User:JohnB/Fanfiction/What is a dream

In Daoist tradition there appears the following tale: 'Lao Tzu fell asleep and dreamt he was a butterfly. Upon wakening he asked, Am I a man who has just been dreaming he was a butterfly? Or a sleeping butterfly now dreaming he is a man?'

Quoted in William Harston, Things that Nobody Knows [London: Atlantic Books, 2011], p. 314.

I woke up early one morning in 2019 to find a giant scallop lying on the bed next to me, the kind you see on the seabed in Morrowind. It was a monster that could have covered a standard card table. I wondered in horror how and why it got there. I thought, "This can't be real! I must be hallucinating!" I'd never hallucinated before, and it was beyond me why this should be happening now right after having woken up.

I gripped the edge and tried lifting it. It had quite a heft, and it took quite a bit of muscle-work to flip it over. I found that the under shell was missing, and the fleshy body of the scallop was masticating on a large snail. I could barely contain my disgust and wished to God this wasn't real.

Then I woke up again.

It was highly disconcerting to find that something so palpably real just a moment ago no longer existed as I looked around to see where it might have gone. Well, scallops can't just walk away, so I was satisfied that it was not a waking hallucination after all. However, this was not the first time I'd had such a dream.

I don't remember the vast majority of my dreams, and when I do wake from one, it's soon forgotten as inconsequential. But when I do remember one for being out-of-this-world bizarre, it's due to some kind of mental stress, like the one I had some 20 years ago when the high school I was teaching for was on the verge of going bankrupt over a land deal gone bad.

I woke when the doorbell rang, and I called out "I'll get it!" as I stumbled through the bedroom door and across the living/dining area to the entrance. I unlocked the door and was nonplussed to find a group of about five hideously ugly children gathered in the hallway laughing at me. One of them pointed his finger at me, and in a rage, I took it between my teeth and bit it off.

When I woke up again, I wasn't standing at the doorway but was still in bed. All that activity never happened, and yet it was so real. What made both dreams come to a halt was the sudden realization that something wasn't right. After all, scallops don't feed on snails. I don't know what they feed on, but it's not snails. Also, a finger can't be bitten off like a breadstick. So what's going on here?

There is a rabbinic saying in Judaism that a dream is 1/60th prophecy [myjewishlearning{dot}com], which begs the question which 1/60 of the scallop dream was prophetic. Still, this brings to mind the incomparable dream scene in Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971), in which Macbeth sees a king holding up a mirror reflecting his immediate predecessor, going all the way back to bloodied Banquo himself.

What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?
Another yet! A seventh! I'll see no more:
And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass (mirror)
Which shows me many more...

Lalatia Varian of the Imperial Cult also prefaces each quest she gives you with "I have seen..." and leaves it to you to guess where to go and what to do. We can safely assume she'd seen these things in a dream. However, we know this is not how dreams work in real life.

It was while reading Volume 10 of Will Durant's The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution that I finally came across a workable theory on what causes a dream. I had tried to answer this question once before but could only give examples of dreams and dream-like states.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) wrote a seminal work for what was to become the science of psychology. It was called A Treatise of Human Nature in which, among other things, he suggested that the sights and sounds we see and hear all around us are not outside of us but within our heads. We have been conditioned from the day we were born to believe that the ambulance siren is outside the window, not in our head.

There was a chapter in a reading textbook at the college that I retired from in 2018 that was about this very same topic, and I remember how the students struggled to wrap their heads around it. The air waves from the siren cause the window to vibrate at the same frequency, and it is those air waves emitted by the vibrating glass that enter our ear. The ambulance-siren center of the brain is stimulated, and we know there is an ambulance passing outside our window. If it was a tree falling in the park, the falling-tree center in the brain would be stimulated instead.

The textbook used the tree-falling-in-an-empty-forest scenario to illustrate the absence of sound where there's an absence of people to hear it. It will cause airwaves to travel and dissipate, and that is all. I liked to tell my students about the Tunguska Event that happened in central Siberia in 1908. Three people didn't live to tell about it, but one survivor described it as:

 ...the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, the wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down... Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright...as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting...  And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!

 Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck the fallen trees.

 We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled "Look up" and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder. (Wikipedia)

His sense of sight registered an object as bright as the sun, and the stereoscopic nature of his sight registered that it was moving swiftly across the sky into the distance. His sense of hearing registered four explosions and/or sonic booms that were decreasing in volume, and the stereophonic nature of his hearing registered that they were increasing in distance. Of course, to his own way of thinking, the bright object was flying overhead, and the sounds were getting fainter and farther away.

Some 20,000 square kilometers of forest were flattened, and one initial report told of an explosion that rained stones and gravel from the sky. However, the science of astronomy was still young and so could have had no explanation for the phenomenon, and with a world at war and a revolution in progress, it took several decades for anybody to venture into that part of the world to figure out what had happened. It's now believed to have been the air burst of a small asteroid or comet, and had nobody lived to tell of it, the world would have been none the wiser. Now we live in mortal fear that it could happen again at any time.

The encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was so struck by Hume's writings that in his Letter on the Blind he formulated what might be called "the blind-man conundrum". Let's say we have a man born blind. We place in his hands a sphere and tell him to feel the sphere all over. Next, we place in his hands a cube and tell him to feel the cube all over. After he has been operated on and cured of his blindness, we bring him back to the sphere and the cube and ask him to identify each from his sight alone. He can't--because he has never actually seen a sphere nor a cube. However, I would imagine that given enough time to reenact the touching of the objects with his hands--like shadow touching--he would eventually guess correctly.

Therefore, what is true about hearing is also true about touch and sight, especially sight since it is what we see in a dream that confounds us, or maybe even entertains us. The back of the eye is covered with green, blue, and red light sensors that are hardwired to the brain. Think of it as a kind of digital camera, which does exactly the same thing. Each of those sensors in the eye is like a pixel-sized sensor in the camera. Each pixel of color is given a digital value and arranged in a grid with so many pixels in the x-direction and so many in the y-direction. If you've ever tried to open an image that was incompatible with any photo program, you'd know that the outcome is a load of gibberish that only the proper program can interpret. Fortunately, we don't have that problem anymore.

The eye does the same except that the brain has to reverse the upside-down image and combine all red/green stimuli into the color yellow, which exists only in our head. All other colors are combinations of red, blue, and green. In the real world, colors probably do not exist, and we would see things as they used to appear on a black-and-white TV screen. Surfaces reflect light of given wavelengths that stimulate the red/blue/green sensors in the eye. I once met a color-blind teenager who couldn't tell the difference between green, yellow, and red. He told me he can drive anyway because he knows which traffic signal means stop and which means go.

Well, now that I've thrown your sense of reality into disarray, let's go back to the question of what causes dreams. I read somewhere, and this is common knowledge anyway, that dreams occur during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of sleep. According to Diderot, who took a great interest in this problem, the conscious mind has been switched off, but the sight, sound, and touch channels somehow switch on automatically. In my experience, pain is reduced to a tingling sensation, as when a strange creature sank its teeth into my hand. Occasionally, there's music in the background, but it's always instrumental and unrecognizable. There may be colors as well, but they don't really stand out. Food eaten in a dream is tasteless. The strongest sensation is that of motion, complete with butterflies in the stomach, as when your car has been driven off a high cliff and manages to land in one piece in shallow water. Much of it is a chaotic hodge-podge that throws you around willy-nilly and can leave you mentally exhausted in the morning.

On July 29, 2010, Jordan Lite wrote "How can you control your dreams?" in Scientific American, which judges that the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Inception, about dream research using drugs and psychology, is "far-fetched" but not to the point of total science fiction. Research is going on into experimental control of recurring nightmares brought on by post-traumatic stress. It has been shown that working with a therapist to develop an alternative scenario to a recurring nightmare and concentrating on that scenario just before going to sleep can have a positive effect. Without this preemptive-strike capability, you are at the mercy of your dream because where there is no self-awareness that you are dreaming there is no protective action you can take against it. Victims of crime can especially benefit from this.

If we can channel our dreams, who's to say we aren't dreaming already, like Lao Tzu?

From my story, The Book and the Stone:

The captain decided to make a port of call of many-spired Firsthold in the Summerset Isles because the ship still had a long way to go before reaching Cyrodiil. He also wanted to avoid war-torn Valenwood at all costs. Having spent the night on land, the captain and crew were preparing to cast off when they heard a shout, "Help! HELP!"

Two men came running up the gangplank, and some of the crew wanted to drive them away. The captain ordered them to allow the men aboard to see if they had good reason to seek refuge. As they came on deck, one suddenly fell and lay delirious. He began speaking, but it sounded like total gibberish.

"I'm a fellow bastard-lunatic, so I can understand him!" the second man said.

"Why can't I understand him?" the captain asked puzzled.

"You're not a bastard-lunatic."

"Oh," the captain responded almost disappointed. "But what happened back there?"

"The mages have been rounding up all of us bastard-lunatics and throwing us in a dungeon called the Tower of Nightmares. This fellow was presumed dead. I was appointed his gravedigger and stood at the ready to bury him after some guards dumped him into the grave. Suddenly up he jumps scaring the everloving shite out of those guards, but I being a bastard-lunatic wasn't the least bit surprised. I decided now was the time for him and me to make a run for it."

A contingent of battlemages soon arrived and ordered the captain to return the escaped prisoners. The captain responded by ordering the crossbowmen to take aim.

"These men have taken haven with me! They are under my protection!"

"Then this ship will not sail!" one of the mages shouted back.

"Then embrace your demise!"

The battlemages promptly backed off and hurried back to the tower.

"What's he saying?" the first mate asked the second man, who was listening to the gibberish.

"He had found a way to tunnel into the cell next door where a prisoner was dying. Then he lay in wait until the prisoner was pronounced dead by the healer. He quickly scrambled into the cell, dragged the body to his own cell, and having changed clothes, lay on the dead man's bunk. The guards came with a stretcher to convey him to the graveyard."

(Note: I borrowed this from The Count of Monte Cristo.)

"Who is he?" the captain inquired.

"He goes by the name Edgar, and he strongly requests that you take him to Bal Timmer."

"Bal Timmer--where's that?"

The first mate shrugged in response.

"And who might you be?" the captain asked, marveling at the strangeness of all of this.

"Reynolds is the name, sir."

"Reynolds, could you help the first mate and me move Edgar to a bunk below?"

"Actually, he's not going anywhere,” Reynolds put in. “He seems to be waking up from his nightmare now."

"You mean he's dreaming all of this, ourselves included," the captain said doubtfully.

"Exactly."

Edgar said one last word and then vanished entirely.

"What did he say?"

"'Nevermore.'"

There was a protracted silence.

"You know, it makes me wonder," the captain finally said to nobody in particular, "whether we are dreaming everything we experience, and if so, what happens when we wake up."

"Maybe we all end up in Bal Timmer," the first mate chuckled, and the captain gave him a sharp look.

"Well, consider what happened to Vaezbrub. Vaezbrub was my bastard-lunatic soothsayer," he added turning to Reynolds. "Poof--vanished without a trace!"

"I can assure you, gentlemen, that we bastard-lunatics are just as biodegradable as you are."

(...In the four days between Walker finding [Edgar Allan] Poe outside the public house [in Baltimore] and Poe’s death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. [A waking dream in the Tower of Nightmares?] The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for “Reynolds”— a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery. [smithsonianmag{dot}com{slash}history{slash}still-mysterious-death-edgar-allan-poe-180952936{slash}])