PeniG
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2003
- Messages
- 2,434
I had one of those "well, yeah" moments this morning on the topic of why precognitive dreams are so often about trivial things, telepathic dreams don't convey useful information, etc. (Where's the thread with the story of the guy who shared a dream about being killed? That was the trigger for this thought.)
I'll have to set this up by explaining a neurological theory of dreaming which I find more or less convincing. Under this hypothesis, what happens when we dream is that the brain is in the process of housekeeping - making new connections, weakening old ones, testing synapses, reinforcing connections needed in order to learn new facts or tasks, etc. In the course of doing this, the various areas of the brain are subjected to stimulation in a chaotic (I hesitate to say random) fashion, much as a neurological patient would be. Dreams are the result of this process, as we attempt to make sense of these chaotic stimulations and the sensory data they present. Urgent real-life sensory data like a full bladder or pain, or the sensory leakage that occurs during the process of waking, can also be incorporated into dreams, distorted by the contingency with the chaotic images - this is why so many of my dreams involve a frantic search for an acceptable restroom and end with getting up in the middle of the night.
Now, consider - if (I admit this is a big if) the peculiar abilities known collectively as psi are normal brain functions, then they must be stimulated in the same way as other brain functions in the course of nightly maintenance. The imagery generated would be as random, fragmentary, and nonsensical as for any other brain function, and would be incorporated into dreams in the same manner. Sometimes, real sensory input from the future, another brain, or whatever would also be incorporated into the dream, but since it's only a test run, the odds of getting anything useful in this way, or remembering it if you do, aren't very high - you're a lot more likely to get mundane test data cheek-by-jowl with a random review of motor skills and the color blue.
This is one of those nifty little untestable theories, alas, and only works if two unproven conditions - one a reasonable hypothesis currently working well enough for many practical neurology purposes, the other a very tentative hypothesis which all tests have failed to demonstrate - happen to be true, but I thought if it couldn't get a sympathetic hearing here, it couldn't anywhere, so there it is, for what it's worth.
I'll have to set this up by explaining a neurological theory of dreaming which I find more or less convincing. Under this hypothesis, what happens when we dream is that the brain is in the process of housekeeping - making new connections, weakening old ones, testing synapses, reinforcing connections needed in order to learn new facts or tasks, etc. In the course of doing this, the various areas of the brain are subjected to stimulation in a chaotic (I hesitate to say random) fashion, much as a neurological patient would be. Dreams are the result of this process, as we attempt to make sense of these chaotic stimulations and the sensory data they present. Urgent real-life sensory data like a full bladder or pain, or the sensory leakage that occurs during the process of waking, can also be incorporated into dreams, distorted by the contingency with the chaotic images - this is why so many of my dreams involve a frantic search for an acceptable restroom and end with getting up in the middle of the night.
Now, consider - if (I admit this is a big if) the peculiar abilities known collectively as psi are normal brain functions, then they must be stimulated in the same way as other brain functions in the course of nightly maintenance. The imagery generated would be as random, fragmentary, and nonsensical as for any other brain function, and would be incorporated into dreams in the same manner. Sometimes, real sensory input from the future, another brain, or whatever would also be incorporated into the dream, but since it's only a test run, the odds of getting anything useful in this way, or remembering it if you do, aren't very high - you're a lot more likely to get mundane test data cheek-by-jowl with a random review of motor skills and the color blue.
This is one of those nifty little untestable theories, alas, and only works if two unproven conditions - one a reasonable hypothesis currently working well enough for many practical neurology purposes, the other a very tentative hypothesis which all tests have failed to demonstrate - happen to be true, but I thought if it couldn't get a sympathetic hearing here, it couldn't anywhere, so there it is, for what it's worth.