Dreaming is the most fascinating part of our sleep. This is a universal experience; we all dream. Those who say they never dream probably forget their dreams, for we all dream during REM sleep. This has been studied both biologically and psychologically in the previous chapters. However, in this chapter, I am going to study dreams and philosophy.

Our nightly supernatural trips

There is no reason to believe that the basic structure of the dream of primitive man was very much different from that of mode man’s dreams. Of course the contents of the dreams would chang with the passage of time—buildings, modes of transportation, foo clothing, customs, etc. kept on changing and will continue to chang in the future. Naturally, the contents of dreams will be very muc different a thousand years from now.

In spite of the changing contents, the basic format of dream remains the same throughout the ages. The experience of dream is universal. Whilst we are dreaming, we can experience thing considered as supernatural in our real lives. For instance, we ca~ in a very short space of time, travel thousands of miles away an visit places sometimes totally strange to us. We may even be able to talk to relatives that are no longer with us. It is as if, during dreams, part of us can leave our bodies to experience all these unusual events and rejoin our bodies the moment we wake up. For mo of us this is the only time in our lives that we can have the supernatural experiences.

Subconsciously these dream experiences give us some insight in the mystery of the spiritual world. All religions, despite differ cultures and different social backgrounds, believe that soi separable part of the human being is immortal. When the bo dies, this immortal part may leave the body and live on. In Western society, this is known as the soul. Is the understanding of the soul made much easier as a result of the supernatural experience of our dreams night after night?

Am I dreaming?

This supernatural experience can sometimes be very real during dreaming and it may not be easy to tell what is real and what is a dream. My daughter Melinda told me about a dream she once hid. We had been playing billiards the night before and she lost. That night she dreamt that she was pushing the billiard ball with her teetn and tried to get it into the side pocket of the billiard table. She tried so hard that her front tooth became loose. She touched her gum and there was blood on her hand and the tooth fell out. She was not frightened as somehow she knew she was in a dream. She made a conscious effort to wake up, as she thought if she could wake up and look in the mirror she would see that her tooth was still there. Still asleep, she dreamt that she woke up, and pinched herself just to make sure. She felt relieved and looked in the mirror. To her horror the tooth was still missing. The rest of the dream was vague and hazy. When she was telling me this dream, she still touched her teeth to make sure the dream was really over. Dreams can be so real, that pinching yourself and feeling the pain does not imply that you are not still in the dream. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything you can do to tell for sure whether you are actually in the dream or the real world.

Throughout the ages, philosophers have marvelled at the reality îò dreams. A sleep researcher, G. W. Leibniz, talked about a dream consciousness lasting the life of a man. In other words, we are two people, going side by side, one in the dream state and the other in the waking state. The Nobel Prize winner, Bertrand Russell, went îne step further, and stated that real life was actually the dream and waking life a persistent nightmare.

Dream prophesy

Many people believe that dreams contain some message for the dreamer, often foretelling the future. One of the most famous dreams was that of the Pharaoh of Egypt interpreted by Joseph and recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible (Genesis, chapter 41). Joseph was sold to an Egyptian courtier as a slave. Because he was very handsome, his master’s wife wanted to have an affair with him, but he refused.She became terribly upset and she told the master Joseph had made love to her. The master put Joseph in prison.

Whilst in prison, he became well known for his ability to predict the future through dream interpretation.

One night the Pharaoh had a dream in which he was standing by the River Nile. He saw seven fat cows feeding on the grass, but then seven thin cows came up and ate the seven fat cows. In his next dream there were seven ears of good healthy corn and seven ears of withered corn blighted by the east wind; the seven thin ears swallowed up the seven good ears.

No one in the palace could interpret the dream. Joseph was called from the prison to interpret the Pharaoh’s dream. Joseph explained that Egypt would have seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. The Pharaoh was very pleased with Joseph and made Joseph the Governor of Egypt. Joseph began stockpiling grain and was able to do this for seven years. But the next seven yea-were ones of severe world-wide famine. Joseph had lots of grain and became the most powerful man of his time, for soon the whol world was coming to Egypt to buy grain.

This is one of the many stories of dream prophecy, illustratin the fact that some people can dream what is going to happen i the future. It is believed that such people possess psychic power. But dreams are in fact a reflection of our inner feelings an unconscious thinking. Perhaps dreams represent a sixth sense—the ability of seeing into the future.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung had his own theory of the interpretation of dreams. Jung saw the mind as being divided into two main compartments, the conscious and the unconscious. Deep in the unconscious portion there is a part that is common to all mankind and he called this the ‘collective unconscious’. The collective unconscious is the common denominator of our personalis irrespective of culture, race, and time. Jung thought there were tw kinds of dream, the personal and the collective.

The collective dream obtains its source from the collective unconscious and is significant both to the individual and to society Primitive people described the personal dream as the ‘little’ dream and the collective dream as the ‘big’ dream. The dream of the Pharaoh of Egypt was a big dream It was of supreme importance to the people and, at that time, dreams were believed to be sent by God. At the time of the Pharaoh, cows and ears of corn both had tremendous meaning to the Egyptians, conveying symbolic meaning. Food and its accumulation meant power and stability. The Egyptia worshipped a god of corn, and they had sacred bulls. These were the symbols in the collective unconscious of the Egyptian mind.

But how Joseph was able to predict seven years of famine through a dream remains unanswered. Perhaps he was doing what the present day economists are doing all the time-predicting when our next recession will be.

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Another discovery made in the sleep laboratory is that a normal adult will wake up a few times during the night. Some may wake as often as 10 to 15 times. Each time can be as short as a minute. The person then falls back into sleep and never remembers that he has in fact woken at all. This discovery is important for allaying the fears of problem sleepers. When people who suffer from insomnia wake up in one of these normal awakenings they panic. They say to themselves, ‘This is it, I am awake in the middle of the night, and I will not be able to sleep again tonight’. This fear and anxiety of not being able to sleep after awakening at night causes further insomnia.

So next time you wake in the middle of the night, tell yourself that this is completely normal. Just relax, do nothing, let nature take its course, and you will fall back into natural sleep again. Never look at the alarm clock; in fact, knowing the time of night will normally increase your anxiety. You will find yourself sleeping better if you put your alarm away.

As a person becomes older his sleep pattern changes. He has many more awakenings throughout the night. His sleep is much lighter, and he rarely enters stages 3 and 4; instead these are replaced by a lot of awakenings and there is a kind of natural insomnia. However, most older people do not understand that they no longer need somuch sleep. They feel distressed lying in bed alone at night, and some still want to recapture the feeling of ‘sleeping like a baby’.

My advice to the elderly is that we are becoming wiser and more respected as we grow older. We should be proud of our grey hair and hard-earned senior status in society. We should feel lucky that we have outlived our unfortunate associates. We are no longer babies, and do not need all that sleep anymore. We can relax and rest at night, and should keep ourselves more active both physically and mentally in the daytime. During the day, if we are inactive, we may have a lot of microsleeps. Microsleeps are brief periods of sleep activity which can be recorded on the EEC These microsleeps last only a few seconds, but, if all these microsleeps during the day are added together, they will replace most of the need to sleep at night.

Many of my older patients regularly sleep three hours a night and have one hour of afternoon nap. They are all healthy and they function perfectly well in the day. They understand that they do not need all that sleep. It is sad to see older people, who biologically need only a few hours of sleep each night, extending their sleep time artificially with sleeping pills.

To summarise, the two different kinds of sleep, REM and NREM, alternate with each other, and we have a few sleep cycles each night. We used to tmnk that sleep is passive and peaceful and that if we dream a lot we have had a poor sleep. Now, with the help of the sleep laboratories, we know that we have at least four or five dream periods at night and at least one-quarter of our sleep is spent in dreams, although we cannot remember most of them. The other surprise is that it is normal to wake up in the middle of the night. These findings have dispelled the myth that good sleep means no dreams and no awakenings in the night.

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When a person is sleeping in a sleep laboratory he is hooked up to a number of machines that measure a number of bodily functions. These include the EEG and EOG. A further recording is made by an EMG or electromyogram which is attached to the chin to determine muscle tension. In some situations in men, the circumference of the penis is also monitored. It has been discovered that during REM sleep there are a lot of physiological changes, including male erection—more about that in chapter on Sex and Dreams.

The Sleep Disorder Unit at Epworth Hospital, Melbourne has the most advanced equipment and, in addition to the above measurements, the patient is monitored for many other important bodily functions also. These include air flow through the mouth and nose, the movement of the chest during respiration, blood oxygen saturation (by means of an oximeter in the finger), snoring (by recording the noise level in the room), the condition of the heart (electrocardiogram), and individual leg movement. All these activities are computed at real time and organized on a video screen. The amount and frequency of the brain waves are analysed by computer and displayed in different colours on a separate screen which gives a clear indication of which stage of sleep the patient is in. The patient is also observed from the control room with and is continuously recorded on video.

This kind of multiple recording in the sleep laboratory is called a polysomnogram, and operates as long as the person is asleep. The recordings can then be analysed the next day and the results used in the diagnosis and treatment of impotence, sleep apnoea and other sleep disorders. There are now as many as 50 sleep aisorae thanks to the sleep laboratory.

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The study of sleep is now a serious science. There are more than 170 sleep clinics and sleep laboratories in the USA alone. Sleep laboratories are designed for conducting research on sleep; they are also used to diagnose and treat sleeping problems. They are usually situated within the larger hospitals or attached to the medical schools and universities.

The first sleep laboratories were set up about 50 years ago. Scientists began to measure the electrical activities of the brain. Our brain is made up of a huge number of brain cells, and messages, in the form of electrical impulses, are transmitted from one cell to another cell and so on. This creates many electrical circuits, very much like the microchips of the present day computers. These circuits in the brain are always conducting messages, which generate electrical potentials. These electrical activities can be picked up by electrodes located outside the scalp and recorded on a moving scroll of paper as oscillating waves.

The machine which records brain waves is called an electroencephalogram or EEC It is now possible to distinguish several different kinds of wave forms according to the frequency and shape of the waves. When a person sits quietly with his eyes closed, the wave form is quite regular and the frequency is about 8 to 13 cycles per second. This is called the alpha rhythm. It is noticed that when a person falls asleep, the wave form changes to slower and slower waves. The EEG is now the most reliable objective way of telling whether a person is falling asleep and of judging how deeply he is sleeping.

Nowadays, with the advance of organ transplant between bodies, the surgeon has to know when a donor body is really dead before any of its organs can be removed and put into a recipient body.

This is especially important in the case of heart transplant, as the surgeon has to remove a beating heart from a donor body and place it into a recipient body with a failing heart. The EEG is used to determine if the brain is alive or not. When the EEG is silent and not recording any activity, the person is said to be brain dead. If a person is brain dead he is truly dead, and his organs can be used for transplant purposes. In 1976, at a conference of the Royal Medical Colleges, unanimous agreement was reached for the clinical diagnosis of brain death and very strict criteria have to be satisfied by clinicians before brain death can be pronounced.

When a person falls asleep from the fully awake state, he enters stage 1 sleep, which is a very light sleep. This is followed by stage 2, stage 3, and stage 4 sleep, where stage 4 is the deepest sleep. These four stages of sleep are differentiated by the characteristics of the brain wave forms as recorded by the EEG. Stage 1 light sleep occupies only 5 per cent of all these four stages put together, while stage 2 sleep appears to be the most important stage, occupying 50 per cent. The waves become slower and bigger as the person sleeps deeper and deeper. In stage 4 sleep, the brain wave frequency is only 3 cycles per second. Both stage 3 and stage 4 sleep are called slow wave sleep.

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Sleep is a fascinating biological function which we all experience. In fact, one-third of our lives is spent in sleep. Most of us take it for granted that we fall asleep at night and wake up the next morning. We do this night after night, and we do this from the day we enter this earth to the day we depart. However, have you stopped and asked what sleep actually is and why we need to sleep at all?

We have all experienced the fact that after a good night’s sleep we are refreshed and appear to function better than after a restless night. The exact nature of this is not fully understood. Sleep is not unique to man. Nearly all species of the Animal Kingdom sleep. But the amount of sleep in animals varies a great deal between different species. Gorillas sleep 14 hours a day, elephants only 2.

Evolution theory

The first explanation of why we need to sleep is coherent with the theory of evolution and survival. Hibernation, which is like a very deep sleep in winter for some animals, has been studied extensively by biologists. It is an adaptive survival mechanism enabling certain animals to survive long snowy winters; without it, many of these animals would face extinction. The hibernating animals do not need food during the winter months, at a time when food may be scarce or unavailable. Just before winter comes, they have built up a great deal of body fat. When winter arrives, they automatically go into extremely low activity and so can survive solely on their fat reserves. There is very little movement, the body temperature is very low, the metabolism is minimal, and the breathing is slow and shallow. The brain waves of these hibernating animals are nearly silent and are in distinct contrast to those of sleep. Normally, during hibernation, the animals cannot be aroused, even if given a good shake.

Hibernation has been studied in laboratory conditions. The animals are kept inside in the warm with plenty of food throughout the winter. However, they still go into hibernation, as if there is a need for them to do so. Hibernation is an innate mechanism in these animals; they do not have to learn how to hibernate. Hence the mechanism could have been handed down from one generation to i the next through the genes.

What about sleep? Sleep is distinct from hibernation. This is shown by the different brain wave pattern and the fact that an animal can always be aroused from sleep but not from hibernation. Sleep is another evolutionary adaptation to survival. The earth e every 24 hours and any one point on the surface is i nearly half of this time. Man has been walking on the ?planet Earth for over a million years. Remember that artificial light such as candles, oil lamps, and electric lights are inventions only of the last thousand years. During the long dark night, primitive man had noyjing to do. In fact it could be dangerous to move around in the dark. Man could injure himself easily by tripping over in hrough meeting some vicious animal. Hence he withdrew , stayed put,closed his eyes, and slept.

The need to sleep at night not only withdraws us from a dangerous environment, but also allows us to rest and restore our energy. Sleep is an innate biological hibernation, and has been studied under laboratory conditions. Even if the room is continuously brightly lit without the cue of what time of day or night it is, we still feel the need to sleep once every 24 hours or so. Here, the need to sleep is very similar to the need to hibernate—an evolutionary adaptation for survival.

Chemical theory

Another possible explanation of why we sleep is the chemical theory.We are all aware of the fact that certain chemical substances induce sleep; we have all heard of sleeping I pills. When we take a sleeping pill, the drug is absorbed into the brain.When the drug wears off and is eliminated from the body, we wake up.

Is there a sleep-inducing, naturally occurring chemical in the body? Also, does this chemical accumulate in the day like a waste product from our metabolism and require elimination? When the chemical reaches a certain threshold, does the brain become drugged and cause us to fall asleep? Whilst asleep, is this chemical eliminated from the body, causing us to wake up refreshed? A French scientist in 1913 called this hypothetical chemical sleep poison or hypnotoxin.

The answers are all no. This is shown in the example of Siamese twins. Siamese twins are two twins born together with some parts of their bodies attached. They share the same blood circulation. It is observed that one twin can be wide awake whilst the other is fast asleep. If there is a chemical in the blood causing sleep, then the two twins should be waking and sleeping at the same time. This clearly demonstrates that ‘natural sleep’ is not due to a chemical or a drug circulating in the blood. On the other hand, if one twin is given an appropriate dose of sleeping pill, after this is absorbed into the blood the two twins sleep at the same time. This shows that sleep induced by sleeping pills is very different from natural sleep, and the chemical theory is unable to explain why we need to sleep.

However, in spite of this, there is still considerable research taking place to examine the possibility of the presence of hypnotoxin. Claims were made that extracts of spinal fluid from sleep-deprived animals when injected into waking animals would induce sleep. US scientists called this substance in the spinal fluid factor S (5 for sleep) and Japanese scientists called it sleep-promoting substance or SPS. Sleep-deprived animals were used for the source of this substance as it was believed that factor S or SPS accumulated greatly in these animals, since only sleep could eliminate it.

Biological theory

Now, what is the biological benefit of sleep? One suggested benefit is growth. We all have a small pea-like structure at the base of the brain called the pituitary gland. This secretes growth hormone and is responsible for growth and normal development of the body. It is now known that growth hormone is secreted in a greater amount during deep sleep. There are reports that in some victims of child abuse the children are afraid to sleep or wake up too often at night to have any deep sleep; these children do not grow much. Their dwarfism results from an insufficient secretion of growth hormone.

Once they are removed from their homes and put into a more loving environment their sleep improves and their growth becomes more rapid, as if they are catching up on lost ground. Of course, one cannot overlook other factors such as nutrition, exercise, and so on. We now know that children need much more sleep than adults. In fact, the older we are, the less sleep we need. Is this because we need less growth hormone as we become older and consequently less sleep?

Dream theory

Another possible explanation of why we need to sleep is perhaps a psychological one. When we are sleeping, we all dream. Dreaming has a restorative function. We act out and experience some of our frustrations and anger during dreams. When we wake up the next morning, we have forgotten our dreams. This forgetting is important, as it allows us to forget our frustration and anger at the same time. Dreams are like a psychological filter, filtering out the worries that accumulate during the day. Sleep laboratories have demonstrated that when we are dreaming all the big muscles of the body are totally relaxed. This may be the only time that the body muscles are ever completely relaxed.

Another recent discovery in dream study is the occurrence of a male erection, which is discussed in chapter on Sex and Dreams. It has been observed that whenever a man dreams his penis is erect, no matter what sort of dream he is having. This dream erection occurs in all age groups and I believe this to be important for the proper development of the penis. Hence, at least for men, dreams are very important.

Neurone theory

A television documentary recently reported an unusual case of insomnia in England. Loughborough University advertised for people who thought they did not need to sleep to come forward to join in a sleep research study. So people who were short sleepers volunteered to be tested under laboratory conditions. At night they were allowed to lie in bed to rest and their brain waves were monitored continuously. There was a man who claimed that after an accident causing head injury a few years earlier he did not sleep at all. He also claimed that he was functioning normally and did not feel worried when he was lying awake. Brain wave recordings showed that he slept only four minutes during the three day study.

The study findings suggest that perhaps the brain is programmed to sleep periodically. The man who did not have the need to sleep after the head injury may have had his brain reprogrammed in such a way that sleep was no longer required. Maybe in hundreds or thousands of years from now we will be able to reprogram the brain so that we will have the choice of not having to sleep at all. There is a Chinese saying, ‘Life is not as long as it seems, as half of it is spent sleeping’.

It is possible that there are other biological functions, yet to be discovered, which only happen in sleep.

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Related Posts:

• DREAMS AND PHILOSOPHY
• SLEEP: NORMAL AWAKENING . NATURAL INSOMNIA WITH AGE
• SLEEP LABORATORY: POLYSOMNOGRAM
• SLEEP LABORATORY: BRAIN WAVES