Barking at the Moon

Spiritual Seeking in the Age of Science


Dreams and Pattern Matching

Podcast

Are dreams just whatever the machine makes of our random impulses?


Dreams are a curious thing, and the experience is rarely the same for two people. Some see colors. Others can smell things. Then there are those who dream in black and white, with commercials. When we sleep, there's room for everyone.

Analyzing dreams is a pastime that's probably been around for as long as we've been able to talk about them. One of the reasons for this is that they're often abstract and symbolic, though the symbolism may well be in the eye of the beholder.

Then again, that's rather the point. If our sleeping visions were as clear and precise as our daily lives, there would be little need for interpretation. If you find a twenty dollar bill lying on the street and pick it up, there's not much need for symbolism. You got lucky, and a nice meal at your favorite restaurant may be just minutes away. Not so in the realm of dreams.

The good news is that this has been a great career opportunity for soothsayers, psychologists and professors. Since there's almost always an ambiguous nature to what we remember, there are as many different meanings as people you ask. The fortune teller may explain how this bodes for an upcoming period of your life. Someone teaching a university class on the matter may give you textbooks to read that explain the chemistry of what happens in your brain as you sleep. And of course, the psychologist may just tell you that you're crazy. They're not always wrong.

One possibility lies in the part of our nature that is responsible for perception and pattern matching. We each have the sense of taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. All of these are supported by various aspects of our body, whether it's eyes for seeing or the nervous system for touch. Because I'm a geek, I see them as sensors that gather data and send it to the central processing unit for analysis and interpretation. In humans, that's the brain. I'm not really sure how it works in a jellyfish, but I tend to give them all the personal space they require so we don't have much opportunity to chat.

What happens when all this data hits your brain? Often, it invokes some pattern recognition logic. For example, if I'm swimming in the ocean and see something that my brain says is a jellyfish, that's useful information. It means I should start swimming in the opposite direction, even if it does seem a bit impolite. While not everything is visual, the data still gets interpreted. Even with my eyes closed, if I get a little too close to a fire, I feel the heat, hear the crackling and smell the wood burning. My brain will put it all together and offer some rather specific observations on what's going to happen should I continue on my present course.

What happens to this sophisticated system of sensors and interpretation when we sleep? Does it all just go away or shut down for the night? There might be some kind of biological labor union that requires a specific number of hours off in order to avoid a strike, but as best I can tell it hasn't reached humans yet.

If I'm asleep and someone pokes me with a stick, I'm going to feel it. Clearly those sensors are still working. Equally clear is the thought that I should probably find a better place to sleep. The important thing to note is the fact that awake or asleep, my sensors seem to keep working.

In the case of my eyes, I'm not taking in much data because my eyelids are closed. Just the same, I can close my eyes during the day, stare at the sun, and see all manner of things that become visible when there's sufficient light to penetrate my eyelids. The eyes do their thing regardless of whether or not the eyelids get in the way.

It's probably safe to say that all the sensors stay online in one form or another, even as I lay unconscious. If that's the case, then it also means that data is being transmitted to the brain, so it's just as likely that the pattern matching system is still doing its work, lack of union representation notwithstanding. That highlights some interesting possibilities.

I don't really know what the difference is between being awake and the sleep state. In fact, the hours we spend in slumber is an area of ongoing research in the scientific community, and there doesn't appear to be a hard and fast answer to that question. What I do know is the states are different.

The logical portion of my brain, responsible for my conscious thought and internal dialogue, doesn't appear to be working during these hours. Perhaps it has a better agent than the rest of my body. I know that it's not active, at least in the same way that it is when I'm awake, because sleep simply does not come until this guy decides to sit down and shut up.

If my conscious mind takes some time off, then perhaps the way the data gets interpreted from my various sensors is different when I sleep. Maybe my thinking self slips off to the local pub for a quick drink and leaves the mental version of the night watchman on duty. If pattern recognition depends in part, even at a subconscious level, on the logical portion of my mind, this data stream could be interpreted in a much different way by a guy who just sits there drinking coffee and eating stale donuts.

When I'm awake and I see a collection of shapes off in the distance, it may take a moment for me to interpret them. Eventually, however, all those lines and colors coalesce into the recognizable shape of a person and I realize that someone is walking up to me. If I'm about to go to sleep, I may also check to see if he's carrying a stick.

This perception of a human is very clear and unambiguous. There is a head on top of the shoulders, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, all in the proper order. This is not necessarily the case in a dream. Like one of Picasso's cubist paintings, I may see an image of a giant nose floating in space, an eye on top and one on bottom, with the mouth floating a respectful distance to the side. It's possible that the same data came to the pattern matching machine but for whatever reason was interpreted in a very different manner, which may well have something to do with shortcomings in the night watchman's resume.

This is, of course, an example of visual components, but it illustrates the concept across all of the senses. If we break it down into the notion of data and interpretation, what we perceive in our dreams is often represented in a far more abstract manner than our waking state.

This may also explain why it can be difficult to clearly remember even the most vivid dream just moments after waking up. The conscious mind has returned to duty, albeit a bit hung over at first. He waves at the night watchman, who tosses the empty donut box in the trash along with all of his abstract creations as he heads for the exit. What we experienced in those sleeping moments just doesn't map to the logical constructions of reality, so it's hard to remember the specifics.

So far we've only considered our five senses as data sources, but that's not all that goes on under the hood of your average human. We also have memories. Neurologists may be able to give you information on the portions of the brain that are active when we remember, but the way our memory works is often just as mysterious as the nature of our sleep state.

No matter how you choose to explain it, it's clear that our memories serve as yet another data stream that feeds into our pattern matching machine. It's not at all uncommon for people to have dreams about events or interactions from their past. Sometimes they show up in full detail, like going to the theater to watch a movie. For other people they can be just as abstract as our Picasso painting. It not only varies from person to person since we tend to have different ways of dreaming. It can vary from night to night. Either way, it's another set of impulses that get interpreted while the logical part of our brain has stepped out for a quick one.

The brain is also a very complicated place, full of neurons and lobes and gray matter. There are also fluids. The medical and scientific community often speak in terms of chemical interactions, which seems reasonable until the night watchman takes over. What happens when you're lying in bed, tossing and turning, sloshing all those fluids around? Seems like a whole new set of possibilities for generating random data, not to mention the occasional short circuit.

Depending on how creative your night watchman is, all this data provides a wealth of abstract imagery for the dream professionals to interpret. After all, if you see a jellyfish holding a coffee cup, what does it mean? The only person who really knows is the jellyfish. The rest of us are just guessing.

It would be easy for me to look at all of this, dust off my hands and say that's that. Lots of different data streams going to the brain while I sleep, lots of different ways for that data to be perceived when there's no conscious mind to interpret things the way I would expect when I'm awake. And yet, there's another source of data that can play a part, though it's not acknowledged in the scientific community.

We've all heard of people who have prophetic dreams, observing events in their sleep only to see it play out later in the three dimensions of the real world. I've listed the dimensions as three because the future invokes time as a fourth dimension, and that's where it gets tricky. To the best of our knowledge, time flows in one direction only, and you can't see the future until it becomes the present. Except for when you do.

The entire realm of metaphysical perception is a contentious area where scientists and philosophers argue endlessly and pointlessly. Neither will change the other's mind. You can't logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into in the first place, and for those who experience prophetic dreams there is absolutely zero rational thought involved. To the scientist, this is the end of the conversation because if it's not rational, it simply doesn't exists. Without a shared experience, there's no way to validate the truth of the matter through the eyes of logic.

And yet, prophetic dreams have happened enough in the history of humanity that it becomes difficult to dismiss as pure fiction. Sure, there are plenty of people who tell tall tales in order to get attention, both in the spiritual community and in science. However, when something keeps happening over and over again, I have to ask myself if there's some kind of fundamental reality to it, even if I lack the ability to prove it.

I have known people who have had glimpses of the future. They told me about things that they simply couldn't have known in advance, and I later saw them come to pass. Moreover, these weren't gypsy fortune tellers who made a living by peddling whatever the public would buy. These were just everyday working people who only shared the stories with me because they knew I had an open mind about such things.

I find these to be data points that merit consideration, but only for me. It's not important to me to prove or disprove these claims to anyone else as I'm only interested in my own exploration. Even so, while I've had these conversations often enough to bend the needle on my coincidence meter, if I'm honest with myself I have to admit that I'm operating on second hand information. I may consider someone to be truthful and trustworthy, but I have no way of knowing what really happens in their dreams.

Even though the hippie side of me is willing to offer the benefit of the doubt, my logical brain is hesitant. At least it would be, if I hadn't had a couple of similar experiences myself. While I'm a bit of a strange creature even by my friends' assessments, I am not now nor have I ever been a prophetic gypsy fortune teller. Okay, I own a few bandanas, but that's the extent of it. I don't read tea leaves or possess a crystal ball, and no matter how interested I am in the things that lie beneath our normal reality, my day to day life tends to be mind-numbingly average.

I have, nonetheless, had a couple of dreams that were vivid enough to wake me in the middle of the night. Nothing shocking there, we've all had those experiences. One in particular, however, was a first person view of some rather violent events. When you wake up on the business end of a gun, it does wonders for your heart rate. I simply chalked it off as a bad dream until the next evening when I watched it unfold in perfect detail on the 10 o'clock news. The exact same violent incident, with the cameraman as the recipient filming his own demise. It was unnerving, to say the least.

When I experience something like this, it becomes harder to dismiss the stories of others. Many of them are surely fabrications, but clearly some are not. What's the data stream for a dream of this type? It's not a product of my sensors, as I woke up with a conspicuous lack of bullet holes. It's not a memory, because that seems to be the sort of thing one wouldn't forget. The event had not yet happened when I went to sleep, so it wasn't something that I saw on TV, forgot, then dreamed about. This was something else. I just don't know what.

Our dreams tap into all the data that our bodies generate. They also make use of streams from vague and difficult to pin down sources like our memories. Apparently there's also some kind of perception that is rather casual about the rules of time and space. If those rules get broken, what other sources are at play while the logical mind takes the night off and the night watchman has the run of the farm? It seems to me that most of our dreams are the result of poorly interpreted data streams. Except for when they're not.

Are our dreams just the output of a poorly monitored pattern matching machine, sensible data interpreted in nonsensical ways? With the logical mind off duty for the night, are we more open to perceiving other states of being that we close off to when we're awake? Is it possible that dreams are a different dimension, immune to the laws of physics we encounter when awake? Or am I just barking at the moon?

Read more from Barking at the Moon
We use cookies to make the site work. We don't share your data.