David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Why Do We Dream? And How Do We Do It?
by Robin Fox, Psychology Today
March 7, 2012
What is dreaming for? How does it work?
We spend a third of our lives asleep and most of that dreaming. Why do we dream? In The Tribal Imagination, I was discussing the role of rhyme in verse, its history and its biology. This led to the following discussion of dreams, brains, evolution, rhymes, concepts, metaphor, meter and memory.
Flashback to the hominid brain and its evolution of lateralization: the division of functions between the hemispheres: the most amazing development since the origin of the brain itself. Words that rhyme are processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, the home of language, linearity and analysis. The pattern of a rhyme scheme, its chunkiness, is detected by the right hemisphere, the home of wholeness, of gestalt. The confluence of the two unites the hemispheres (via the corpus callosum) and drives the whole brain, including the emotional functions of the limbic system and the arousal of the pleasure centers and their opioids. When linked to metrical rhythm it involves the movement-control activities of the cerebellum and the motor cortex. Literacy and rhyme together change the brain; they set up new neuronal patterns, but patterns that tap into the most basic of that organ's basic processes.
Memory was the mother of the muses, and so a major function of the meter-rhyme combination is mnemonic. I have described elsewhere, following the neglected but path-breaking work of Jonathan Winson (Brain and Psyche) the chemical process by which language (along with all other experience) is first stored in the cyngulate gyrus, in preparation for processing into memory. During Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, or "dreaming" as we know it. This chemical material, along with other "day residue" (Freud's term) is passed through the hippocampus where "neuronal gates" progressively release it to circulate through the limbic system, the old-mammalian emotional center of the brain.
We cannot remember everything. Memory has to be selective, but on what principle? For any material, including concepts couched in language, to get into long-term memory, the dreaming brain must first translate it into images so that it can be emotionally "vetted." This is done by input from the emotional brain, especially the amygdala but also the septum and the cerebellum, and then it is transmitted back to the frontal lobes for storage, via the hypothalamus and the thalamus. This happens about four times a night, and deeper levels of retrieving and processing are reached and then recede as the REM dream-sleep continues.
Memory is older than language; it worked entirely on images before language came along, very late in primate/hominid evolution. In consequence words must be accompanied by, or be converted into, images, in order to enter memory. Primate dreaming had accommodated sound, but words are more than sound: they are concepts and categories; they have meaning. Dreams are always visual; there is no such thing as a purely linguistic dream?sound without symbol. Metaphor and simile are two basic ways to provide the memory with ready-made images and symbols, and must have been there in the Ur-language of mankind, which was probably closer to poetry than prose, as Vico proposed in the eighteenth century.
But, as Winson insists, "abstract concepts arising with language... can only be integrated into our unconscious brain mechanism by translation into visual scenes and action." Thus concepts must become images before they can be lodged in long-term memory. Some of the strangeness of dreams is a result of this conversion process, this "need for representability" as Freud called it. It also explains why our concepts and categories like Time for example, are not simply abstract and logical but are loaded with emotion. Time is an old father, with tide it waits for no man, it marches on, there is a nick of time, we beat time, we mark time, we keep time, we spend time, we waste time, and if we commit a crime, we do time, perhaps until our time is up.
The "stamping in" to long-term memory takes about three years, studies of memory loss have shown. During this stamping-in process the human brain compares incoming material with already-stored experience and not just with basic instincts as in the "theta rhythm" of other mammals, exemplified when your dog twitches in his sleep in pursuit of phantom rabbits. This may be one huge and crucial exception to the rule that we do not lose anything in evolution. The human loss of theta rhythms (starting with the mammals: the monotremes have large brains but don't dream) may have been one of the most liberating developments in our evolutionary history. It released memory from instinct so that memory could build directly on memory itself. The brain then stores only that which meets the test of emotional appropriateness. That is, it stores material seen as relevant to stored experience?a lot of this being experience from early childhood, and therefore retained. Charles Dickens understood this uncannily well. Pip asks Estella in the movie of Great Expectations if she remembers making him cry as boy. She tells him no, and adds that he meant nothing to her so why should she remember? She says: "You know Pip I have no heart. Perhaps that is why I have no memory."
I have in the past used the example of totemic categories and their instillation during the initiation ceremonies of young men, to make the point. The rules of the totem clan or moiety marriage and exogamy for example,) perhaps the most archaic of social rules, are concepts that are most effectively learned as dramatic images?snake, bear, wolf, eagle, raven, crow, coyote, emu, and the legends associated with them. These are instilled into the boys' during often-painful and dramatic rituals over a long period, and dreamed into memory. In fact we learn better from trauma than normality, and male rats seem to learn more from "inescapable stress" than female rats. The actual process is complicated and the reader must look to the details in The Red Lamp of Incest and The Search for Society, and to the theory proposed by Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison (at the much the same time as Winson) that dreaming is an aid to selective forgetting. But despite the complexities, the general point about meter, rhyme and memory is obvious.
Rhyme schemes are compressed and powerful images like "death/breath"?"womb/tomb/doom"?"lust-thrust-dust." Every rhyme scheme is a little metaphor; every poem is a little ritual. Ted Hughes, in his book on Shakespeare's "ritual drama" sees metaphor as a result of the brief perfect combination of left and right hemisphere interaction that produces a momentary "convulsive expansion of awareness." So rhymes, added to the power of meter, and embodied in the "heightened reality" of metaphors, are a ready-made system of images for the dreaming brain to work on in its task of vetting the emotional appropriateness of potential memories. It is not then just that rhyme helps memory; rhyme is part of the metaphorical process of memorizing itself.
Some references:
by Robin Fox, Psychology Today
March 7, 2012
What is dreaming for? How does it work?
We spend a third of our lives asleep and most of that dreaming. Why do we dream? In The Tribal Imagination, I was discussing the role of rhyme in verse, its history and its biology. This led to the following discussion of dreams, brains, evolution, rhymes, concepts, metaphor, meter and memory.
Flashback to the hominid brain and its evolution of lateralization: the division of functions between the hemispheres: the most amazing development since the origin of the brain itself. Words that rhyme are processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, the home of language, linearity and analysis. The pattern of a rhyme scheme, its chunkiness, is detected by the right hemisphere, the home of wholeness, of gestalt. The confluence of the two unites the hemispheres (via the corpus callosum) and drives the whole brain, including the emotional functions of the limbic system and the arousal of the pleasure centers and their opioids. When linked to metrical rhythm it involves the movement-control activities of the cerebellum and the motor cortex. Literacy and rhyme together change the brain; they set up new neuronal patterns, but patterns that tap into the most basic of that organ's basic processes.
Memory was the mother of the muses, and so a major function of the meter-rhyme combination is mnemonic. I have described elsewhere, following the neglected but path-breaking work of Jonathan Winson (Brain and Psyche) the chemical process by which language (along with all other experience) is first stored in the cyngulate gyrus, in preparation for processing into memory. During Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, or "dreaming" as we know it. This chemical material, along with other "day residue" (Freud's term) is passed through the hippocampus where "neuronal gates" progressively release it to circulate through the limbic system, the old-mammalian emotional center of the brain.
We cannot remember everything. Memory has to be selective, but on what principle? For any material, including concepts couched in language, to get into long-term memory, the dreaming brain must first translate it into images so that it can be emotionally "vetted." This is done by input from the emotional brain, especially the amygdala but also the septum and the cerebellum, and then it is transmitted back to the frontal lobes for storage, via the hypothalamus and the thalamus. This happens about four times a night, and deeper levels of retrieving and processing are reached and then recede as the REM dream-sleep continues.
Memory is older than language; it worked entirely on images before language came along, very late in primate/hominid evolution. In consequence words must be accompanied by, or be converted into, images, in order to enter memory. Primate dreaming had accommodated sound, but words are more than sound: they are concepts and categories; they have meaning. Dreams are always visual; there is no such thing as a purely linguistic dream?sound without symbol. Metaphor and simile are two basic ways to provide the memory with ready-made images and symbols, and must have been there in the Ur-language of mankind, which was probably closer to poetry than prose, as Vico proposed in the eighteenth century.
But, as Winson insists, "abstract concepts arising with language... can only be integrated into our unconscious brain mechanism by translation into visual scenes and action." Thus concepts must become images before they can be lodged in long-term memory. Some of the strangeness of dreams is a result of this conversion process, this "need for representability" as Freud called it. It also explains why our concepts and categories like Time for example, are not simply abstract and logical but are loaded with emotion. Time is an old father, with tide it waits for no man, it marches on, there is a nick of time, we beat time, we mark time, we keep time, we spend time, we waste time, and if we commit a crime, we do time, perhaps until our time is up.
The "stamping in" to long-term memory takes about three years, studies of memory loss have shown. During this stamping-in process the human brain compares incoming material with already-stored experience and not just with basic instincts as in the "theta rhythm" of other mammals, exemplified when your dog twitches in his sleep in pursuit of phantom rabbits. This may be one huge and crucial exception to the rule that we do not lose anything in evolution. The human loss of theta rhythms (starting with the mammals: the monotremes have large brains but don't dream) may have been one of the most liberating developments in our evolutionary history. It released memory from instinct so that memory could build directly on memory itself. The brain then stores only that which meets the test of emotional appropriateness. That is, it stores material seen as relevant to stored experience?a lot of this being experience from early childhood, and therefore retained. Charles Dickens understood this uncannily well. Pip asks Estella in the movie of Great Expectations if she remembers making him cry as boy. She tells him no, and adds that he meant nothing to her so why should she remember? She says: "You know Pip I have no heart. Perhaps that is why I have no memory."
I have in the past used the example of totemic categories and their instillation during the initiation ceremonies of young men, to make the point. The rules of the totem clan or moiety marriage and exogamy for example,) perhaps the most archaic of social rules, are concepts that are most effectively learned as dramatic images?snake, bear, wolf, eagle, raven, crow, coyote, emu, and the legends associated with them. These are instilled into the boys' during often-painful and dramatic rituals over a long period, and dreamed into memory. In fact we learn better from trauma than normality, and male rats seem to learn more from "inescapable stress" than female rats. The actual process is complicated and the reader must look to the details in The Red Lamp of Incest and The Search for Society, and to the theory proposed by Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison (at the much the same time as Winson) that dreaming is an aid to selective forgetting. But despite the complexities, the general point about meter, rhyme and memory is obvious.
Rhyme schemes are compressed and powerful images like "death/breath"?"womb/tomb/doom"?"lust-thrust-dust." Every rhyme scheme is a little metaphor; every poem is a little ritual. Ted Hughes, in his book on Shakespeare's "ritual drama" sees metaphor as a result of the brief perfect combination of left and right hemisphere interaction that produces a momentary "convulsive expansion of awareness." So rhymes, added to the power of meter, and embodied in the "heightened reality" of metaphors, are a ready-made system of images for the dreaming brain to work on in its task of vetting the emotional appropriateness of potential memories. It is not then just that rhyme helps memory; rhyme is part of the metaphorical process of memorizing itself.
Some references:
- Robin Fox: "Playing by the Rules: Savage Rhythms and Civilized Rhymes" Chapter 9 in The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind. (Harvard UP, 2011.)
- "The Matter of Mind" Chapter 7 in The Red Lamp of Incest (Notre Dame Press, 1983)
- "The Passionate Mind: Brain, Dreams, Memory, Evolution and Social Categories." Chapter 8 in The Search for Society (Transaction 1989)
- Jonathan Winson, Brain and Psyche: The Biology of the Unconscious (Doubleday 1985)
- Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison, "The Function of Dream Sleep." Nature 304, 111-114, 1983
- Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (1992.)
