The Fox's Secret

In this post I want to share a very short and memorable part of a longer dream that has already faded from memory.  The narrative itself won’t take much time but I think that there is a great deal to unpack from this very brief moment.  Here is the narrative:

I am sitting in the second row of seats in a van.  I am next to the sliding door to the back part of the van and it is already open.  There are two men and at least one young adult/adolescent.  The two men are in the front two seats and one of them is my dad.  I am not sure who the others are.  Both my dad and I get out of the van and I realize we are in a parking lot on the North Side of Pittsburgh.  We are next to a parking garage on our right.  Looking to the left, I see Three Rivers Stadium.  At first this feels normal, but then it occurs to me that Three Rivers Stadium is “no longer there.”  Of course, it IS there, standing right in front of me.  I try to tell my dad that it’s not there and he laughs at the obviously absurd statement.  I say that I mean it shouldn’t be there, that it’s gone, that this has to be a memory or a dream.  He shakes his head in disbelief and tells me to prove it.  There is a breeze blowing.  ”See,” he says.  ”I feel that.  Do you?  Just like a normal breeze?”  And he is right.  Everything looks and feels perfectly real and normal.  There is no way to prove I am dreaming.  The pavement feels solid under my feet, the breeze I can feel on my face and I can turn in every direction and see what’s around me.  A perfectly seamless world without gaps.  I say, “It’ not a breeze, it’s the memory of a breeze.”  Then I look at the parking garage and the bland N1 sign designating what lot it is expands to more letters and symbols and spells out “A fool parks here.”  I remember the fool being important in my dreams and I hold up my hand to cut off something my dad is saying as I go to find the fool.  I go around the corner of the garage and I hear laughter, but it is a woman’s laughter and not what I had expected.  I then hear another woman laughing.  I look up at the higher levels of the garage and I know it’s coming from up there but I can’t see anything.  Then I wake up.

Okay, so it took a little longer to narrate than I originally thought it would.  I try to be thorough and put down in writing every detail I can remember so that the analysis can be that much more thorough.  So what are my thoughts regarding this dream?

First, it reminds me of the scientific aspects of dreaming that I have written about previously.  In one of my first dream posts, I discussed some of the ways in which brain functions are different during dreaming than they are in waking and how these differences can help explain the dream experience.  Two of the brain areas that have low levels of activation during dreaming are the DLPFC (dorso-lateral pre-frontal cortex) and the regions associated with short term memory.  I think this dream is further evidence for how that lower activation comes into play.

The DLPFC acts as a “fact-checker” in waking life.  After receiving an emotional signal from the amygdala that you could basically translate as “Hey!  Something’s wrong!  Figure out what it is!” the DLPFC recruits the efforts of other brain areas to figure it out.  In dreams, things that would seem very odd in waking life don’t seem “out of the ordinary” to us WHILE we are dreaming in part because of the lower activity in this brain area.  But in this dream, it did occur to me that it was odd that Three Rivers Stadium was there.  Why?

One easy explanation would simply be that no two sleep or dream states are alike and that sometimes the DLPFC is a bit more alert than during other dreams.  This is probably true in this dream.  But why was I able to figure out what was wrong and then realize I was dreaming?

Another area that is nearly shut down during dreaming is the area relating to short term memory–the kind of memory that roughly covers the last 30 minutes or so of our conscious experience.  I would need access to this kind of memory to recognize it as out of the ordinary to walk out my front door and end up in Alaska.  Since we don’t have much access to this kind of memory in dreams, bizarre transitions often don’t seem bizarre at all until after we wake up. (Think of all the recounted dreams you’ve heard from people that inexplicably go “and then I was in this place…and then I was in another…and then…and so son without a pause to ask what the heck is going on!)

But we DO have pretty good access to our long term memory.  So while it might not seem strange at all to exit my bedroom and end up in the White House, it could still seem strange to me to be standing outside Three Rivers Stadium.  The fact that this stadium is no longer in existence is available to me even in the dream state, even if I have no idea how I got in that van, who most of the other people in the van were, why we had parked there and so on.  Long term memory intact, I was able to realize that I was standing outside of a building that simply isn’t there anymore.

Moving beyond the science of brain areas and activation levels, though, there are really interesting philosophical questions that come up in this dream.  The most obvious regards the question of “what is real?” or “what can be proved?”  This was a “lucid” dream, a dream in which I realized I was dreaming, and yet there was no evidence I could offer to anyone else in the dream that this was the case.  In fact, the only evidence I had was the anachronistic presence of a building that shouldn’t be there anymore.  Prodded by my dad’s question, I investigated the reality around me for any other signs that it lacked realism.  It did not.  The door of the van, the parking lot, the parking garage, the breeze, even the warmth of the sun was indistinguishable from any ordinary experience of waking life.  I could touch and taste and smell and see and hear just as well as I can right now.

And yet I concluded that it was all a memory.  Or built from a memory.  Memory doesn’t work like a digital video recorder even in waking life.  Memory is all about connections between neurons.  Memory has gaps that are seamlessly filled in by the brain without any conscious effort.  Even our conscious, waking experience has this quality.  They eyes are not capable of taking in enough information each second to produce the seamless “picture” most of us see as we look out at the world.  The brain fills in the gaps.  And it filled in the gaps in the dream as well, without any external input at all.

If you have been watching any of the new series “Caprica” on the Sci-Fi Channel as I have, you might know that there is a virtual world that people can enter that seems just as real as this one even in the absence of physical objects of people.  The more dreams I have like this, dreams where I know that the world I see around me “isn’t real” and yet that world remains indistinguishable from the real, the more I am convinced it is only a matter of time before we create such simulations “for real”.  Perhaps “we” have done so already and we’re living in one right now.  Could you prove that we’re not?