When we are waiting around or about to sleep, our minds always meander to the “what if…” thoughts. My thoughts, in particular, usually end up at the same destination. This specific destination is recording my dreams.
There are days where I can feel that my dream was like a storybook or something from the imagination of J.K Rowling. All throughout the morning, I aimlessly think and try to piece together all the events, similar to a sobering drunk who cannot recall the night before. Some days the dream, or some particular part, is so clear to me it’s as if it were a real memory. These are the few that have wriggled their way into my permanent dream recollection. An example of one of these was a night several years ago that I had dreamt of myself flying. Before that point I could never recall ever being able to feel the full sensory effects of this particular physical act. If I could have recorded that dream and watched it with awake eyes, I know that it could have been even more wonderful.
Dreams are not very much understood by the science community. Dreams only last about 45 min to an hour. They occur mainly through your REM sleep. Anyways, three things I definitely know about the whole process of dreaming revolves around your sensory, how you cannot act your dreams out and the limitless potential of this small window.
1. Sensory-Within dreams there is only so much you can feel since your brain cannot recall certain physical actions if they have not yet been done. A great example of this would deal with the act of kissing within dreams. With girls it may seem as if you are but your brain fumbles for sensory information to pair feeling with this dream.
2. Sleep paralysis-When you hit that REM sleep, deep restful sleep, your body’s neurons that control motor skills shuts down. This is called REM atonia. If this process did not occur, you would act out your dreams. Sleepwalking is not associated with this since once you enter that state, you have some consciousness; enough to perform normal tasks. So don’t worry if you’re sleepwalking that your REM atonia is dysfunctional.
3. Within your REM sleep your inhibitors or what I call “imagination” (this might be wrong so just think inhibitors) are shut down. You are capable to think of anything. This is actually the cause of such famous works at Paul McCartney’s song Yesterday, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others. With these logic inhibitors shut off, your brain can process at its more creative than if you were awake. There is such an invention that alerts you, without waking you of course, that you’re currently in REM sleep so you may use that small window to imagine anything you want.
To conclude this rambling post that involves way too much information about dreams, is that recording dreams could be another frontier. In the sectors of psychology and science, analyzing this process could unlock so many secrets that we still don’t even know about our brains. Could you imagine a library of your dreams sitting in a folder on your computer? Well this dream may be close than anyone, or I, could have hoped for. Scientists in Japan have actually been able to take thought patterns and translate that to 3D images.
The technology is still in its beginning stages, yet, in 20 or 40 years the technology may be more advanced then we could ever dream.
Flying Platypus 