I woke up this Sunday morning, perhaps for the second time, around 04:45. At first, there was nothing, then after what may have been a few seconds, a whole lot of dream became available again.
A dream which, when I try to write it down, becomes a jumble of facts and images which do not connect up into a very coherent whole. Integration is poor and there is no narrative thread – although, on occasion, such a jumble may resolve into a short sequence of scenes, sometimes connected, sometimes not. On the other hand, I know from experience that if I do not write it down then and there, the dream will likely vanish altogether, never to be recognisably recovered again. Likely vanish, but not always vanish: sometimes it will pop back again, perhaps some minutes – or even hours – later. Not sure about hours.
It is as if the dream were blocks of memory which could be online or offline. And when it is online it is in read-write mode, not just read mode. As I poke around the block of memory, as I try to make some sense of it, the block of memory is being updated. Maybe chunks are being deleted. The original dream is being overwritten with a new version. And I suspect that what I get to write down is as much a product of waking organisation, of waking imagination, as a left-over from sleeping imagination. It is difficult, if not impossible, to write down the dream as it really was – if indeed, there ever was such a thing. So I also suspect that whatever it was that goes on when one was asleep, does not usually map onto words, onto serial, linear text in a neat and tidy way.
I associate to the practise I once had of telling my two young sons stories which I made up as I went along. They were hung off a permanent framework – a chap called Nogbog the Bad who lived in the wild and woolly fens of north Cambridgeshire – loosely based on someone called Noggin the Nog of references 1 and 2 – a permanent framework very much in the way of a television soap – of domestic or police variety – sometimes both at once – but the story of the day was made up as I went along. For which purpose, it helped if I was lying down on the floor, with my eyes lightly shut. It sometimes happened that I went to sleep before they did, which was not the idea at all. It also sometimes happened that the narrative thread broke; there was a more or less long pause, after which I was usually able to restart.
So, this morning, although I was more or less awake, I seemed to be fully inside the dream again, creating new content. A process which was made easier by the dream being a rather fanciful elaboration of a real-life situation, that is to say managing the stocks and supplies of all the various pills I am now on.
All of which seems to tally rather well with the theory that I read recently – I can’t presently think where – that memory is dynamic in exactly this sort of way. Every time you access a memory you are, potentially at least, rewriting it in the light of what is going on at the time of access. Perhaps in the light of what you might be wanting at the time of access.
Perhaps also, as a young adult, you can keep all this under control. You can rely on your memories of important stuff not being dynamic in this way. But for the young and the old, it is all a much more uncertain business. Or is it not a matter of age, rather that there is a difference here between short-term memory and long-term memory? The one fragile and malleable, the other more substantial and permanent? Perhaps not a binary difference, more a matter of degree.
Another angle is the way that the large language models which have been so much in the news this year – the likes of Google’s Bard – generate plausible (but often untrue) text from some foundation or other. Is there a connection here?
Yet another is a theory of my own, that some children have a near adult capability to generate consequences from premises, which makes them capable of saying things which are true, but of which they have no emotional experience, of which they have, as it were, no real understanding. It would perhaps be better if they did not.
Time to take another look at the dreams reported by Hobson in the short book at reference 3. Dreams which seem to include a lot more action than mine: I have plenty of complicated situations but not many complicated stories.
PS 1: I think we must have had one or more of the Noggin books. I do not remember ever seeing the television version – or even knowing that there was one.
PS 2: I have failed to find a full-size version of the snap, just this rather small one from Wikipedia. Maybe BH will be able to put her hand on the book itself.
PS 3: it comes back to me now, that Hobson suggests that important parts of the brain are turned off when you are dreaming. Parts which are turned on again when you wake up. To that extent, you are never going to recover what you dream when you wake. Something else to take another look at.
References
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noggin_the_Nog.
Reference 2: The Sagas of Noggin the Nog – Oliver Postgate, Peter Firmin – 1992.
Reference 3: Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep – J. Allan Hobson – 2002.
Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/dream-diary-first-report.html. A previous product of reference 3. I might add that dream reports have run along at a fairly steady 100 rows (of Excel worksheet) or so a quarter since then.
No comments:
Post a Comment