Suspension of disbelief

My mother used to say that successful consumption of a play or a novel depended on being able to suspend disbelief. To overlook all the bits of the story or of the action which did not work, which would not work in real life.

I find now that something like this suspension seems to be a feature of both dreams and the consumption of television dramas, presently, in our case, mostly with a police flavour. 

Hobson argues convincingly at reference 1 that, in the case of dreams, this suspension of disbelief amounts to the relevant bits of brain having been turned off by neuro-chemical action from the brain stem. The bits of brain which check that the evolving story, in this case the dream, is generally credible and hangs together properly are offline. So we can dream away untroubled by the fact that it is often complete nonsense. It still works, it still has emotional power and when we wake it may take some time to shake it off.

Something of the sort seems to happen when I watch television drama (on our smart new television from Samsung, mainly tuned to ITVX), even though I am awake. A recent example was ‘The Reunion’ mini-series of references 2 and 3.

I am drawn into the story which has plenty of emotional power. It does not much bother me that I don’t understand lots of the detail or lose track of all the people and all their twists and turns. A story which is superficially plausible but which, in the cold light of day, often seems terribly implausible and full of all kinds of holes. But usually, provided the television people have done their stuff properly, none of this bothers me at the time. 

It is as if all that really matters is the visual imagery, the lighting and the sound track. These stir one up in a satisfactory way and the actual story is just a prop. Rather like a prop on an Elizabethan stage which can stand for something without being anything much like it at all – say the hedge in the artisans’ play within the play about ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

Perhaps the common thread here is a safe space, often dark or near dark, a relaxed & recumbent posture and to a large extent shut off, shut away from the world outside. The brain can either make its own amusement, in the form of a dream – day dream or night dream – or it can let itself be swept away by someone else’s story – but either way, its critical facilities are largely closed down. The point is to enjoy the present, not to carp about the detail. A few more or less realistic details are enough to cast a satisfying cloak of reality over the whole.

Or put another way, perhaps the subjective experience is built mainly top-down, in broad brush strokes, with enough detail to provide a bit of colour, to keep the show on the road, being built bottom up – and with the care with which this is done reflecting the then current state of the relevant bits of brain.

Noting in passing, that in my own dreams ‘story’ is perhaps too strong a word: more often than not there seems to be plenty of context, one is engrossed, sometimes there is emotional content – but rarely a narrative. On waking, I can say where I have been and what was going in general terms, but am hard put to it to say what actually happened. And even when something does happen, more often than not I have observed rather than participated. Which is not necessarily to say that nothing happened or that I observed rather than participated, maybe it is just that the memory of it has gone. That autobiographical, narrative memory is one of the systems that the brain stem has closed down.

Going back to my mother’s phrase, she talked of suspending disbelief. In my case it seems to be more a matter of this disbelief never being there in the first place. There is nothing there for me to suspend. But, notwithstanding, perhaps she was on the same track as I am here.

PS: I do not do opera, but I am reminded of my younger brother once telling me that opera was mostly ridiculous – but once you got into it, it still worked, it still had plenty of emotional power. No doubt helped along in his case by being musical.

References

Reference 1: Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep – J. Allan Hobson – 2002. 

Reference 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9844904/. The Reunion mini-series made for television from the book below.

Reference 3: La jeune fille et la nuit – Guillaume Musso – 2018.