Muse Droppings
By:
C.C. Youngren

Dreams

Is a dream a movie that plays in your head to that most private of audiences?  I don’t think so, but I can’t find a legitimate authority on the subject who agrees with me.  Most do agree that dreaming is associated with the Rapid Eye Movement (R.E.M.) stage of sleep.  There are at least 4 other, “non-REM” stages of sleep poetically named stage 1, 2, 3 & 4, making five in all.  Some say six by including a “wakening” stage.  There would be seven if you counted Wide Awake as a stage too, but that would mean we are sleeping all the time, with our most vivid dreams occurring during that stage we have come to call consciousness.

The consensus “sleep cycle” consists of repetitions of the stage sequence: 1-2-3-4-3-2-REM-(wakening), several per night.  The length of each stage, identified by a specific brain-wave profile, varies from cycle to cycle, and night to night.  The number of cycles per night is not fixed either.  Dreams are associated with R.E.M. because when sleep is interrupted during that stage people are statistically much more likely to say they have been dreaming than at interruptions of other stages.  One conclusion is that the mental activity of R.E.M. is dreaming.  I think R.E.M. has another function, and dreams are the phenomena associated with interrupting that function. That is, we do not dream during R.E.M., we dream as we wake up if that change of state is mid R.E.M. 

The brain is not (just) a computer, but bear with that analogy for a moment.  What if the myriad stimuli of the day’s experience are waiting in some volatile RAM to be ”saved” in some more permanent memory storage—sorted by some hierarchy of relevance?  What if the objective is to have the familiar reinforced, skills honed, and links to related past experiences established, and not simply archive a chronological recording of day to be played back later?  The latter (verbatim playback) never happens.   A novel cut up into phrases and stored by character, setting, events & relationships would probably not—definitely not—be streamed in the order of the original text.  What if this is the activity of R.E.M. sleep? And if interrupted mid process, these clippings, possibly familiar in and of themselves, would be displayed in no immediately discernible context and maybe even only vaguely recognizable in their machine language pajamas.  As we awake to this environment, the impulse to make sense of these shards of broken down memories is to weave a story through them—instantaneously inventing a fictitious context.

[The Bruce Willis “Die Hard” films are a lot like this.  A set of tightly choreographed, technically spectacular stunts are conjured up having no particular relationship to one another.  Then some contrived dialog is superimposed to get the characters from one stunt location to the next, assaulting our intelligence in the guise of a “plot.”]

That is what I think dreams are.  Instantaneous creations produced during that waking moment to place the shards of disconnected factoids, intercepted during the filing process, into some context, however absurd.  How do I know this?  I dreamt it of course.

Tired throughout supper, I thought if I got an hour of shut-eye I could complete the tasks I needed for tomorrow before turning in for the night.  I asked my wife to wake me about 8:30, padded off to the bedroom, and fell immediately to sleep.  The dream took me to a control room, a generic version of any one of the Star Trek Enterprise Bridge Decks.  There was a raised catwalk in front of banks of computers, a railing, and central ramp down to the control desk which, come to think of it, was more network anchor cubicle than Star Fleet command chair.  This was the pre-PC age, so computers were walls of blinking lights, toggle switches and large tape reels jerking clockwise & counter.  No graphics either, what screens there were scrolled lines of monochrome data.  Two technicians in white boiler suits monitored the premises.  A young woman, whose name I somehow knew was Myrna, patrolled the catwalk clipboard in hand, and Ferguson, a stork-like young man with an impressive wingspan, was seated in a roller-swivel chair at the anchor desk gliding from one keyboard to the next.

I knew I was looking at the inner workings of my brain and that Myrna & Ferguson played some not insignificant role in determining the “me” of me.  Myrna would lean over the rail and say something.  Ferguson would nod, give a mock or nonchalant salute and continue to type on two keyboards, 6 ft apart, simultaneously.  Without explicit dialogue I determined that Myrna was the hardware technician: opening cabinet doors, poking around with meter probes, sliding out, inspecting and re-inserting circuit cards, she was armed with a flashlight and needle-nose pliers in her back pocket.  Ferguson was programmer/analyst, carried more pens than anyone could ever possibly need in his top pocket, and at this minute was under some pressure to get a download completed under some severe time constraint.  He was trying to sort and store a day’s worth of memories during a short R.E.M. period when the busywork would not be cluttered with data traffic to/from the world on the other side of that firewall called “the senses.”

I heard my name being called—twice: “Conrad … Conrad,” the second louder than the first. Both Ferguson & Myrna, startled, looked up to a focal point above and behind the perch of the dream-viewing camera which panned 180 degrees to face the familiar Star Trek communications screen.  On screen was my wife in the doorway, calling my name and telling me it was 8:30 and that I had requested her to awaken me.  I flinched as I heard my own voice boom “No, go away!” and turned back to see a panicked Ferguson holding one of those large 1930’s radio broadcast microphones.  Myrna vaults the rail and grabs Ferguson from behind with her left arm jerking back his left shoulder while she reaches in front to push away and mute the mike with her right—a classic pass interference pose.  “You can’t contact them directly,” she admonishes. “You know the First Commandment!”

Blinking, I see my wife standing there, hands on hips, frown on brow.  “Whoa!”  I think is all I said, but suddenly, I knew.  I knew what dreams were, and knew I would get to know Myrna & Ferguson better as time went on.  More on that; I promise.

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