The other night I dreamt that a massive, orange penguin was walking around the house. Then the penguin burst open (it was just a penguin suit) and a bunch of little penguins burst out!
I half-woke up and worriedly told Lucy, “Close the door! The penguins will get in.” then burst out laughing.
In 1953 the University of Chicago’s Sleep Research Laboratory discovered that about an hour after we hit the sack we experience a burst of rapid eye movement, or REM, along with a change in brain wave activity – our brains act like they do when we’re awake.
About 80% of people recall their dreams if woken during REM; and only around 30-50% if woken after REM, but this is more a memory of dreaming without the particulars.
What’s interesting is that D-state (desynchronised- or dreaming-state) shut-eye has been observed in monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, elephants, shrews and opossums, and even in some birds and reptiles.
I sometimes dream about flying, and I wondered if birds sometimes dream about sitting in their undies on the couch with beer, pizza and a James Bond movie on TV.
Surgical deconstruction shows that the ability to dream depends on the pontine tegmentum area in the brain stem, and involves a bodily chemical called norepinephrine and sometimes serotonin.
Physiological changes include increased variability in heart rate, a jump in activity in the respiratory system and sexual organs (often caused by Jessica Simpson or Oprah), higher blood pressure and almost total relaxation of the skeletal muscles.
I’ve noticed that I tend to dream more vividly and bizarrely when the moon is full.
This is not psychosomatic, because sometimes I don’t even realise it’s a full moon until after the weird nightmares.
For me, slumberland is either in blue-and-white (like I’m in a dark room at night) or in bright, primary colours (like you’d see in a child’s old colouring-in book).
The scariest dream I ever had went something like this: I was Batman swinging from the rooftops, the grass was lumo green and the buildings processed-cheese yellow. I landed on a red roof and a guy at the other end told me everyone I knew was dead and had been replaced with robots. He peeled his face back and there was a gray, metal robot-face underneath. Then Robin did the same to reveal a metal mug.
Philosophers argue that dreams are either reflections of reality, sources of divination, extensions of the waking state, or curative.
In ancient Greece there was a practice known as ‘temple sleep’. Sick people would dos down in a god’s temple and wait for the big man (usually Asdepius) to give them two Panado and a note for work.
Psychologists laugh at such superstitions, but offer no better answers.
Freud wrote that dreams are a reflection of our repressed wishes – hostile and sexual – and that we keep ourselves from waking to avoid awareness of our disgusting desires.
Maybe I should get Lucy to dress up in a penguin suit for my birthday.
Carl Jung believed dreams balanced those bits of our character that are underrepresented in our daily lives and that they could affect those lives when we were denying ourselves true elements of our personalities.
Time to get that Batman costume out again.
Personally, I think those dream interpretation books are bollocks – if you’re so interested go see a shrink, you cheapskate. You can’t just paint all our psyches with the same hippie paintbrush.
All we know for sure is that you shouldn’t eat cheese, chocolate, or biltong before bed because that will always lead to anarchy in the land of Nod.
As for the moon thing – tides of the largest amplitude occur during the full moon or new moon, and the human body is, what, 80% liquid?
That’s got to have some effect.
