There’s a whole lore about dreaming.
In fact, Sigmund Freud wrote a book called
The Interpretation of Dreams which many people
think is the foundation of psychoanalysis.
Well scientists now have looked at Freudian
psychology and the brain using all these modern
techniques.
And first of all we realize that perhaps Sigmund
Freud wasn’t totally wrong.
There are many textbooks which simply dismiss
Freudian psychology calling it nuts.
That is nothing but the sexual fantasies of
a repressed Venetian scientist of the last
century.
But now we realize there’s more to it.
First of all the unconscious mind.
We can actually see the brain in motion and
we realize that much of the activity is totally
unconscious.
Just like what Freud predicted.
And Freud also said there is the ego, the
id and the superego, that we are in a constant
battle with our desires and our conscious.
And we see that now with brain scans.
The ego is basically your prefrontal cortex.
That is who you are.
When you wonder where am I anyway.
Well, you’re right there.
You are sitting right behind your forehead.
And then your desires.
We see the pleasure center right there at
the center of the brain.
That is the libido.
We see where the pleasure center is located.
And then your conscience is right behind your
eyes.
The orbital frontal cortex right behind your
eyes is where your conscience is.
And so we actually see that in motion.
If you were to see a chocolate cake you would
see these three parts of the brain going zippity
back and forth like a ping pong ball because
you’re constantly debating the pleasure
of eating a chocolate cake versus how fat
you’re gonna become and all the sugar and
the calories that you don’t really need.
So we see the beginnings of Freudian psychology
coming out of brain scans.
And now dreams.
Freud had a whole collection of interpretation
of dreams.
Scientists have looked at and said, “Nonsense.”
Now we understand the physiology of the dreaming
process.
And we realize that it comes at the back of
the brain, the very primitive part of the
brain and that certain parts of the brain
are shut off when you dream.
First of all your prefrontal cortex is basically
shut off, it’s quiet.
Your orbital frontal cortex that is your conscience
is also shut off.
But that part of the brain is your fact checker.
The part of the brain that said, “Hmmm,
that’s not right.
Something’s wrong” is right behind your
eyes.
That’s shut off.
What is active when you dream is your amygdala.
Now what does your amygdala govern?
Fear and emotions.
And so right then you know that when you dream
the active part of the brain is not the fact
checker, not the rational brain – it’s
the emotional brain, the fearful brain that
is active when you dream.
And then there’s some superstition called
lucid dreaming where you can actually control
the direction of the dream.
Well that superstition last year became science
fact.
At the Max Planck Institute in Germany they
were able to show once and for all that lucid
dreaming is testable, reproducible – it
is real.
And here’s how they did it.
They took a person who was about to go to
sleep and told them that when you dream clench
your right fist and then clench your left
fist.
Now when you dream you are paralyzed.
You cannot move when you dream.
Otherwise we’d be able to carry out all
sorts of horrible things and destroy ourselves.
So we are paralyzed when we dream.
But when this person went into a dream state
you can clearly see that the brain initiated
orders to clench your right fist and your
left fist.
In other words, he was conscious while he
was dreaming.
There are many Buddhist texts, many texts
hundreds of years old that give you the outlines
of how to control dreams.
Lucid dreaming.
We now know that it’s not hogwash that you
can actually do this.
You can actually direct the course of your
dream.
And then one day we may be able to brain scan
the brain as you dream and put it on a screen.
In which case somebody will be able to see
you dream and know the direction of the dream
and you are conscious of the process.
In other words, the movie Inception is not
totally hogwash.
