Dreams I

"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."

-Edgar Allan Poe, via someone I stole it from.

I place "I" in the title of this entry because I know it will be a subject I return to. Of all the odds and ends in this world, dreams are an interest to which I always find myself revisiting in some new light. At times this is brought on by emotions from throughout my day, and at others stimulated directly by my own dreams. Either way, I feel like I only ever make a ounce of progress at a time. Hopefully putting some words on paper will take me somewhere.

Speaking from the mouth of a neurologist, dreams are the rationalizations the mind invents when neurological synapses spontaneously reset during a sleep period. Disconnected from the body, the mind pieces these random bits of memory together and interacts with them as if they were real. An analogy would be a painter who cleans his brushes off by wiping them on a canvas, and then attempts to make sense of the final product. At the same time, however, the events and thoughts of your day are processed and reinforced via a system known as "the Papez circuit". Thus, as I recall it from my neurology courses, dreams are a push and pull between these rogue neural impulses and the information still fresh in your circuit of Papez. This explains a bit, as we often find dreams to be a confusing mixture of our daily lives with random thoughts we cannot explain.

Psychologists, to my understanding, seem to cling to other explanations of dreams. Many believe the dream state is a virtual playground for the repressed memories of one's conscience. I find this a little less convincing, as most dreams seem to not only be things one would not repress, but also things that one desires openly. Imagine you dream of cupcakes falling from the sky while you rollerskate on a lake. Does that mean you're a cupcake-phobe who won't skate near water? These situations tend to convince me to remove faith in the explanations of psychiatrists, whom I've already learned to be undeniably the strangest people you will ever meet. Or at least the ones who teach it.

Other explanations exist as well, but the majority are simple extensions of religion or mythical ideas that I do not accept.

I'm not ready to continue from here, so I'll leave this entry as the stepping stone to others. Perhaps in a future entry I will look upon this these explanations as way I understood dreams, and not how I understand them.