I’ve been having strange dreams lately. Lots of random situations and locations with people I haven’t thought about for years. Also the cast of dream characters are an odd mix. Ages and genders that might all gather together at a funeral or a wedding, but wouldn’t ordinarily be in each others company.
I was mentioning the dreams to a friend of mine, and she brought up the belief some people have that if you dream about someone, then that means that person was thinking about you. I’ve heard this idea before and I always react as if it’s nonsense because I see a dreamloop as the end result.
An inescapable loop.
Because if someone is thinking about you, and then they show up in one of your dreams, then that means you’re now thinking about them. Therefore you should show up in their dreams, and so now you’re trapped in a closed loop that only ends when one of the dreamers in question dies.
Even then you’re not necessarily free of the dreamloop, because the same people that think the loop exists for the living, also lean toward believing a dead person showing up in your dream is a legitimate contact from another realm of existence.
Which is kind of creepy.
Unless the unalive can traverse the fourth dimension. If that were the case then your dead relatives could have a look into the future and provide you with stock tips and airplane crash warnings. But there are some problems with that scenario. First of all, the warnings would alter the future and create a different timeline for you, and by extension everyone who exists at the same time as you. Also, if everyone’s dead relatives were providing insight into the future then I’m thinking things would get complicated.
At a minimum, there would be a lot of ties in hockey pools.
While I was contemplating dreaming I kept getting stuck on the fact that we need to be asleep in order to dream. And that led me to wondering why we need to sleep at all, which further led me to having to google fish, sharks and dolphins. Before the google clarification I didn’t have a problem with sleeping fish because they can breathe underwater. I was a little curious about how and where, mostly from a safety perspective because I was pretty sure there isn’t a set sleeping time for all fish. But I also wondered if fish have eyelids. Google informed me that eyelids are a no and that they leave a part of their brain on to watch for sharks. No one mentioned if fish dream.
Dolphins and whales are another matter altogether. They need air, and so they have the ability to keep swimming and surface for o2, because they emulate the fish and keep a portion of their brain in alert mode while the other parts sleep. Also, they pair up and sleep in shifts so someone is watching for Orcas. I didn’t see any data for dreams, but they’re clever fuckers, and so I’m putting my money on an affirmative for dolphin dreams.
It would seem that if we eliminated sleep then dreams would also disappear, and so I was off to google again to try and grasp why the hell we need to sleep at all. I could understand it if we needed to recharge our batteries, and sleep provided that power like sunlight does for solar panels. But we get our fuel from food, and so it would seem that if we’re well fed and hydrated that there wouldn’t be any need for sleep. But that’s not how it works and it’s kind of fucked up. In fact, once we power up with a tray of lasagna, then instead of feeling energetic we have an opposite reaction and feel like passing out for an hour.
Or two.
It ‘s a good thing our cars don’t follow the same path where you fill your tank and the car doesn’t feel like doing fuck all for anywhere from one to eight hours.
But as I said, I googled my questions and Google delivered.
Sleep allows us to purge toxins. I don’t know why we can’t purge and stay awake, but apparently the process works better when we’re sleeping. Sleep also allows us to register and organize memories. Again, I don’t understand why we can’t do that shit when we’re conscious, and I’m guessing that the kind of dreams we have are directly related to the memories we’re organizing and our methodology for that organization. Sleep allows us to direct energy efficiently toward important shit like growing and healing. I kind of get that concept. Stop moving around and that lasagna can be used to add a couple inches or fix the snapped clavicle.
And finally to discard the scientific terms in favor of a simpler explanation. No sleep means we become bitches. Lots of no sleep and we become hallucinating psychotic bitches, and that’s not very conducive for ours or our companions survival.
But the most compelling reason that I found for necessity of sleep is related to survival. The planet rotates and so we have no choice except to deal with light and dark. The evolutionary path we selected made us day denizens. Some creatures chose the night, and their sensory apparatus evolved to function in the dark. We chose daylight and in time we came up with fire, torches, flashlights and night vision goggles to help us deal with the night.
So eventually we developed a rhythm that enhanced the survival of our species. This circadian pattern released sleep hormones when it got dark and so we got sleepy. This served one primary purpose, that being we were well rested when the lighting was best for killing shit.
That sort of explains sleeping I guess, but I still maintain that sleep isn’t the optimal time to arrange your thoughts and memories. I can’t help but feel that being alert and conscious would be a much better choice when you’re trying to make sense of the day you’ve just completed, or when you’re trying to decide what folder to stash the experiences from that same day.
Because if dream content is a reflection of our filing system, then we’re undoubtably going to deal with both retrieval and comprehension issues. Which seems sub-optimal. In fact, if a persons waking thought patterns behaved the same as their sleeping thought patterns, I’m certain that there would be an institution in their future. But for roughly eight hours of every day it’s a perfectly acceptable way to behave.
I’ll try to be a little more precise in what I’m trying to say. If dreams are an indicator of how we process experiences and file memory,. then it’s fucked up that when we’re awake that we don’t know what the dreams mean. A filing and assessment function shouldn’t be interpretative where there’s a debate over the symbolism of what our brains are trying to tell us.
So I guess what I’m saying is that maybe dreams are more of a recycle bin than a filing system. Maybe dreams are composed of all the junk we’re discarding as no longer relevant to our current state of mind. This makes more sense to me, and to test the hypothesis I had a look at our recycle bin and history folder. What I saw was Amazon searches followed by sciatica treatment and queries about fish eyelids.
Stuff that dreams are made of.