[All bracketed text indicates deletions made by author]
Dreams are medicine, good for young and old men and beast.
Recent experiments have [demonstratedthat]
demonstrated that if an animal is
prevented from dreaming by waking it whenever rapid eye
movements and [the characteristic dream] brain-waves indicate
that the animal is dreaming, he will soon show all the symptoms
of sleeplessness, no matter how much dreamless sleep he is
allowed. He becomes irritable, anxious, disoriented. Ten days
[oe]
of dream deprivation le[gn]
ads to convulsions and death.
Exactly
the same results have been obtained with human subjects, without,
of course, carrying the experiment to a fatal conclusion.
I quote from an article that app[r]eared in the London Obser[b]ver,
by Wendy Cooper:...
"One of the most important facts to have been
established about REM sleep and dreams is that they appear to
be essential to our health and well-being-so vital, in fact, that
dreams obstinately resist el[l]imination. When 8
7 volunteeers were
prevented from dreaming for six successive nights by waking them
as soon as EEG records showed the onset of REM sleep, they had to
be roused only five times the first night but by the fifth night
it became twenty or thirty times. The longer the dreams were
kept out, they more they tried to force their way in, [A]
and
uninterrupted sleep was permitted, the subjects dreamt 30 percent
more [morethan]
than during these recovery nights. Although deprived
of REM sleep, volunteers still achieved some seven hours of
[orhtodox]
orthodox sleep, yet this did not seem to compensate, and they became anxious, tense, and irritable.
The conclusion is unavoidable:
dreaming is a biologic necessity for all warm-blooded animals.
Dreams can be seen as the prototype for artistic expression and
creative thought.
The part played by dreams in writing and
painting is well documented. Mathematicians and chemists have
found the solutions to formulae in dreams. We may, I think,
extrapolate to say [taht]
that art is an elaboration of the dream
process and far from being a superfluous luxury, is necessary
for the continuation of human life. No people so far contacted
are without some form of artistic expression. When Plato banned
poets from his republic utopia, he may have been unwittingly advocating
a program of extermination.
I quote from an article in the London Sunday Times by Peter Watson
,
entitled "
the mechanism of dreams"
:
"Michel Jouvet, Professor of Experimental Medicine, has made
a remarkable breakthrough in the study of of sleep which may
explain why it is that we dream. Jouvet has found some
interesting differences between the animals who do and do not
dream. Cold-blooded animals like fish and reptiles do not dream,
but warm-blooded animals like [animal] mammals and [brids] birds do. He also [foun]
found differences in in the amount of dreaming done by animals
at different stages of their developement. He found that animals
like calves and foals, which can fend for themselves immediately
after birth dream a lot in the womb and relatively little
after that. Humans and kittens, on the other hand, dream much
less in the womb than calves or foals, and are unable to fend for
themselves at birth.
"Sleep, we know, rests our thinking [bairn]
brain and [rechargesthe]
recharges the batteries
needed for mental effort. To Jouvet it seems [taht]
that dreaming does
the same for our instinctive activities, such as walking, feeding,
agression [adn]
and so on. So, he concluded, human babies and and kittens
could not walk or feed [themselvesuntil]
themselves until their instincts had had
enough practi[v]
ce in dreams. Another [facotr] factor sorted out by Jouvet
is that during sleep the electrical activity of the brain is
exactly the same as during the waking state. Even the nerve [fibr]
fibers gove[n]rning movement behave normally, but we don't move.
Somewhere in the brain therefore there must be a structure [tht]
which inhibits the movement that would normally result from the
electrical activity.
Jouvet remembered the difference in dreaming
between warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals. In "cold-blooded"
animals, the nervous tissue is different [form]
from that of warm-blooded
animals. When injured it can regenerate [ise] itself, whereas the
neural tissue of warm-blooded animals does not. Except, that is,
[fora]
for a small piece at [theback]
the back of the brain called the pons. This
is similar to the ####brain tissue of cold-blooded animals.
Jouvet has destroyed the pons [ina]
in a few cats, and this has indeed
destroyed its inhibitory power, with "startling results." The animals
are quite normal when awake and when asleep and not dreaming.
As soon as they [art] "start" to dream, "they" [beginto]
begin to move about,
acting out their dreams chasing imaginary mice, running [fora]
from
dream dogs, lapping dream milk. Jouvet points out that their
dreams are always instinctive. Dreams in humans are more complicated
but, Jouvet believes, [noy] not any less insti[i]nctive.
This is certainly an interesting piece in the jig
sleep and dream. Here is another: John Dunne, an[d] English
mathematician and physicist, noticed that some of his dreams
referred to future events. He [worte]
wrote his dreams down for many
years, correlating the dreams with the [futrue]
future events. He [says]
said
[taht]
that anyone who writes his dreams down [overa]
over a period of time will
find that some of them are precognitive. He made a curious
discovery: In dream
s, where the future event was a [wreckn]
a wreck
, a fire, an earthquake,
the dream refered not to [theevent]
the event itself but to the
time when [thedreamer]
the dreamer learned of the event, often through a news-
paper. He is not then dreaming of the future in general, but of
[hsi]
his own future.
He describes his finds in a book entitled An
Experiment with Tie first published in 1924.
An aspect of dream[a]ng [A I] on which it is difficult to gather
data is the [instaned]
cases of [a] people who die in their sleep. What
were they dreaming at the moment of death? Some years ago I
read an[d] article in the Saturday Evening Post by Earl Stanely
Gardener entitled "The Men with the Deadly Dreams."
This fatal night-
mare is called [Bagutot has some smudge above the "a" and lightly drawn line through the "o" and neither appear to indicate a deletion] Bagutot; literally, "trying-to- get - up-########g
and- groaning."
Bangutot afflicts males in the prime of his life and
is apparently confined to Asiatics. Autopsies have cast no[t]
light on why a healthy male with a sound heart should die in his
sleep for no apparent reason. The victims often knew they were
threatened by a Bangutot. One man rigged up an[d] elaborate device
to prevent erections during sleep, but he died of Bangutot. There
is one ins### interesting story by a survivor: He was sleeping
in the same room with a friend and they were in adjacent beds.
The friend heard him groaning and struggling in his sleep and
rushed over to administer the kiss of life [adn]
and shake him awake.
The survivor reported [taht]
that a little green man was sitting on
his chest and strangling him. Now all dre[e]ams by males [exeept]
nightmares are normally accompanied by an erection. Could Bangutot
[bea] be a special form of nightmare accompanied by erection, leading
to death through acute heart failure?
Recent research on heart
failures occurring where no heart dam[e]
age is apparent [have]
has indicated
[taht]
that a major trigger for many serious and abnormal heart rhythms
is not the heart but the brain and [cnetral] central nervous system. It [wou]
would seem that a dream could triggera fatal heart attack.
Now to discuss the material cited in the light of my own
experience;
I cannot agree with Jouvet's theory that dreams serve a
restorative function with regard to what he calls instinctive
activities like walking, feeding, aggression. As Korzybski
points out in Science and Sanity
, all activities are both
cerebral and instinctive, representing the reactions of the
organism as a whole in relation to its [c]
environement. You may
have an "instinctive" [p] or preferential reason [fro]
for walking
into the kitchen, but your cerebral cortex [enablesyou]
enables you to
perform this action without bumping into obstacles, tells you
what is in the ice box
, how to open the door, where the plates are, etc.
[ETC]. [His]
Jouvet's discover[y]
ies that cold-blooded animals do not dream, and
that the pons or reptile brain inhibits movement in sleep, [is]
are
much more interesting than his theoretical formulations.
Unfortunately he does not tell us whether the cats who were
acting out their dreams were able to avoid obstacles in the
room, whether they would actually lap milk in sleep if it were
provided, whether they would [chasea]
chase a real mouse or [r] run from a real dog.
I have kept dream diaries for twenty years and have encountered
a number [oe]
of instances where dreams turned out to be precognitive
of some future happening. Often the future happening turns out
to be seemingly unimportant. Example: In a dream, I saw a ward-
robe float by. Next day in the Cafe de France, Tangier
, I looked
up from my coffee [tosee]
to see the wardrobe floating by; [S]
some work-
man was carrying it by a leather
######### on his back. For my purposes
the princip[le]
al use of dreams is in writing, and I get a good
percentage of characters and sets directly from dreams-and
occasionally a whole short story, word[s] for word.
The question as to exactly why dreams are necessary is still
unanswered. There is no way to tell, except by inference, what
an animal is dreaming about, but we can surmise that they are
dreaming about incidents that they are liable to encounter or
have encountered in their waking life. The dreams of cats are
cat dreams; the dreams of dogs are dog dreams. The animal is
defined by his dreams as he is by his waking activities. I
suggest that dreams are life; and that you are what you dream.
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