Dreams : What Do They Mean.

For years and years, I wondered about dreams.

What are they?

Where do they come from?

Why do some of them keep repeating time after time?

Why do they sometimes look so real and vivid that we almost feel as if we are living in them?

Is there any meaning to them?

Are they trying to tell us something, some kind of warning, message or some prediction of future events?

Being a creature of science, I wanted to know the answers to all of these questions, and maybe some more. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not go very far. I heard some clairvoyant souls bring some spiritual discussions and some para-normal theories into play; some used dreams as a link to the past, present or future events; some used it as a window into the past life and some other equally dubious concepts.

In short, these explanations made interesting stimulants for cocktail-party conversations, including the usual "My Dream Is Better Than Yours" or "My Dream Is Scarier Than Yours" challenges! Nothing of substance, of course! The third-party experiences and validations were also the staple of such discussions. Alcohol and good food seemed to fuel these episodes, and combined with the insatiable human curiosity, it took the conversations in different directions.

If you tried to distill it into something useful and meaningful, you came up with nothing more than vaporware.

So it went on, until I started studying computers during my college years in early seventies. At that time, I started to understand that computers came in two flavors: analog and digital. Analog computers took in data in a continuous, unbroken fashion, and required considerable amount of storage space to store, retrieve and manipulate it, while the digital computers broke the data into 1's and 0's, thereby making it easy to store, retrieve and manipulate it. My professor explained that analog data was like a live musical concert, or like an ocean wave where the motion was continuous and unbroken - in other words, the events we see in real everyday life in a continuous form, like a sine wave. The digital form was like a motion that we saw with a strobe.

That got me thinking. It seemed that all real events seemed analog, while the digital events were analog events chopped up into small chunks, linear and simple - 1's and 0's. It seemed that all of our senses gave us real, analog data that was continuous.

I wondered what happened to the enormous amounts of analog data that we were collecting throughout our waking moments. It must be somewhere, I figured, because we could always remember the events of past in vivid details, with the appropriate sensory connections. We remembered our visits to our grandmother, and could remember in detail her voice, the delicious smell of her home-cooked meals and the taste and flavor of her heavenly cookies and the sensation of swinging on the tire swings. We remembered our first dates, the first cry of our babies right after they were born. So, all of this information was neatly filed somewhere in our brain, easily accessed at the first hint of a connection. The massive storage space needed for such data and such an elegant, responsive and efficient system of retrieval of the information meant only one thing. It was probably stored in some digital form to make it available for fast, efficient and accurate retrieval.

While all these conjectures were going through my mind over a period of time, I had a chance to meet one of my friends who worked in a bank. During our conversation, I asked him a question that always perplexed me: why did banks keep such short hours, and fewer working days (remember, this was in early seventies!). He explained that all the transactions that took place during the course of a business day took at least twice as much time to sort through, match and post all the transactions accurately. He called it a "back-room" operation.

Can there be a similar process going on in our brain, where all this massive information coming in must be sorted, posted and filed neatly and accurately so that it can be available quickly, I wondered.

Over the next six months or so, I was always thinking about the meaning of all of this, when one night, while I was sleeping, I suddenly woke up around 2 am and started putting all these pieces together in my mind. It was as if I found out a missing piece of a puzzle, and I was so excited, I could not go to sleep and had to make sense of it all.

One of the first thought that hit me was that during the day when we are awake, we are constantly taking in live data, leaving very little time to analyze it, sort it and file it away, because the "fight or flight" instinct kept us on the alert all the time and the survival instinct took precedence over everything else. I thought the most logical thing for our brain to do was to wait until we went to sleep, when, because of the safety and comfort of our environment, only a small portion of our brain was monitoring events on a reflexive mode. This seemed like the ideal time for the brain to do the "back-room operation" of sorting through the massive analog data collected during our waking hours, convert it into digital form, and index it, label it and file it with a suitable tag, so that it will be easy to retrieve.

Then came the interesting question. How does it relate to the data already in files? When I started thinking about it, I pretended that I was a "back-room" clerk, and started visualizing the kinds of situations I would face. One of the first thing that hit me was, what if the teller made a wrong entry? I would have to put it aside for a later time, when everything else was taken care of and I had more time to look at it and check it out, and if I couldn't sort it out, seek some help. When I finished all my filing, and this wrong entry was still there, that would stay on the clipboard for someone higher up to sort out. In the flash of an inspiration, I thought that this is what we could be seeing as dreams-things that could not relate to anything else in the past, and had no logical place to go to.

The question of recurring dreams could be explained in this way. If over several nights, there is no valid connection to other data, this wrong entry will keep on popping up, until, at some future, predetermined point, this data would go into a "round file" and get lost!

Also, that would explain some of the dreams as the result of this analog-to-digital conversion, where the data just would not fit into the format.

(There is a lot more to it that has developed in my thought process over the years, but that could very well be the subject of another blog!)

So I propose this as my hypothesis of dreams, and now I leave it open to discussion, hoping that someone, somewhere , may find something useful, meaningful and beneficial in understanding this mystery that has kept us awake at night, tossing and turning and trying to make some sense of it!

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Response to the comments:

I really appreciate your thoughts, observations and references related to this blog.

I am planning to publish part two of this blog soon, after my material is ready.

In the meanwhile, I would like to address the thoughts and comments of the responders who were kind enough to share them here:

1: jorge, thank you for your comment. I will be expanding on the thoughts expressed in this blog, and also adding some interesting observations and concepts in the next blog.

2. robertinseattle, it is interesting to read about your experience. There will be one aspect about dreams that I will be writing about in my next blog regarding events and pace of the day.

3. victhestick, you make a very interesting observation!

4. alla, thanks for the information about Hypnosis Institute.

5. damjamjar: Thank you for the link.

One of the most dangerous thing about expressing your thoughts in an uncharted area is the possibility of an accusation of plagiarism. To keep out of these troubled waters, I have been practicing the habit of expressing my new ideas and concepts to a group of people. If anything, some of them remember the discussion and the time-frame.

I this particular case, I expressed my thoughts and hypothesis to a group of my wife's relatives on the Christmas Eve in 1975, when there was a lively discussion on this subject. About 5 of the people attending the event said they understood what this meant and shared their own stories and surmised how their dreams could be explained in the way I was proposing.

I am extremely pleased to read about the experiments at the Rockefeller Institute that were the subject of the article in the Discover Magazine in 1992, because it seems to validate my hypothesis.

Thank you very much for the link.

6. aem, the questions you raised are very interesting and provocative!

I will try to address them in one of my future blogs.

Keep reading and participating! That is what make this blog interesting!

Peace and Blessings!

April 27, 2007 6:35 AM