Of dreams and arrogance

I suppose I should change the name of this blog to "occasional psychwriter." No apologies but here I am again. The end of the school year may herald greater productivity but no promises. I will continue to transfer some of my old blogs
here (I can access them but not post new blogs on the original site) and add a new
piece...occasionally.

Sharon Bagely,science editor of Newsweek did an article titled "The hidden brain." Until recently many neuroscientists described default brain activity, when a person is doing nothing but resting, staring off into space or dreaming, as meaningless, random noise. The neuro establishment now seems to be reversing itself on this position. When the brain is in a default mode and our mind is blank, brain neurons are chattering away, expending twenty times as much energy as when we are consciously engaged in thought--thinking, feeling, and using our senses. Scientists are now concluding that this activity is more than just a background murmur; it must serve some important function. One theory is that default brain activity prepares it for future contingencies. It creates images that help us make sense out of real experiences. It integrates memories,imagines the future, plays out possible scenerios to help us navigate social situations.

I am no stranger to neuroscientific hubris. When I was writing my dream books I ran
smack up against an NIH neuroscientist that Chelsea House Books used as a consultant. He had a distinct bias against anything subjective and was not at all happy with psychology, which I'm sure he categorized as a pseudoscience. Like many others of his ilk, he considered dreams to be noise. The publisher insisted that half of my book be devoted to the brain. I acquiesced and the title became "Sleep and Dreaming," not he book I intended to write, and I had to scrap the best parts of my manuscript.

My thesis was that dreams have no Freudian, unconscious purpose, but do have meaning. I found that to be so in my own dreams as well as those of patients I had treated. Begley's summary of recent neuroscientific thinking drives home both the arrogance of those who dismiss subjective processes as unimportant and my own faith in the significance of many drerams. They provide evidence of what the brain is doing when we sleep, perhaps as important as brain wave readings. If the new theories hold water, then we can learn from dreams by considering them as the sleeping brain's efforts to organize, process, sort out, integrate, classify, utilize past and present experiences, and to prepare us for future events. If we can interpret the information gleaned from dreams then we are in some ways better off for the effort.