TUNE INN TOKIO!
HONORARY DOCTORATE FROM 'SC
DR. SLEEP (The Sleep Scientist)
The Hypotheses That Some Of These Scholars (Below) Give Concerning DREAMING Are WRONG. As A Matter Of Fact, The Only One Whose Guess Is Somewhat Accurate Is The Terese Hammond Woman. Now, Read The Passage Below Regarding The Content Of DREAMS To Get A Better Idea Of Why We DREAM What We DREAM!
YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINES PIMP!
The Hypotheses That Some Of These Scholars (Below) Give Concerning DREAMING Are WRONG. As A Matter Of Fact, The Only One Whose Guess Is Somewhat Accurate Is The Terese Hammond Woman. Now, Read The Passage Below Regarding The Content Of DREAMS To Get A Better Idea Of Why We DREAM What We DREAM!
YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINES PIMP!
DREAM TIME
So
sleep is good, but sleep how? In what environment? It turns out that
the question of how is as relevant as how much. Much of the research has
illuminated the complexity of sleep. We sleep in discrete stages, each
marked by clear and distinctive patterns of brain activity. Further,
some of these stages correlate with specific benefits. This
means that a particular stage is necessary for learning or for memory
consolidation, for instance, and if you disrupt sleep in ways that
deprive a person of that specific stage, the benefits linked to that
stage do not accrue, even if the total sleep is at the golden average of
eight and a half hours per night. This shows that there is a quality issue at work here, and this is where we are left in the dark. We
really don't know what normal sleep is, but we have some strong signals
that the way we do it, a single, solitary, silent stretch, eleven until
seven thirty, entombed in retreat from all others, is downright
freakish behavior in terms of the human condition and human evolution. Might this habit of ours cause troubles? Maybe our dreams can tell us something about this.
At least when considered in one aspect, sleep is not a peaceful proposition. We dream about bad things. And the research on this matter is interesting: acts
of aggression and threats and violence are overrepresented on our list
of dream topics. We are more likely to dream about a thug threatening us
with violence than a sunny day in a meadow with bunnies and butterflies. For instance, one study found that acts of aggression constituted about 45 percent of the dream content of one sample of people - by far the dominant dream category. In those cases, the dreamer was directly involved in the aggression about 80 percent of the time and was more often than not the victim.
However, this burden of fright is not equally shared among all humans,
although there are some common elements between genders and among
adults. With both genders, the
attacker in a violent dream tends to be a male or group of males or an
animal, with animals in the minority, at least among modern adults.
This
analysis gets far more interesting in the case of children, for whom
the scary element tends to be overrepresented as animals. Further, the
animal content of younger people's dreams tends to be skewed to the
violent and threatening. Dogs, horses, and cats are underrepresented,
while snakes, spiders, gorillas, lions, tigers, and bears make far more
frequent appearances. More telling still is there is an age gradation to both of these factors. That is, dreams
of situations involving threats from animals are more common among the
very youngest children and taper gradually as children move toward
adulthood. In
effect, children - and this is true across cultures - slowly adjust
their dream content to the realities of their world. It seems as if they
are born afraid of attacks from aggressive animals and gradually
substitute bad guys with sticks and guns for lions. But still, threatening situations are overrepresented.
Lions, Tigers, Niggers, And Bears. Oh, My!
That
this is true, even of children who have never seen a wild animal and
have no reason to fear an attack, suggests something quite innate, a
hardwired memory of conditions more realistic in evolutionary time, when
children and adults both had every reason to fear animal attacks.
This can seem a bit preposterous to the modern, rational mind, but
probably only because we are talking about dreams. There is plenty of
nonsense, superstition, and speculation involved in the topic of dreams
through the years, and so there's every reason to be suspicious.
Nonetheless, there is a parallel and well-established phenomenon among
the waking, and not among humans but among other primates as well. Take
a city-bred, born-and-raised denizen of concrete for his first walk
through the desert, and then surreptitiously toss a live snake in his
path. The reaction will be quick and predictable, regardless of whether
your subject has ever seen a snake befoe! Same is true of chimps raised in cages. We have instincts, animal instincts, and this is demonstrable.
Yet
even more interesting is the maintenance and sharpening of these very
instincts among people living where the instincts come in handy, and
this is borne out in the dreaming research as well. The closest we can
possibly come to knowing about how our ancestors dreamed is through
studies of contemporary hunters and gatherers, and it turns out that
this has been done at least twice: once with aboriginals in Australia
and once with the Mehinaku Indians of central Brazil, before
there had been significant contact with the outside world. The latter
case proved especially informative because these people actually valued
dreams, so they were careful to note content and often talked about
dreams with one another. In
both Brazil and Australia, animals and aggression were overrepresented
in dream content. In both countries, people dreamed about animals far
more often than similar samples of civilized humans did, indicating that
the decline of animals in dreams as we age is indeed an adjustment to
our civilized, tamed world. We enter the world programmed to dream of
the wild, but civilization takes those dreams away.
But just as important, the gender differences are alike among both hunter-gatherers and the civilized. In both cases, aggression and animals loom larger in the dreams of men.
Antti
Revonso, who compiled and analyzed this large body of research in an
important paper, concludes that this is really about something other
than fear and trauma. Rather, it is far more in line with the main body
of research on sleep in general. In his view,
sleep is not a retreat to helplessness, but rather a functioning part
of our learning process when the brain works through problems and
devises solutions. Humans evolved among predators. Our formative years
were not spent at the top of the food chain, a factor we think is too
often glossed over in formulating the just-so stories about human
evolution. Modern humans have forgotten what it is like to be meat, and
being prey must have entailed terrors beyond imagination, particularly
for the young and helpless and for the people who cared about them most.
We
can begin to imagine this state of being through extrapolation,
especially those of us who have seen lions or grizzly bears or Siberian
tigers in the wild (all, in fact, still posing a significant threat to
some humans). And yet these
animals were far more numerous during humanity's history than they are
now, and they were joined or preceded by even more formidable predators,
now extinct. For instance, modern-day !Kung people fall prey more often
to leopards than to lions, but ancestor leopards of that place were in
fact much larger, giant leopards, with every bit the speed and prowess
of the more compact variety that still kills people. Even North American
native people encountered saber-toothed tigers and short-faced bears,
which were larger and faster than modern grizzly bears.
In
such an environment, skills for dealing with predators would have been
highly adaptive, to say the least, and that is exactly what determined
the content of our dreams. Revonsuo believes that dreams served as a
rehearsal of challenging events, to allow our brains to work at night on
the reactions and skills necessary to deal with our most important
threats. He concludes:
Any behavioral advantage in dealing with highly dangerous events would have increased the probability of reproductive success. A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations would have been valuable for the development and maintenance of threat-avoidance skills. Empirical evidence from normative dream content, children's dreams, recurrent dreams, nightmares, post-traumatic dreams, and the dreams of hunter-gatherers indicates that our dream-production mechanisms are in fact specialized in the simulation of threatening events, and thus provides support to the threat simulation hypothesis of the function of dreaming.
...
Carol Worthman, meanwhile, believes that the presence of predators also formed our habits of sleeping, which steers us in another direction, toward the flip side of fear. If we look closely, we can find ample evidence that sleep is not retreat but an act of social engagement, and this, too, can be derived from wondering where the lions are.
Worthman is an anthropologist and probably the only one in captivity who specializes in sleep...
...
It turns out that the anthropological perspective does nothing to contradict Stickgold's conclusions from studies of modern-day sleepers, but it does provide a different emphasis, especially on the prescription. There is nothing in the cross-cultural studies that disagrees with the idea of the need for a baseline of sleep of about eight hours out of every twenty-four, but Worthman says her real concern is with quality, not quantity. For instance, she says people who complain about insomnia - the tortuous variety that has one lying in bed awake, tossing and turning through the night - often sleep far more than they report, but they get only low-quality sleep. They believe they are awake - and, more to the point, the sleep they do get doesn't do them a lot of good.
"The question is how do you get good sleep, and that draws attention to context, and that's where the evolutionary context can be helpful," Worthman says.
What we know about evolutionary context is extrapolation from what we know from cross-cultural sleeping habits. But nonetheless, the studies contain some clear evidence that we are missing something important about context, at least we who practice what Worthman calls the "lie down and die" model of sleep: to bed at ten, lights out, silence, set the alarm, and await resurrection. The simple fact is, across the world and across time as far as we know, few cultures sleep this way.
"In virtually all societies there is a sense of the social organization of sleep, and in many, many societies the provision of an appropriate sleep context is viewed as extremely powerful," she says.
And what does an appropriate context look like? To begin with, it includes other people. Few other cultures view sleep as a retreat, even a private act. Just the opposite.
Back to the lions for a moment, to see where that comes from. Thomas described a scene as much about being awake as it was about being asleep, which makes perfect sense if you happen to be a !Kung sleeping outside among lions, and through most of evolutionary time, humans did indeed sleep outdoors among predators. But there is actually some math at the root of this casual observation, calculations that Worthman has done. This is based on well-known and established variations in sleep patterns that remain fixed in modern humans, according to age. Babies can be and often are awake at seemingly random periods around the clock, but once they are a bit older, they lock onto a circadian rhythm much like that of adults. Adolescents, however, have a rhythm of their own, worldwide and across cultures: they go to bed late and get up late, compared with adults. Older people, meanwhile, are often awake longer and for periods in the night. This age segregation is consistent across cultures but begins to make sense when one superimposes those various patterns on one another. Worthman says that doing so allows a calculation that, given a band size of about thirty-five people with usual age distributions, yields a group pattern in which at least one person is awake at any given time.
Yet there is more to this than simply being awake. Many cultures, for instance, cultivate a form of light sleep, a watchful doze that is instantly reversible. In the studies of modern sleepers, this corresponds with a stage of sleep that confers a distinct set of benefits. Everyone performs this sort of light sleep without realizing it, but each of us also needs periods of very deep sleep, a stage vital to brain benefits and at the same time deeply threatening to people who live among lions. Researchers generally divide sleep into two categories by eye movement: rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep and non-REM sleep. The latter category has four distinct stages. Both REM sleep and the deepest stage of non-REM sleep are marked by a near complete lack of muscle tone and awareness; it's like being in a coma, helpless against threats like predators.
In REM sleep, debilitation is nearly complete. Two pathways of brain chemistry work together to induce paralysis in all muscles but the eyes. Researchers don't know the function of this paralysis but speculate that it prevents injury caused by muscles acting out our dreams, which also mostly occur in the REM state. People with disorders that prevent this paralysis often suffer such injuries.
Worthman says these stages, more than even the threat of lions, are why the social context of sleep is vitally important. We are not checked out or mentally absent during sleep, at least not all the time. On the contrary, as the research has shown, our brains are doing some of their heaviest lifting during sleep. But doing that requires modulation, a shifting of gears from one stage of sleep to another, which in turn requires some attention to context, reading of the signals that tell us when it is safe to check out and become helpless against external threats. In order to sleep properly, we need to pay attention to what is going on around us, using that awareness to guide us through the necessary stages of sleep. Isolating ourselves in soundproof rooms may be about the worst way there is to go about this - but, more to the point, so is isolating ourselves from other people.
This conclusion is not speculation. Worthman carried out one research project in Egypt, which gave her access to subjects who have been settled in cities for millennia. The choice was deliberate: she wanted to look at the persistence of hunter-gatherer sleep patterns, despite civilization. Egyptians, in both city and countryside, sleep the way most of the world does, which is to say together - what she calls "consolidated sleeping." Typically, whole extended families sleep in great rooms, with almost no isolation. There are exceptions, though, and those proved to be the most telling. Egyptians and others typically segregate post-pubescent girls from boys. Not always. Sometimes there is an aunt or grandmother and the teenage girl bunks with her. But some end up sleeping alone, and it was those people, both guys and girls, who had the insomnia and other forms of dysregulation. The people who slept alone had the emotional problems.
This same pattern has emerged in a variety of studies to the point that we begin to understand why social sleeping seems to be a nearly universal characteristic of cultures, as are the staggered patterns of wakefulness of the group. While we are sleeping, we continue to monitor our surroundings for cues of safety: relaxed conversation, relaxed movement of others, popping fire. Those cues, subtle sounds signaling safety, tell us we can retreat to our deepest sleep.
Many cultures are, in fact, conscious of all of this and the importance of these arrangements, and no place is the importance more pronounced than in the case of infants. (We need not necessarily bring lions into the picture to underscore this, although predators like hyenas and leopards are certainly preferential to the young of our species, undoubtedly one of the reasons infant mortality was high among our ancestors. Thomas, for instance, records one example of great injury to a toddler who stumbled into a campfire while others were sleeping, and this was probably a common occurrence through time.) One of the biggest reasons for modulated sleep is to protect infants.
But the research suggests that this works in both directions - that is, infants' bodies are instinctively aware of their vulnerability and so do things like dream about frightening animals. They are even more dependent than adults on signals of safety. All of this helps explain what Worthman characterizes as an almost universal perplexed response among most other cultures upon hearing of the Western practice of making babies sleep alone.
"They think of this as child abuse. They literally do," she says.
The evolutionary context of sleep, however, extends well beyond the people around us, and this may begin to suggest some antidotes to our present isolation, some practical steps one might take to reintroduce evolutionary context to our rest. Anthropological studies have shown that almost all cultures pay a great deal of attention to the sound of a fire, and not just as a threat to babies. Changes in crackle and pop might, for instance, signal that a fire is dying and trigger a new level of alert sleeping, just as the sounds of a fire settling into a sustained glow might signal that it's okay to sleep deeply. This doesn't mean you need to sleep next to a fire (although it's nice if you can). But you can look for similar patterns of sound that may help, even recordings.
Likewise with animals. Herders in particular sleep with such sounds as cud chewing and gentle bovine breathing, signals from sentinel animals of peace that transpires when no predators are around. Our favorite sentinels through evolutionary time were once predators: wolves slowly tamed by food to be dogs. Any suburban dweller can attest how the sound of an incessantly barking dog can be profoundly disturbing to sleep, more than decibels and persistence alone can account for. Yet we forget how the reverse is certainly true: that many of us tune our degree of peace and relaxation to the rhythms of a snoring dog. If something went wrong, the dog would say so.
All of this may be enough to explain the finding of epidemiology that people who are married and people who have pets live longer. It may be because they sleep better.
Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind From the Afflictions of Civilization. Ratey, Peyton Manning, p. 134-145.
BLACK LIGHT
