“We must investigate dreams and, above all, find out how they appear to the soul … it is obvious that a dream is not a sensory perception … Therefore, it is clear that this state, which we call“dream,”is neither opinion nor understanding, but it is not it is also an ordinary sensory sensation. After all, if it were such, it would be possible to simply hear or see in a dream. But how and how the vision of dreams occurs - that is what should be investigated ….
So Aristotle Spoke
This is how Aristotle's treatise On Dreams begins - the first scientific work on dreams. The great thinker repeatedly turned to this topic - in total in the corpus of Aristotle's works there are three small-volume treatises on sleep and dreams: "On sleep and wakefulness", "On dreams" and "On predictions in a dream." All of them are included in the group of the so-called small natural science works of the philosopher.
Indeed, science could not add anything to the information about dreams contained in the work of Aristotle until the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. The obstacle here was the very nature of dreams - in this mysterious kingdom both the experimental scientific method (which European science was justifiably proud of) and the most advanced scientific instruments - microscopes, telescopes, galvanometers were equally useless …
The birth of scientific somnology
A revolution in the scientific study of sleep (and a key event in the history of all neurosciences) was the invention in 1928 by the German researcher G. Berger of a method for recording the biopotentials of the brain - electroencephalography.
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Berger himself was the first to describe the differences in the electroencephalographic rhythms of a waking and sleeping person, which actually became the starting point for the development of the science of sleep - somnology. A number of articles were soon published describing the main states of the brain during sleep. However, a major breakthrough in sleep research was ahead. The discovery of the cyclicity of night sleep (a discovery that could “technically” be made immediately after the advent of encephalography) was delayed by two decades due to such a strange reason as saving EEG paper! The fact is that during sleep, encephalograms were recorded either at the beginning of the night, or at short intervals several times per night. In addition, scientists simply did not want to stay awake all night, recording the subject's sleep. As a result, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that a great event in somnology took place: the structure of sleep was discovered and the most important (and dream-related) phase of REM sleep was identified, as well as the phase of slow wave sleep alternating with it.
Disappeared irretrievably
As we now know, on average, in one normal night of "falling asleep", the REM / slow sleep cycle repeats about four to five times. The duration of each subsequent phase increases. REM sleep phases make up only 20-25% of nighttime sleep, with one phase lasting 10-20 minutes and alternating with slow-wave sleep. People dream of dreams precisely in the REM sleep phase - the test subjects, awakened after the start of the REM sleep phase, claim to have seen colorful dreams.
At the same time, it turned out that people remember only an insignificant part of their dreams! The fact is that a dream can be reproduced in memory only if the awakening occurred during the fast phase or immediately after it. Because if there is a switch to slow sleep (and this is just a normal cycle for a person), then the dream (which has performed some work that is still incomprehensible, but clearly necessary for the brain) becomes inaccessible for reproduction and is simply erased from memory. We can say that the possibility of remembering a dream appears at the moment of awakening. If a person does not wake up, but goes into a slow phase of sleep, then the dream is not remembered and the person will never know about this dream. In this case, it seems to a person upon awakening that he slept without dreams. But this does not happen - there are always dreams, we just do not remember them!
Memory quirks
Well, in those cases when a person wakes up after a phase of REM sleep - how well does he remember them? There is an opinion (it was expressed in ancient times) that people very quickly forget their own dreams. But is it really so?
As studies in recent years have shown, our memories of dreams (of course, if this dream is not erased from memory by the slow phase of sleep) are as well stored in memory as memories of real life events. For example, researchers from the University of Leeds made this comparison: twenty-five participants had to write down their dreams in the morning for two weeks. Immediately after recording the dream, they should have also recorded some event from the previous day. The result was unexpected - no convincing differences were found between the reproduction of dreams and reality.
In other studies, scientists asked "experimental" volunteers to describe dreams and real events from the past, indicating the time when the corresponding dream or event took place. It was found that the temporal distribution of events to which the memories belonged and the temporal distribution of events to which dreams belonged are practically the same - most of all the memories and dreams were about the period of adolescence or the recent past. On the contrary, the minimum number of memories related to early childhood and the period between adolescence and the recent past.
An interesting effect has been known for a long time, which is called dream lag. The essence of this phenomenon is that people most often dream of things that refer to the day preceding falling asleep and to events about a week ago. Since sleep is clearly associated with memory mechanisms, the dream lag, apparently, is explained by the "rewriting" of memories - the brain, after waiting about a week, filters the events recorded in memory, filtering out unnecessary ones. Recently, this algorithm has been confirmed in studies of ordinary daytime memory. Dutch psychologists Murr and Dros published data that if a person, having memorized any material, does not repeat it (in one form or another) within a week, then the information is quickly forgotten. In the same way, dreams (those of them that have generally remained in memory) are forgotten after about a week,unless a person "scrolls" them in his head, and even better writes down or retells to someone else.
Why then does empirical experience show us that we remember dreams extremely poorly? The reason is that when extracting material from memory, people rely on stereotyped scenarios, supplementing the missing elements with images from a standard well-learned scheme. It is easy for people to remember ordinary actions and deeds that they have repeated thousands of times and which have been hammered into the brain in the form of ready-made templates. To remember a specific event (for example, going to work on one of the days), you just need to supplement this template with a few details that distinguish this particular event from hundreds of similar ones. But it is precisely in dreams that elements that completely fall out of all templates prevail, and therefore our stereotypical template scenarios are usually not suitable for remembering dreams! And without them, it becomes insanely difficult to reproduce the impressions of sleep in memory.
Therefore, in order to make a dream available for recall, additional efforts are required, usually adjusting the "plot" of the dream to the usual patterns. At the same time, many fragments of the dream that do not lend themselves to rational presentation are inevitably lost.
Conquest of the dream world
However, this situation may change completely in the near future. For thousands of years, people have considered dreams to be an area of consciousness that cannot be controlled. But, as studies in recent decades have shown, after special training, people (at least some) can manage their dreams, take meaningful actions during these dreams, and even exercise! And technological progress is likely to soon allow even people without special skills to control dreams. At least some inventors promise to give a person full control over the world of dreams in the very near future, actively raising funds on crowdfunding resources.
For example, today there is the Aurora device - an electronic dressing for immersion in lucid dreaming. Aurora is able to track the phase of REM sleep (in which a person sees a dream), analyze the nature of sleep using a special program and, using the LED signal, let the user know that he is currently asleep. In this case, the person will not wake up, but simply realizes that what is happening to him is unreal, and will be able to control his sleep. To the uninitiated person, the concept looks strange, but it reliably works! And it opens up great opportunities. “By training or learning something in a dream, a person improves his skills in real life,” says Daniel Scunover, the device's developer, “so if you are, for example, a football player, then on the eve of the decisive match you had better play football in your sleep” …
There are such developments in Russia as well - for example, Oleg Kochankov gained fame, who, being a graduate student of Sarov Lyceum No. 15, created the Sleep Corrector, which received a number of awards (including at international exhibitions).
However, it is worth listening to the voices of skeptics (among scientists who study the activity of the brain). They point out that our "dreams" are not at all what we really "dreamed", but what we were able to remember when we woke up. To what extent guided dreams are truly guided, and to what extent this is an illusion caused by self-hypnosis (when dream memories are edited in accordance with a given matrix already in the waking state) is completely unclear.
Meanwhile, serious interference with obscure higher nervous activity is potentially very dangerous and should be carried out with the utmost caution.
Magazine: Secrets of the Universe №2 (147). Author: Prepared by Alexander Stela