Some Secret Physics Laws In our Dreams
Image Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1061146
In this beautiful world everyone would dream. DREAMS are
difficult to get a handle on for most of us. We project through them like
blunt-nosed missiles, responding to the unfolding action automatically, never
questioning the larger often-impossible context, however many iridescent
blimp-sized taquerias (to quote a recent example) are floating through the
scenery. The neurobiology shows an under-activated prefrontal cortex; certain
high-level decision making capacities are offline. We are in a kind of trance.
The fact that our short-term memories seem also to be disengaged doesn’t help.
Most of us carry only fragments of our experiences with us back to waking, and
these fade quickly in the bright light of daytime concerns. (see some interesting facts of Dreams)
It is possible, however, to change you relationship to
dreaming, as everyone who has seen Inception now knows. It’s called lucid
dreaming. Your slumbering frontal lobe “wakes up” inside the dream itself, and
– blinking, slightly stunned, patting your chest in disbelief like a cartoon
character – you set off to explore. Reason, memory, intentionality are all
intact. It is difficult to communicate how shocking and disorienting a real
lucid dream is to those who have never had the full experience. This is not a
bit of dissociated self-consciousness directed towards some washed-out dream
fragment. It is your waking self and body moving through a sensorial-rich
wraparound world every bit as real as the daytime one. You can feel the air in
your lungs, the grit on the sidewalk. You cannot believe this is an actual
existential option of 21st century life. Why don’t we learn about this in
school? It’s as though there is a huge twin Earth floating next to the moon
that no one can see. A blind spot the size of reality.
The story of how lucid dreaming was scientifically
validated is a fascinating one (see here, here and here) [links]. What I’d like
to talk about here are the apparent laws of physics in the dream world, laws of
physics that are also, weirdly, psychological laws. It is not the case that anything
goes in dreams; as with a video game or an operating system (or, for that
matter, waking reality), there exist certain fundamental constraints that seem
to be true for everyone. In the case of dreaming, both expectations and a lack
of stable sensory input play a role in shaping the action. If the dreamer is
lucid, these constraints are subject to empirical investigation. I’ll say this
another way: You can conduct experiments.
This is science in another mode, something psychologist
and altered-states pioneer Charles Tart called, in a classic 1972 Science
paper, “state-specific science.” Tart argued that science needn’t be
specialized for use in waking reality alone; in fact, the basic principles of
good observation, well-trained investigators and evidence-based theory can be
applied any place the mind is clear – including inside a lucid dream. This
means that a scientifically-minded investigator can form a hypothesis in
waking, fall asleep, become lucid, and then – in rainbow-colored lab coat and
marvelous wind-swept Vidal Sassoon hairdo – test her hypothesis in the dream
world itself, documenting the results on her return to waking.
One of the few researchers who actually practices
state-specific science is the psychologist Stephen LaBerge, the man who proved
the existence of lucid dreaming to the scientific world. Among his experiments
he has looked at how time passes in a dream, as well as how specific dream
movements corresponds to areas of activation in the motor cortex. Many of the
following laws are inspired by his experiments and observations.
THE
LAW OF MECHANICAL DISORDER
As depicted in Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life,
mechanical devices – clocks, lights, gearshifts, particle-beam accelerators –
don’t work properly in the dream world. It sounds random and improbable, but
this actually turns out to be the case when you try it yourself. Perhaps it has
something to do with the evolution of the mind: no motors or delicate moving
parts on the savannah.
THE
LAW OF TEXTUAL DISORDER
Many dream workers have commented on the relative
infrequency of reading, writing, and arithmetic in the dream world. When writing
does appear, it’s often scrambled and unreadable, or it morphs between
readings. LaBerge’s explanation for this is that two different brain systems
are operating when you look at writing: a part that deals with appearances, and
a separate part that deals with meaning. The implied meaning may stay the same,
but, as we’ll see below, in dreams, appearances are never static.
THE
LAW OF NARRATIVE MOMENTUM
If you linger for too long in any one place, the dream
world begins to fray and you will wake. Dreams are in a constant state of flux;
the best strategy for riding them seems to be to keep moving. I have also had
the bizarre experience of moving somewhere so quickly that I arrived in an
entirely blank space, as though the world had not yet loaded up. It felt like
standing at the edge of creation.
THE
LAW OF DELAYED CAUSE AND EFFECT
Astute observers will notice a delay in dreams.
Simultaneous events are impossible for the very good reason that they’re not
happening in the physical world; they are happening in a model of the world
where our brain creates the continuity.
THE
LAW OF SELF-FULFILLING EXPECTATIONS
In dreams, what you expect to happen often will happen,
and first impressions often become the dream “reality.” This is because our
minds are not neutral, and our learned and hardwired assumptions about the
world run free in our dreams like escaped felons. This, says LaBerge, is true
even of the basic operational laws of the dream world, which is why dreams are
usually equipped with gravity, space, time, and air. Of course, this doesn’t
explain why light switches don’t work even though we expect that they will.
Perhaps an older logic cannot be overruled.
THE
LAW OF EXTREMA
Whatever you notice in dreams seems to become more
exaggerated. Steep stairs get steeper, a trickle becomes a stream becomes a
flood. The writer Bucky McMahon experienced this law when he tried to pass
through a dream wall:
The wall is an oddly mottled collard-colored green and
sickly organic in appearance. My arm, as I extend it toward the wall, doesn’t
look so good either—all chitinous and glimmering, reddened and singed. Numerous
grub-like fingers sprout from my fist, more the longer and more closely I look.
LeBerge believes this phenomenon reveals one of the
functions of consciousness: “When we attend to some element in the memory
array, that element then becomes more activated.” In lucid dreaming there are
no external constraints on vividness, so the features keep getting enhanced in
a kind of feedback loop. So you’re interacting with a tree in the dream, and
your brain keeps buzzing “tree” in the memory array, and the longer you look
the more your internal ideas and associations about trees start to pile up, and
the tree gets huge and grotesque and unstable. You then, obviously, try to have
sex with the tree.
These represent just a few laws – no doubt there are
others to discover. Find out for yourself. Lucid dreaming is not that difficult
to learn, [link] although for most it is difficult to sustain. One day this
landscape may be filled with scientists, inspecting the walls with their dream
magnifying glasses and comparing cross-reality protocols. Until then, the whole
endeavor is thrillingly DIY.
Post a Comment