by Guy Murchie
Most deep sleepers, however, including humans, have a sort of filter in the central nervous system that discriminates to some degree between harmless and dangerous sounds, or scents or other stimuli. A circus elephant will sleep through having another elephant sit on his head yet will rouse instantly on hearing a faint metallic clink. Or a mother will sleep through her husband's snores or coughs but wake the moment her baby whimpers.
Sleep provides a vital rest for most muscles, although a few work rhythmically or intermittently during it, resting only fractions of a second at a time in the case of heart, lung and digestive muscles, or irregularly for those in limbs, neck and torso, which have been found to shift the average sleeper to a new position about five times every hour. But in many known cases, muscles can function in sleep almost as when awake, particularly if their movement is rhythmic. This has been known not only in the familiar manner of people who get out of bed to walk in their sleep but also among dog-tired soldiers in an allnight forced march, in dance marathons, in soaring albatrosses that almost certainly must doze on the wing and in the proverbial punkah wallah (fan servant) of India who can work his hanging punkah (fan) with one foot quite satisfactorily while sound asleep all night long.
In modern sleep laboratories, it has been found that sleep often begins physically with a relaxation of the tongue and jaw, progressing down the throat, through the head and out the limbs. Sleep's mental side also involves a progression (not yet well understood) of states of mind leading into deeper and deeper slumber, the stages of which can be distinguished to increasing extents by the kinds of brain waves they produce in an encephalograph, by eye movement, by phosphenes (page 236) and by dreams or dreamlike experiences.
An example of one of the less recognized states of mind might be an experience I first became aware of one morning in Spain in 1956, just after awaking and while still half asleep with my eyes shut. It wasn't a daydream but rather a kind of shut-eyed consciousness beyond the self - something imposed on me and out of my control, something akin to dreaming but definitely conscious and not really part of sleep. It was entirely visual. With my eyes shut I could see a kind of phosphene consisting of moving cloudlike forms. Large, hazy, whitish clouds, dimly outlined against surrounding darkness, seemed to be condensing or drifting inward toward the center of my vision, continuously getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared into a point as down a drain. And while each diminished, taking three or four seconds, it was replaced by new and different clouds appearing in the outer circle. It made me think of starbirth, the presumed condensation of dust clouds in space that continues (although extremely slowly) until the steadily increasing pressure of gravity ultimately ignites the new system of worlds.
I began to experiment with this mind state, making a strong effort to control the clouds either in form (by willing certain shapes) or in speed (by slowing them down), but found I had no more influence on them than if they were clouds in a real sky. For they appeared independent and a law unto themselves. They seemed more than imaginary, moreover, for imaginary clouds are controllable to some degree by any artist who imagines them. Each of these seemed independently perfect in itself: beautiful, individual, willful. I felt that by opening my eyes I risked losing the clouds for good yet, if! opened them for only a fraction of a second, I found I could regain the cloud phosphene as soon as I closed them again. Then there came a time when I opened my eyes for several seconds and, on closing them, I was suddenly "blind" and saw nothing but black, which gradually became dark brown. It was a shock, and I tried in vain to will the clouds to reappear. Then, about five minutes after I gave up, while still in a drowsy state, the clouds returned as before - just as if they had a will of their own. I have scant doubt that there must be many such little-known states of mind, particularly on the sleepy side of consciousness.
The modern, objective way of measuring or identifying a state of mind or the depth of sleep is by the sleeper's brain waves. So-called alpha waves (oscillating about ten times a second) are what the oscillograph shows during the relaxed, shut-eyed wakefulness of "transcendental meditation." If the subject then opens his eyes or moves around, his alpha waves speed up and intensify until (at about thirteen cycles a second) they become beta waves and perhaps soon sort of hash out. If he dozes, they. slow down and gradually laze into looser forms. When someone consciously generates a particular kind of brain wave, say alpha, when meditating, the process is known as biofeedback, and developments of it may be used in everything from psychotherapy to self-hypnosis. The waves of full wakefulness, one notices, display a relatively high frequency, although their amplitude, denoting voltage, is inclined to be low. The waves of sleep, on the other hand, have a low frequency (generally less than half that of wakefulness), but with a correspondingly high amplitude and voltage. And the so-called delta waves of deepest sleep have the lowest frequency and highest voltage of all - a fact that has recently led more and more sleep researchers to begin thinking of sleep as not just a nightly submergence below consciousness but as perhaps the mind's basic (high voltage) condition, out of which wakefulness arises as a daily (high frequency) flight of excitement.
Meanwhile a discovery in physiology supports the same concept of sleep as more active than passive by revealing that certain cells in the brain "turn on" to inhibit physical activity and thereby promote subconsciousness. This finding has been credited to Dr. Carmine D. Clemente, who has been exploring it since 1959 at the University of California's Brain Research Institute in Los Angeles. He reports that a class of specialized neurons he calls "sleep cells," located in the basal forebrain, begin to fire as one gets sleepy, sending impulses to muscles, glands and other active parts of the body, ordering them to hold still and, where possible, relax. And a further step attributed to Dr. Dominick Purpura, anatomist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is the realization that this natural process can be promoted by artificially passing electric currents through the brain. A mild current in fact brings on unconsciousness by jamming brain circuits and disorganizing neuron activity to the point where information transfer is stopped. This is now known as electro-anesthesia and is beginning to be used in surgery where other anesthetics are dangerous or impractical.
DREAMS
If sleep thus may be the basic state of mind, the dream in turn may be the basic state of sleep. At least the "dream lab" researchers' consensus to date definitely indicates no human can survive long without dreaming - a conclusion evidenced by the nervous system's steady deterioration when dreams are systematically interfered with. It has also been demonstrated that the most obvious, or easily remembered, dreams come during periods of lighter sleep, when one's eyeballs move rapidly (their motion readily measurable through closed lids), and that these periods of REM (rapid eye movement) occur cyclically, about every ninety minutes. This doesn't mean the intervening periods of deeper sleep are dreamless, for evidence has long been accumulating of significant mental activity during delta sleep. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, had a strong intuition that dreamless sleep is nothing but a myth and he declared with authority that whenever we wake "we break the thread of some dream." My own experience confirms this, for nearly every time I awake, even when I can't recall the subject of my dream, I am aware that I have been dreaming (or thinking) about something. In fact I can almost always "guess" what time it is within half an hour, which I do by reflecting on the duration (if rarely the content) of my less-than-conscious thoughts since I fell asleep. And, to test the universality of continuous dreaming, I have made a point of rousing innumerable other sleepers to ask them as their eyes opened what they had been dreaming (or thinking) about, and I have yet to find, one completely dreamless.
Ouspensky goes even farther in corroboration of the perpetuality of dreams, writing: "I became convinced that we have dreams all the time, from the moment we fall asleep to the moment we awake, but remember only the dreams near awakening. And still later I realized that we have dreams continuously, both in sleep and in a waking state
..." In reality, he continues, "dreams never stop. We don't notice them in our waking state amidst the continuous flow of visual, auditory and other sensations, for the same reason we don't see stars in the light of the sun. But just as we can see the stars from the bottom of a deep well, so we can see the dreams that go on in us if, even for a short time, we isolate ourselves ... and achieve 'consciousness without thought.'"
"Consciousness without thought" presumably means a meditative state, but whether the phosphenes and "daydreams" accompanying it qualify as true dreams of course must depend on one's definition of a dream. In any case, the dream is a phenomenon that offers us prime evidence, if not understanding, of basic mental processes - processes used by animals, who also seem to dream, if not by plants and lower life forms. To me, a striking thing about the dream is that it is not subject to the will, but rather seems imposed from beyond consciousness. Like a law of nature, we accept it because we must. It swallows us and digests us. And the same may be true, if less obviously, of all mental processes.
Where, in fact, do thoughts come from? Historically it has turned out to be a lot easier to deduce the source of comets, meteorites and cosmic rays than to discover where thoughts and dreams come from. We certainly have no assurance that dreams just originate in ourselves. Nor can we rule out the possibility that some unsuspected amalgam of heredity and environment might somehow someday reveal the hidden nature of the thought and the dream.
In a dream the deep sea becomes a hospitable world for breathing, talking men and women, the clouds a drifting staircase, the sky a banquet hall. You drive a car and it takes wing. You float through a house and it changes. You meet a strange girl and you know her thoughts.
What is the purpose of the great traffic of dreams, the extravagant scenery that shows no regard for economy or efficiency, the vast crowds and fantastic cities, the struggles and adventures that so easily slip out of memory before we awake? Are they hints of a world to come, of the struggle for transcendence from our present finitude of space-time to the dimension-free Infinitudes beyond?
The preponderance of current authoritative opinion is in surprising accord with many such ideas. It considers dreams the sleeping mind's arena of confrontation with the stresses of wakefulness, with the daily emotional problems that need nightly therapy, not through reason but through feeling - feeling that often reaches down to the level of a child or an animal. For dreams have a way of simplifying things, of boiling their messages down into pictures and parables. And they avoid making moral judgments. They express symbols, not thoughts, omitting all the qualifying conjunctions like if, so and but. And there is some recent evidence that they even help inscribe short-term memory into long-term knowledge.
Sigmund Freud, the great pioneer of dream analysis, surmised that dreams in general seek to fulfill wishes, particularly sexual wishes. His reasoning was that, because sex wishes are the ones most apt to be unfulfilled in most people, sex has to be the biggest common denominator of dreams. Other psychologists believe, however, that although almost all children's and many adults' dreams deal with wish fulfillment (including wishes for sex, power, popularity, etc.), other dreams may be reactions to such physical or psychic stimuli as noise, hunger, anxiety, bladder pressure and indigestion, which, incidentally, the dreams tend to disguise so as not to wake up the sleeper. Still other dreams deal with anticipation, with going to a party or off on an exciting journey... And, as I've suggested, dreams of all these kinds seem to express some sort of conflict and, in one way or another, to work at resolving it.
Carl Jung, originally Freud's close colleague, accepted all this, and broadened dream interpretation by adding to it interpretations of myths and religions, explaining that all three symbolize unconscious human thoughts and feelings, which together use "libido" or psychic energy to promote mental well-being. Specifically he theorized that the symbols featured in these dreams, myths and religions include archetypes or primordial images that enable the mind to resolve its neurotic dilemmas superconsciously, if not mystically, in the sense that such visualizations are not limited to one individual alone but are "historical strata" woven through the "collective unconscious" of mankind (just as star patterns are imprinted in the minds of birds) and thereby presumably imbued with some teleological purpose. In fact it is said that Jung himself was more than once inspired by dreams to change the course of his career, indicating his mystic sense of the dream's oracular portent and his acceptance of its being part of some universal mind.
PSYCHIC DREAMS
The dream's power to foretell the future is of course a very ancient concept, going far back into the forgotten ages before history began. Pharaoh's dream of the fat and lean kine and Joseph's dreams of the sheaves and stars were widely accepted as of this sort. In modern times there was Mark Twain's dream that his brother had been killed and was lying in a metal coffin, a bouquet of white flowers on his chest with a red blossom in the center. Although the brother on that date was still alive and well, it was only a month later that Mark actually witnessed the very scene of the dream, including the red blossom, when he went to view the remains after his brother was killed in a boiler explosion on a Mississippi steamboat.
More remarkable still - in fact perhaps the most astonishing of all prophetic dreams ever published - must be that of Robert Morris, Sr., father of "the financier of the American Revolution," who dreamed he himself was destined to be shot to death by one of the big guns on a naval vessel he was scheduled soon to visit. Because of the dramatic vividness of his dream, he felt apprehensive about the ship and tried to cancel his visit, but naval officers told him he was being absurd, if not cowardly, and eventually the ship's captain convinced him that it was absolutely safe to go aboard as no guns would be fired until after he left. At the end of his visit, the captain tried to make good on this promise by ordering that a salute (without a cannonball) be fired only after he raised his hand when the party, including Morris, had safely reached shore. But while the boat was still within gun range, a fly alighted on the captain's nose, causing him to raise his hand to brush it off. And the ship's gunner, taking this as the signal to fire, fired with the astounding result that a tiny fragment of the discharge hit Morris and wounded him fatally!
In this century J. W. Dunne's book An Experiment with Time offered a theory that prophetic dreams result from time's little-known multiple dimensions which actually extend perpendicular to one another, so that anyone's consciousness may impinge on the future as easily as on the past, a fact rarely noticed since, by the time the events foretold in the dream take place in real life (sometimes many years later), the dream more than likely has been forgotten.
Another possibility, it seems to me, is that the illusion of dreaming the future in time may come from an interrelation between differently dreamed perspectives in space. If a boy views a horse race through a knothole in a fence, for example, he may see a white horse about to overtake a front-running brown horse in the stretch and conclude the white horse will win. But his father standing beside him and looking over the fence may take in a much wider view that includes a very fast black horse overtaking both the others so rapidly he can safely predict the black one must win. If the father tells the son he can foresee a black victory and it proves true, it could seem to the boy that his father has prophetic vision into the future. Yet in fact the only advantage the father had was his larger view of space which gave him more information with which to make a more accurate extrapolation of the same future already extrapolated by the boy. Such at least is the function of one of the causal seams joining space to time.
Some dreams do more than foretell the future. Some dreams create the future. Robert Louis Stevenson attributed all his best plots to his dreams, including the famous story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And Professor Hermann Voirath Hilprecht, the great German Assyriologist, dreamed that a Babylonian priest gave him the key to two ancient and cryptic inscriptions he had spent years trying to decipher - whereupon he woke up to find the dream key w
as also a "real life" key that soon enabled him to translate both texts. Kekulé, the German chemist, had been baffled in his struggle to learn the true shape of the benzene molecule when, in a brief daydream while riding a London bus, he saw a snake holding its tail in its mouth and instantly realized that the solution was a loop, now known to chemists everywhere as the benzene ring.
Dunne's hypothesis of multidimensional time may be supported by the fact that dreams can enfold each other relativistically, a phenomenon I noticed when I "awoke" one morning from a dream and started writing down what happened in it - whereupon, to my utter surprise, I found myself, waking again, which instantly apprised me that my previous awakening and writing was all part of an outer dream enclosing the inner dream I'd been writing about. How many such folds or shells of dreams might encase one another like Chinese boxes, I know not - nor when I will awake again from my present conscious life, revealing it too to be a dream relative to some still larger consciousness - presumably with more dimensions and beyond the grave.
Still another confirmation of Dunne is the fact that one often knows, while dreaming, that a particular scene or episode, apparently freshly encountered, is yet already familiar in detail from previous dreaming whose scope must be much vaster than our waking memory can normally recall. I noted this most strikingly when dreaming of getting a film developed and printed, which produced lots of wonderful photographs I had taken of past adventures, which, having nothing to do with my conscious life, were yet recognizable as part of dream life, And this dream life pretty clearly comprised fields outside time, space and self-consciousness (even possibly outside other "tools" of finite awareness) unfolding continuously outward in unknown dimensions.