep and dreams are also about consolidating the priorities about events into longer lasting memories, including those events as an ongoing narrative of our lives, and helping us regulate emotions. 

  Researchers have documented dreams assisting creative achievement. Empirical studies also show that sleep and problem solving need access to wide-ranging memory associations. This about problem solving is the first of these three ideas sleep researchers have had..The second is about brain cleansing by contextualization.

One way to understand metaphorical imagery is to consider the dreams by way of expressing the individual's core concerns, drawing on memories that are similar in emotion or tone but different in subject matter. This about contextualization is seen with post traumatic nightmares in a person's reaction to a trauma.. Assault is depicted as terror in the face of a natural disaster, such as a tsunami. 

The late Ernest Hartman, a Boston area dream and nightmare research pioneer who studied dreams after the 9/11 attacks, stipulated that such contextualization best helps people adapt when it weaves together new experiences.

 Successful integration produces a more stable memory system that's more resilient to future traumas. Metaphorical images can be a part of a constructive effort to make sense of drama.

Drama for metaphoric images can be part of a constructive effort to make sense of destructive events. A related process is the extinguishing of fear by the creation of safety memories. These possibilities which others have investigated reflect the fact that memories of fearful events are almost never replayed in their entirety during dreaming.

  Instead, elements of memory have been reduced to basic units. These elements recombine with newer memories and conditions to create context in which metaphors and other individual juxtapositions seem incongruous or incompatible with waking life, and more important, are incompatible with feelings of fear. 

  This creative dreaming process uses safety imagery that supersedes and inhibits the original fear of memory, helping to aswage distress over time..

 Dreams and cleansing.

  While also still speculative, a third set of ideas  may explain social distancing themes which permeated Idreamofcovid.com  reports (the site was for dreams reported about Covid). Emotions in these dreams range from surprise to distress to nightmarish horror.

 Tweets found by the Covid Dreams site illustrate how incompatible dream sequences are with social distancing..so incompatible that they often trigger a rare moment of self-awareness and awakening.

"We were celebrating something by having a party, and I woke myself up because something wasn't right, because we were social distancing and not supposed to be having parties."

These explanations focus on dreaming's social simulation function. The view that the dream is a neural simulation of reality, and analogous to virtual realitiy is now widely accepted, and the notion of the simulation of social life as an essential biological function is emerging in 2000.

 Ann Germaine, now CEO of sleep medicine startup Noctum and others have proposed that images of characters interacting with the self and dreams could be basic to how dreaming evolved, reflecting attachment relationships central to the survival of prehistoric groups.

 The strong interpersonal bonds reiterated during dreaming contribute to stronger group structures, may have helped to organize defenses against predators and cooperation and problem solving. (I don't think they would organize their defenses against cooperation and problem solving!) 

  

  Such dreams would still have adaptive value today because family and group cohesion remain essential to help them survive.

It may be that an individual's concerns about other people are fine-tuned while they are in the simulated presence of those people. 

 Important social relationships and conflicts are portrayed realistically during dreaming."

 So here there are three explanations of dreams. One is that it's good for problem solving ability, which has some experimental verification. Another is that it's about safety memories that are sort of letting off the steam of the dream with the events as they take place so that the dreamer doesn't have so much trauma of some events and they adjust it by changing into other motifs that are with the improved emotional level of comfort, so sort of "edging away from edginess". The third one is that it's social simulation.

 Of the 3 methods of explaining dreams I believe the the best may be about behavioral cleansing or edginess cleansing by way of the refraction. I think this may be the main solution because if you look at the evidence for problem solving ability and dreams it's really a lot rarer to have a dream that solves the problem. It may help generally by relaxing and by relieving the emotional stress so the dreamer can better do what they have to.

  ...As for solving problems themselves,  I've had really rare instances I ever personally had a solution that came to me a dream. And while we were asleep we were not active in evolution because were playing possum to stop predators from finding us in the dark, ""Just trying to get some sleep and stay alive!"

 But if you have this paralysis when you're asleep, then the brain is operating on low levels of energy. So the second idea that your brain is cleansing itself out emotionally seems to be better. 

This is the more basic level of the dream.. We have the value of sleeping, which is some value and dreams are for sleep, but when we're asleep, we're actually not at the highest level. You know, it's sort of like cleaning the house when it rains outside, And so you stay in and clean. You do things that are less active than if you're out and about with action.

And I think of dreams as sort of a call to arms because, like the traveller says to the receptionist at the hotel "Give me a wake up call in the morning" So she calls the next morning and says, "What are you doing with your life?" And I think of dreams as a launching event because in the first part of your sleep, you're sort of charging your battery.

  You're also removing the memories that are not as important as in the research, and highlighting the ones that are more valuable, "a memory highlighter for awareness". But also you know you are also not really doing more than charging the battery perhaps, by R.E.M. sleep, which is later and later in the evening and you're getting more like you are awake. 

 So I think it's sort of a way to mediate between first of all the charging, so the first part of your sleep gives you rest from the day before and then the dreaming cleanses you out from there at the later part of the sleep and that launches you up the next day.

I've had times in my life when my situation would change and I had dreams that reflected this change so I think dreams are like a call to arms and perhaps nightmares are are a call to war, a wake up call to do something important that might be more like it.

 You're fresh and ready to start with the dawn. And I've had dreams that weren't really that important but at that point in my life like a life event when something changes in my situation, it really was a wake  up to that change and smell the coffee yet while asleep.. it makes it so that you're mediating between what had gone before to what comes after in the logical sequence.

 And it works. You're cleansing when you dream, but cleaning is not known for major problem solving ability. It's like it's only reflecting or more probably refracting what that part of the pattern would be at that point in your daily rhythm. And so you start to energize. And it's not as high a level thing as being active.

So these dreams you have in the times when your situation changes, often all they are is a reflection of what has changed. A deeper reflection may be true, but no more than the reflection itself. 

 We can't move around to do stuff while we're asleep. It's always been found in research that any change of the brain is also directly associated with a physical change in physiology. Or vice versa we could say that when we're asleep and can't move, this may be where we may be limited to more basic functions like cleaning by way of the refraction, etc. And they used to say that music is like dreams, but music is far more organized than a dream is. A dream is like a cardboard cut out, it's not real amazing. But, being awake is more organized.

The other idea that dreams are a sort of social simulation I don't agree with as much because of the idea that they're also not as much about problem solving, social or otherwise. 

I would think that while you're essentially paralyzed you can't really do a lot of social improvements other than just for the more basic cleansing out of your brain with the randomness and changing it to have more than the more stressful parts of your social situation, these indeed are improved by that change of emotions..

 And while I consider it true that the basis of dreams is not without its problem solving improvement ability and also that has some social value, on those days when I had the more changes in my situation, and then I had a dream, I did 10,000 things after I awoke all morning and afternoon and yet I just had one dream that reflected important changes in my situation. This is not not so much solving problems, and it's really not social. It wasn't a social solution, just a call to action, but it wasn't anything compared to what I do while I'm awake. 

 I would say those who believe that dreams are important haven't got much to do but sleep, but just like meditation, what they do  is just sit around and stay inactive! 

 So dreams may be a valuable refraction, but not a reflection or even a revelation of what the events of the day before were about.

 The value of dreams is like a gift. But for those who have a lot of important things to do, dreams really aren't as valuable as action and activity. 

 I would hold that the primary value of dreams is reduction of stress by cleansing and energising the brain, and sleep does just this.

 But they're still not as high level as the more advanced soap operas!

 I think researchers should accept that and just go from there. I think people attribute magical powers to dreams they may not really have. 

And of course it may have the tendency for feeling good. About how the dreams cleanse out your brain may be the main reason that you're feeling good about problem solving.