SLEEP, DREAMS AND REALITY : PART 2

DIFFERENT TYPES OF COMMON DREAMS

 

 According to me our dreams fall in one of the following  major categories:

1.      Dreams in which events and people actually happened but differently than in our dreams.

2.      Dreams involving people and events which never happened.

3.      Dreams involving people and events which never could have happened

                           The first and second category dreams are what I call as wishful dreams. In these dreams you “see” what you thought ought to have happened but did not happen. For example you dream that a relationship worked, where as in reality it failed, and if you were rejected by a person, you dream that it is you who rejected or if you were fired from a job, you dream that you voluntarily left the job. These dreams in my opinion serve as a safety valve for all the pent up emotions affecting your waking state. Your mind is trying to protect you or soften the blow.

But one characteristic of many dreams is that we often see people or events that actually never could have happened in real life. For example you dream of people from one place and time sometimes meeting people from another place and time. Or you dream of strange places or strange creatures. I do not know the logic behind these dreams if at all they are logical. Perhaps it is the brain’s way of disposing of random thoughts much like GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out) of computers. Or perhaps we have not yet perfected the way the subconscious is communicating with us even though many psychoanalysts specialize in the interpretation of dreams.

 So the reality in dreams is related yet distinct from waking state. It is clear that most of the times your subconscious is trying to convey some message to you in dreams. What those messages are, what are their meanings is interpreted by some psychoanalysts. We should ourselves try to interpret these messages because there is really no one closer to you than your subconscious since your success insures its success as well.

 

DREAMS AND PREMONITION

 

Some people claim to have premonitory dreams. They claim that in some dream or dreams they saw an upcoming event. Mostly it is a warning of an upcoming disaster affecting someone close to them, but occasionally about a disaster affecting many lives. I do not think that these stand scientific scrutiny, but if there is any validity at all, it represents a different form of reality.

This reminds me the story of the King and one of his guards. One day as the King was getting ready for a voyage across the sea in his ship, one of the guards who was on the night duty guarding the entrance to his kingdom came to see him in earnest. On meeting the King, the guard told him to postpone his journey. When the King asked for the reason, the guard told him that previous night he dreamt that the ship carrying the king met an accident and sunk. Seeing his sincerity the King postponed the journey for a day. Later they had reports that there was a big storm on the route the King’s ship would have taken that day and many ships sunk. The King called the guard, thanked him, gave him a big reward and told him that he was fired. Can you guess why?

There is whole new category of dreams within a dream where you dream that you are having a dream. This is analogous to an object placed in between two mirrors facing each other. This generates mirror image of mirror image in both mirrors ad infinitum. So theoretically you could have dream within a dream within a dream and so on. I do not know what to make of it from the reality point of view and so far as I know there has not been any research on this.

 

SLEEP, DREAMS AND REALITY : PART 1

 

ABOUT ONE-THIRD OF OUR LIFE SPENT HERE

 

We spend about one-third of our life in sleep. It is vital that we get good sleep or else evolution would not have retained this aspect of our life. In fact the modern day stresses if not caused by, then at least are augmented by lack of good quality and quantity of sleep. Before the invention of electricity, our ancestors had to sleep between sunset and sunrise and were not confronted with many of the lifestyle diseases facing us like blood pressure, diabetes, depression etc.. But now when light is available 24X7, we work round the clock ignoring this very important aspect. Ideally an adult should get about 8 hours of sleep everyday. It seems that that much sleep is necessary for our brain to have a period of low activity and refresh itself for proper functioning for the next day’s activities. It is a different matter that under some pretext we make do with considerable less sleep and end up feeling sleepy, tired and stressed the next day. I believe that the Japanese recommend their workers to take a power nap during the day. No wonder that the Japanese are so efficient.

In the sleep we have a period called Rapid eye Movement or REM in which most of our dreams occur. I had covered the area of dreams and reality earlier (see post dated Nov.4, 2008), but it was mainly to illustrate that even in dreams we are performing karma and have to accept its fruits, good or bad. But what about reality in sleep and dreams? It is well documented now that our brain and subconscious mind are active while we sleep and dream and are aware of surroundings at least partially. Thus while dreaming if we hear an alarm or a doorbell ringing, our subconscious somehow incorporates that sound in whatever dream we are having.

Also it is theorized that in the period just before falling asleep or just before fully waking up, we experience very realistic experiences. For example we may experience the presence of another person just standing there or trying to communicate with us. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have attributed these experiences to people claiming to see ghosts or alien abduction. In addition to the experience being realistic, complete with sound and other effects, the person usually feels immobile, unable to speak or offer any resistance but be a helpless spectator. This further strengthens their belief in the experience being supernatural. However if they believe it to be an alien abduction, they should ask themselves as to what makes them so special for aliens to want to study them. In my opinion it is just their Ego or feeling of superiority. If aliens really wanted to study us, they would select the best in any particular field, for example top scientists, top businessmen, top athletes etc. but as far as I know none of these have reported alien abduction. In addition to this if the aliens were hostile, they would simply attack us since they have to be superior to us in order to travel intergalactic distances. If they were friendly they would just offer us their friendship. Under no circumstances I can imagine them studying average earthlings clandestinely.

I am not sure we know the reasons for these experiences but perhaps it is leftover from our evolutionary past when we lived in hostile environments surrounded by dangerous animals, where it was better to be afraid of imaginary “boogeyman” and run for life to live another day than to be complacent and fall prey. In fact as I have written earlier, we are all descendants of these nervous survivors and thus perhaps carry those genes.

 

REALITY IN DREAMS AND REALITY IN WAKING STAGE

 

What sort of reality is present in dreams? I had mentioned the Japanese monk who dreamt that he was a butterfly and then wondered whether he was a human dreaming that he was butterfly or was he a butterfly dreaming that he was a human. Logically we can not distinguish between reality in dreams and reality in waking state.. The argument that it feels real in the waking state is fallacious since in dreams also we feel everything as real. All we can do is call one as reality and the other as dream.

Generally we call our waking state as real because it is mostly logical whereas some dreams are utterly illogical as I have mentioned before and again below. For example if you have lived in different countries at different times as I have, sometimes people from one place show up in the other place in the dreams. Logically this makes absolutely no sense since those people have never been with you at the same time and place. In the dream however we do not even think of it as illogical. But just think for a moment. What if the illogical dream state is the real reality and the logical, waking state is unreal?  Even our so called logical reality has unexplainable events as we will see in the discussion on Quantum Mechanics which is full of paradoxes. 

Let us take the example of the game “Second life” since that is as close to creating an alternate reality in a virtual world as we currently can. Suppose all those Avatars with whatever attributes we give them (for example flying humans, humans with more than two hands etc.) could one day develop consciousness and think about their reality compared to our reality. To them we would be as unreal as they are to us. They would not think of anyone without the attributes mentioned above. Thus it can be said that reality depends on whose point of view  we are talking about.

There had been some suggestion that some famous scientists came up with answers to the problems they were solving while dreaming. Often example of Kekule is given where it was said that he came up the with the hexagonal structure for Benzene molecule in his dream in which he saw two snakes capturing each other’s tails. It was later proved that this was not true (that is the dream part, the structure of benzene was proved to be correct). However I believe that dreams do help us come up with solutions to many problems we are facing. This seems natural since our subconscious is thinking about the problem and free from the clutter of other activities and thoughts, it provides much clarity. That’s why when you are considering an offer or facing some problems, it is suggested that you “sleep on it” and usually in the morning you have some inkling of what your decision should be.

Many of the dreams we have are continuation of waking state, for example if you are thinking about a person or place or a situation, you usually dream of those.

More about types of dreams will be covered in the next post.

EVERYDAY REALITY: PART 2

 

HUMAN BRAIN STILL EVOLVING

 

The brain, in particular the human brain is a highly complex and efficient analytical organ but by no means is it perfect or free from errors. Perhaps it has still to climb many more evolutionary rungs and who knows what it would be capable of in a thousand or a million years from now if mankind does not self destruct or is not wiped out by natural disasters? But at the present state the brain is totally dependant on the messages brought in by the five senses. We have already seen that our senses are highly unreliable or can be easily fooled (see post dated Aug. 11, 2008). As a consequence the brain can make wrong conclusions. When two people view an object, say a table or a chair, there is no way of telling that they are seeing the exact same thing. In addition to any preconceived idea about a table, factors such as your distance from the table, the light falling on it from your perspective, your angle of vision etc are some of the factors which will affect your interpretation. Thus one person may describe it as smooth surfaced while other might describe it has rough surfaced and so on. Both might be right or both might be wrong since there is no objective measure which can determine the “table ness” of a table.

Same is true with people. Thus person B may appear as fair skinned to person A but dark skinned to person C, since there is no objective device to measure “fairness” of a person. All our observations and conclusions are subjective. The best our brains can do is making some subjective comparisons, which need not be a reality. I find it highly amusing that in a country like India, where fairness of skin is highly regarded and borders on snobbery, the same fair skinned people are treated as dark skinned by white Americans or Europeans and complain about being snobbishly treated. Funny thing is some white Americans consider themselves as too pale and get tanned by natural or artificial means, even risking the possibility of skin cancer. I guess that’s why the saying “grass is always greener on the other side”.

 

SUBJECTIVE SCALE OF OUR REALITY

 

Those who have seen movies like “Honey, I shrunk the kids”, will appreciate this fact. When humans are shrunk many times even an ant would not only appear like a giant animal like a horse or an elephant but the kids could all ride on it. Incidentally without us being shrunk to an ant’s size, ants and many insects like beetles and termites are truly “giants” compared to us humans. Many of them do Herculean tasks such as carrying a weight many times their own weight routinely whereas humans need special training to lift a weight just slightly bigger than them. Even distance covered by us with our long strides is not insurmountable for an ant for example if we cover a distance of two feet in 2 strides and a few seconds, an ant would cover the same distance in a slightly longer duration. In fact army ants are notorious for covering many miles while consuming whatever hapless creature they find.  

I had often wondered about how people drawing pictures on a grain of rice, or surgeons performing microsurgeries to attach tiny nerves or blood vessels or scientists using micro syringes or micropipettes to transform tiny cellular structures such a single nucleus which is invisible to the naked eye but visible after many times magnification, did so accurately. The key is the detection limit of our eyes which can not detect below a certain small size. If we could increase the detection level by putting the objects under high resolution microscopes such as an electron microscope then both the objects will appear quite huge to be able to manipulate. Thus the tip of the micro syringe as well as the cell and the nucleus is easily visible at a sufficiently large scale. Or the surface of the grain of rice will appear like a canvas on which pictures could be drawn. Of course one still has to master the movements of their hands since even a tiny movement will be magnified several times, but this can be practiced or mechanized with the help of a computer.

Thus in the above mentioned everyday realities no single reality is the correct or right reality. Either all of them are correct or all are wrong.

A question might be asked, what about our scientific instruments? Are they not accurate to measure quantitatively? The surprising answer is that although they are sufficient to measure most of the things in our everyday reality, at the subatomic level quantum mechanical reality takes over. This will be covered under “Quantum mechanical reality”.

EVERYDAY REALITY PART 1

REALITY AS WE KNOW IT OR “NORMAL” REALITY

 

In my opinion we call our everyday reality as “normal” only because majority of us have agreed to call it that.  Generally what we experience day to day, we call as reality. Thus animate and inanimate things in our contact are real to us and we can distinguish them from virtual reality. But suppose our so called reality is nothing but super enhanced form of virtual reality? Can we tell the difference? The only reason to call this reality as “normal” is to distinguish it from reality experienced by us in altered state of consciousness, i.e. under the influence of mind altering drugs or various other categories which I described in an earlier post (different types of realities, dated Feb.15, 2009) and will discuss a little more in detail in further posts.

However since most of us are either taking some medications, some of which could be affecting our brain and perception, or we are under various stressors, or suffering from mild to severe form of anxiety or depression (which are becoming modern lifestyle diseases) so that “normalcy” as applied to brain is more a statistical parameter. Yet this seems to work for most of the time. This is similar to the selection of volunteers for clinical study of a drug candidate. Scientists try to control as many factors as possible like the age, sex, weight, sometimes race etc. in addition to imposing conditions such no smoking or drinking, standardized diet in order to get average, normal volunteers. Despite all that there is fair amount of variation due to each volunteer’s individual biological characteristics. In fact some scientists believe that ideally a drug should be tested in actual patients suffering from the disease for which the drug is developed rather than normal volunteers. I do not want to go in too much detail here since that is not the topic under discussion here.

Let us first consider what we mean by reality. With our five senses we experience a person or an object and our brains scan for previous experiences and assign a category or name to it. Generally our brain works so fast that we are not consciously aware of the process. By common convention we have agreed to assign the category or name to objects. Thus for example a flat top object with legs is called a table, the one with a backrest is called chair and so on. This usually works out pretty well. Thus even if the flat top object happens to be square, rectangular, round or many sided, with four or many legs, the brain still recognizes it as a table and we assign a descriptive adjective (for example round table). Same is true with plants, animals and humans. An animal with a long trunk is recognized as an elephant, whether it is a Pygmy variety or a giant one. Of course scientists have a taxonomic scheme to scientifically categorize even seemingly different objects as belonging to genera or species etc. but that is irrelevant here in this discussion. Similarly we recognize people whether they are tall, short, thin, or fat or whatever physical differences like color of their skin, facial features, as humans.  The problem comes when we encounter identical twins, where with just by superficial observation we are unable to distinguish between the twins. Incidentally many murder mysteries are based on one of the identical twins committing the murder while the other twin claiming to have an alibi without disclosing that he/she is a twin.

 

ARTIFIAL INTELLIGENCE AND VIRTUAL REALITY

MIMICING NATURE, ROBOTICS, SECOND LIFE

 

Somehow as if our everyday life is not fascinating enough, we try to mimic nature. Thus we are trying to create artificial intelligence with ever faster calculating power and yet more human like (see the post dated Aug.4, 2008). We are impressed with robots which walk, do a few things like vacuuming or mixing drinks and which make rudimentary conversational talk. Thus we are completely floored when a robot “understands” us and makes simple replies and asks us questions. For example if we say “Hello, how are you?” to a robot and it replies “Fine, thank you, and how are you?”  We are very impressed and yet in nature even a small child or for that matter a talking bird like a parrot could do what the robot did without really understanding the meaning. I do not mean to belittle the efforts of scientists working in this field, it is just that we have a long way to go still to be as good as nature, let alone be better than nature. 

Despite that, already the field of robotics and artificial intelligence has proved to be quite useful to mankind. In the field of medicine and surgery increasing use of robotics is made especially where accuracy in diagnosis and treatment is vital such as brain surgery, where a mistake of a few mm could impair the functioning of unintended organ system. Humans and robots work together in areas such as inspection of medicines, auto assembly etc. Robots not only carry out simple to complex mechanical, often repetitive tasks without errors but they are proving to be companion cum servants to people in need especially old, weak or lonely people.

 The Japanese, facing with the prospect of shortage of young people and a growing old population have made great strides in this field. They have made not only humanoid robots but some robotic pets as well. The obvious advantages are that unlike humans robots are programmable, error free and are never bored or tired, at least so far. The robotic pets provide similar comfort as natural pets without us worrying about feeding them or worrying about their health.

 

ARTIFICIAL LIFE FORMS AND ARTIFICIAL HUMANS

 

The reason I have written “at least so far” above is because of our desire to make robots more natural. This includes looks; the pet robot dog must look like a regular dog and not a electronic box, or we will not get the same experience and the humanoid robots must look and act like a human being. This has far reaching implications not only scientifically, but also ethically and philosophically. If consciousness in humans is an emergent property of the complex network of neurons as some scientists believe, then it is quite conceivable that artificially intelligent robots (more correctly artificial life forms) will develop not only emotions but consciousness as well.  In fact they would be more appropriately termed as “artificial humans”, a distinct species from humans which may either cooperate with us or compete with us. Already some scientists have suggested guidelines to deal with each scenario. 

If humans are still dominant, will the artificial humans be modern day slaves? What about their rights? Will they demand freedom from us? On the other hand, if the artificial humans become dominating due to their superior “neural circuitry”, how do we best safeguard our rights and avoid being enslaved?

Unless I am mistaken, mankind will face one of the scenarios mentioned above, if not immediately then some time in not so distant future. The third possibility of the artificial humans being indifferent to us and continuing their own development is almost negligible especially if human tendency for dominance is a guide and with the prospect of decreasing natural resources and increasing population. Even if artificial humans do not need food and water needed by humans, they would most certainly have energy requirements and need natural resources in order to continue their development and “evolution”.

 What form of reality would these artificial humans experience? Will it be same or different than “our reality”? For that matter, what about only electronic artificial humans such as the “avatars” in the game of second life? If they ever develop consciousness, what about their reality? Or as I said in the post dated Aug. 11, 2008, we are ourselves in a second life of some other higher species?  I had written then that this could go on and on with every stage being second life of some one higher. What about the realities of all those avatars?. . As it is we are attributing various properties to the avatars created by us. Thus we can make them fly, walk on water, live forever or anything else of our choosing. Upon gaining consciousness these would probably become their reality and they would not be able to imagine anyone without these attributes.

So far our experience has been limited to experience virtual reality which mimics reality as we know from our day to day experience. Usually this is achieved with the help of a few gadgets worn by the participants to give sight, smell, touch etc. of something or some place.  It is qualitatively slightly better than watching a good quality 3D movie but it is still distinguishable from day to day reality since the participants are aware all the time that they are undergoing an artificial experience, however realistic it may appear.. Recently scientists tested a device where one of the participants trying the device felt that he was stabbing himself with a knife when actually a dummy was stabbed. He described the experience as almost real but obviously could tell that it was not.