Breaking Out
Recently, I've been thinking about possibilities and of what could be. Further, I have been contemplating the inception of dreams and how far the process has progressed. Life began a billion years ago, and we've done quite a lot since then. However, what intrigues me the most is how that evolution has altered the development of dreams.
Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have brains that are significantly smaller than that of humans. This discrepancy reflects the expansion of the association cortex, a group of regions that support functions like language, self-awareness, and problem solving. How does this magnitude of a difference impact how the species dream? MIT researchers have learned that chimpanzees dream in a similar manner; they have the ability to recall and evaluate detailed sequences of events after they occurred and as such, their dreams reflect their memories and experiences. However, chimpanzees lack the ability to retain information from their dreams and call back the experiences gotten from dreams. It's not even just our closest relatives that dream.
Aquatic mammals like dolphins dream in a completely different manner. Aquatic mammals had to develop different sleeping methods from land mammals due to the drastically different environment and the dangers associated. In order to be wary of predators, dolphins and whales sleep uni-hemispherically; they quite literally "sleep" with one eye opened and one eye closed. This phenomena keeps one hemisphere of the brain awake and aware of the environment. Obviously, that reflects the idea that even if dolphins dream, they don't dream in the exact same way we do, especially if a part of the brain is conscious.
Even though I would love to understand how exactly other mammals dream, that is not what initially intrigued me after reading about the different ways species dream. No, what grabbed my attention was the correlation between danger and dreaming. The idea is validated that as the need for precaution increases, the importance of dreaming -within species- decreases. That's truly amazing. That's even exemplified by how animals in captivity evidently dream more than those in the wild. Beluga whales in captivity have demonstrated episodes of sleep lasting several minutes accompanied by convulsive movements or muscular spasms- which are associated to dreaming, unlike the average beluga whale. Similarly, sloths in zoos sleep for more than 15 hours a day, while those in the wild only sleep for 10 hours, dreaming less frequently. Does that then imply that if I was placed in an environment unsuitable for me and thus, more precarious, I would dream less? That's a revolutionary idea since I thought the evolutionary function of dreaming was to face experiences that might help guide me through those harmful situations. Does that not mean that I would dream more in the harmful situation, in order to make sense of all the possibilities? Contemporary research seems to suggest otherwise.
Antti Revonsuo was the Finnish philosopher who developed the Threat Simulation Theory for dreams. He stated that the biological function of dreaming is to stimulate threatening events in order to rehearse the perception of threats and how to go about avoiding them. He also included the assumption that our ancestors were good and frequent dreamers, and used dreams to practice the mental and physical skills needed to survive in the world. I didn't question the theory before but now I have so many questions. If the contemporary research on the frequency of dreaming is taken into account, then it only makes sense to adopt the idea that our ancestors would have actually dreamed much less due to the precarious conditions. which nullifies Revonsuo's theory. Further, the philosopher proved his theory by studying children who are traumatized and those who are not, finding that the traumatized children (from war, abuse, natural disaster and etc) have more threats in their dreams. He hypothesized that their early life triggered the dream threat simulation. I propose that the same idea can be explained in a reversal way. Perhaps, their traumatic memories became consolidated into cautious dreams- the evidence that the dreams might have helped the traumatized children navigate through their life is absent.
I don't know if my line of thinking is correct. However, what I do know is that it's important, even crucial, to compare previous theories with contemporary work. It's even more crucial to keep questioning the seemingly antiquated ideas and theories instead of following blindly and remaining in a bubble that might be impossible to burst.
