physiology of dreams

Studies of nocturnal erections in men (duh) showed that men with a physical basis for impotence such as severe diabetes or nerve damage showed no erections during sleep, while those with psycological problems that interfere with waking erections did.  Erections during sleep mostly occur during REM stages, and average from 100-190 minutes per night depending on age. Tumescence in sleep is not necessarily related to erotic dreams, though anxiety or agression in dreams is associated with partial or absent erections.  Efforts to study female arousal in sleep include employing a vaginal photoplethysmograph, an intravaginal probe that directs

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The notes in this section are lifted from my notebooks. Often I will copy whole paragraphs from a text I’m reading into my notebooks because they were either very cogently written, or I needed to slow down my mind by writing the words down so that I could understand the point more completely. Not intending this blog to be anything scholarly, pecuniary, or influential in any way, I don’t see any reason to provide footnotes. I wouldn’t know where to put them, since I generally have no idea which sentences are mine and which are not. But in case you want to read more, here are some of the books I’ve consulted in my pursuit of understanding dreams.

 Koch, Christof; The Quest for Consciousness

Van de Castle, Robert L: Our Dreaming Minds

Smolin, Lee; Quantum Gravity

Halpern, Paul; The Pursuit of Destiny

notes on what Freud had to say

For Freud, dreams had the simple function of ensuring sleep, but they also create clues to repressed emotional problems. He observed that dreams “really mean what they say and have undergone no distortion from censorship. They are an expression of immoral, incestuous and perverse impulses or of murderous and sadistic lusts.”  Another function of the dream was to allow repressed impulses to be gratified via the imagination.

The unfulfilled wishes that motivate dreamas can have four sources: 1) consciously remembered wishes that were aroused

notes on what Jung had to say

What Jung meant by “the collective unconscious” was an earlier stratum of evolutionary mental awareness; prehistoric mental aspects of personality which functioned far below the level of the individual unconscious.

He proposed the existence of a class of “archetypes”, which are the psychic structural components of the collective unconscious that parallel the physical components of our common human bodily structure. Jung’s theory of personality development and dream expression are teleological in nature: the human psyche inexorably moves toward the goal of

William Saletan (slate magazine) on sex dreams

A study confirmed differences between male and female sex dreams. Findings: 1) 8 percent of reported dreams were erotic. 2) Contrary to studies done in the 1960s, women had as many sexual dreams as men did. 3) Current and previous lovers “turned up in 20 percent of the women’s dreams but only 14 percent of the men’s.” 4) Men “reported dreams featuring multiple sex partners twice as often” as women did. “Men tend to visualize themselves making love to unknown women or with multiple partners in public settings.” 5) Women “were twice as likely to have dream scenarios featuring celebrities.” Theories: 1) Over the last half-century, empowerment has made women more likely to have erotic dreams. 2) Empowerment has made them more likely to report their erotic dreams. 3) Women’s empowerment has made men less likely to report dreams involving multiple partners and public settings. (To discuss male-female differences in sexual psychology, click here.)

Christof Koch on dreaming

From an experiential point of view, dreams are full of the sights and sounds of life.  While dream consciousness differs from consciousness in the waking state (for instance, dreams lack introspection and insight), it certainly feels like something to dream.  It is likely that the neuronal coalitions that mediate the neronal correlates for consciousness for visual dreams partially overlap with those for seeng while awake.

Percept vs. precept

The idea that there is an independent, insentient world out there, governed by scientific laws and impersonal processes is ultimately a human construct. A powerful and effective construct, but a human one nonetheless.  Traditional Buddhist epistemology simply does not accept the Cartesian notion of an insurmountable gap between mind and matter. Most Buddhist philosophies hold that mind and object arise interdependently so there’s no easy way to seperate one’s understanding of the world from the world itself.

Another way of looking at this is from the point of neurobiology. In that field, its understood that any change in a

jun 07 at Pam’s office

I was at Pam’s office. She was very jocular with everyone, going from office to office, joking around, dancing and playing with people. She wore a charcoal grey suit. She helped a woman I knew out with maneuvering her wheelchair through some obstacle. I had not been aware that this woman needed a wheelchair, and was chary to ask why. She wore pink. Then Pam had a smock on, speckled with paint or glaze, and she was doing something else. In a fit of joy she was wriggling to some music (in her head?) and did the “bump” against the wall. Everyone laughed.

It was time for me to leave, so we got some roller skates (isn’t dreaming a blast?) and took off down a wide, black-top trail that wound its way downhill. Pam pointed out the homes of two comics who lived next to the trail. You’d have to go under a culvert/underpass to get to their homes, which were not clearly visible because they were behind leafy trees. I realized that Julie had once tried to explain how to get to this place, but she was stymied because it was just too labyrinthine a path. It seemed clear enough to me. The road to the comics’ houses was strewn with rubble. Like a war zone, but only a minor war.

In front of us was a skater of ambiguous gender. S/he had long hair, but a squarish build, and I asked Pam if it was one of the comics. When I looked back s/he had been joined by a large woman with copious, long salt-and-pepper hair. We were skating downhill, and Pam and I had our feet somehow locked together. We were going faster than I was comfortable with, so I told her I had to slow down, and I tried to turn the skates to stop as I would on downhill skis, but I wasn’t slowing, so I pushed my feet into the snowbank that was alongside the path. It was working, but just barely. She quite confidently used the rubber toe things to stop with.

At the bottom Pam had to let me out of a security gate, and just as I got through I realized I still had my skates on, so I sat down to remove them while Pam held the gate open. I fumbled with the knots and had trouble getting them off, as I sat, blocking the path of people wanting in or out. The crowd of frustrated people grew, and I became more and more bumbling.

In the parking lot I had a van. Melanie has put some items in it that she wants me to return to a big box store. There’s a bin of dog biscuits, some curtains that they have had on their windows for a long time, but finally got the curtains they really want, so are returning these, and tubs of things. I ask Matt how it is he can return these things after using them, and in spite of the store’s policy of no returns. He starts bragging about how he’ll bully them into accepting the returns, how he’ll mention the owners’ names. As we pull the items from the back of the van there is a clusterfuck as objects get stuck, and my hands are wet or sticky, so as I brush against some straw hats they get stuck to my hands and I have to shake them off.

 I’ve had a lot of dreams lately with freshly-tarred, very black roads with no lines on them. In one I’m skiing next to it, in another I’m driving over it, and there are no other cars, and in this one I’m rollerskating out of control down it. I sense that its the path of my life, which I’ve not followed easily, and which I see as paradoxically very ‘black and white’ as well as unmarked.

I think that Pam is not an aspect of myself because its a real person. I think Pam, the joyous, successful business woman is the things I’m supposed to aspire to. She charges down the road confidently and I put on the brakes. Everyone in this dream is more confident, accomplished and capable than I.

jun 07 skiing up a trail

I was skiing up a trail that borders a roadway. I had parked my car at one place and the person with me had parked at the end of the trail. We got to the top and there was some problem – it was too late, the weather was turning bad….something. I had to take my clothes and wring them out. They were sopping wet. I had brown long johns and a purple jersey and a yellow jacket and a helmet. I was going to put them back on and just go really fast so I wouldn’t get cold. There was someone watching me do this, not understanding what I was doing. It was decided that I would use someone else’s gear, but I wanted my own helmet because it fit really, really well. There was a question about whether I should also borrow that person’s underwear. It was embarrassing to discuss it, so I just took the underwear off the hook, and turned to go somewhere to change.

The observer thought it will take a whole day, but I explain that I parked half way down, and that this trip really only takes two hours. It was getting late. We were on our way, and I realized that we’d have to stay overnight, and that we had sleeping bags but no tent. The issue of calling (for help?) came up, but I said I’d left my cell phone in the car because I didn’t think I’d need it on the trail. I pictured my car, where the cell phone was, and the car was an interesting mauve shade. As we came alongside the roadway Allie took off after a deer and I didn’t call her off because I thought she’d only chase it a short while, but she kept chasing it really fast, crossing the road several times, and I was very worried that she’d be hit by a car. I called to her and was frightened and upset.

This part of the dream was not in black and white, but the snow was white, Allie is black and white, the deer was black, the road was black.

Another big white pickup

I was on a date with a big guy in a big white pickup. We pulled up in front of a big house which had a water main break in front of it and water was pouring out over the front lawn. I said ‘hey, its a gusher at a starter-castle’! We had been driving around looking at various things, and the guy was disappointed that whatever he was aiming to do wasn’t working out, so he kept saying that we should just start drinking.

I had a cold Fosters with me, so after trying to deflect him a few times I just gave in and opened it. He started driving around the circular driveway toward the house, like we were sight-seeing, and the drive became very narrow, and there was no where to turn around, so we wound up in the back carpark, which was closed off by a security gate and a roll-up garage door, which were both closed. Some kids came down the stairs, and I got out and asked them if the doors could be opened, and one of the kids helped me open the doors.

The guy pulled his pickup forward and it became clear that it was too tall for the door. He started working on taking the roll-bars that were bolted over the bed of the pick up, covered-wagon-style, and I moved boxes of stuff out of the way. Two teen-aged women were there, the daughters of the house-owner. It turns out that I knew the house-owner somehow, maybe I’d done a landscape job for him. The girls were upset with me, badgering me about my relationship with their dad. They kept saying ‘but he’s MY dad’, and I pacified them, letting them know I had no special relationship with him. I said, ‘ you know, parents have a right to their own lives even though they’re parents. Even husbands and wives have their own lives outside their marriage.’

The girls were mollified by this. The guy finally pulled the truck out, and it just scraped the overhead door a bit, pulling the bolts out of some of the lower panels. The girls again got demanding, this time about the damaged door. I said ‘ok, ok, we’ll come back and replace that panel. We tighten the remaining bolts to make the door as sound as possible.