Musing About 'Oneirology'❓

‘Oneirology’ is the scientific approach to understanding dreams in relation to the functions of the brain.

Dreams are a mystery. The neuroscientific approach to dreaming arose at the end of the 1950s and soon proposed a physiological substrate of dreaming: ‘rapid eye movement sleep’.

Fifty years later, this hypothesis was challenged because it could not explain all of the characteristics of dream reports. Therefore, the neurophysiological correlates of dreaming are still unclear, and many questions remain unresolved.

Do the representations that constitute the dream emerge randomly from the brain, or do they surface according to certain parameters?

Is the organization of the dream’s representations chaotic or is it determined by rules?

Does dreaming have a meaning?

What is/are the function(s) of dreaming?

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.—Edgar Allan Poe

Again, dreams are a mystery. One study suggests that we dream less and less as we age. The explained variance, however, was small.

What follows is my present personal experience.

I am 70+ years old. Starting in April of this year (four months ago—it may be six months now), I began waking up at the conclusion of movie-like vivid dreams. I began recording the content of these dreams. In 80% of these dreams, my conduct is rather heroic. While (for example within the dream after which I awoke at 3 am this morning) invariably I am the victim of some injustice, upon reflection, I invariably realize I’ve conducted myself in an manner I consider admirable.

In the remaining 20%, however, my behavior has been shameful.

Almost all my dreams occur in research institutes. The late-great Colorado State University professor (my PhD mentor), Edward A. Hoover, DVM, PhD, appears in the majority of my dreams.

What a mystery❗️

Of the questions posited above, the question I will focus on herein is What is/are the function(s) of dreaming?

The exact function of dreaming is still debated, but current research suggests it plays a crucial role in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and even threat simulation.—Google’s AI Overview.

One study* showed that problems occurred very frequently in the manifest dream content and that these problems were nearly systematically related to the problems noted during pre-sleep wakefulness. In addition, they observed that effective dreams (i.e., dreams that presented some solution to the individuals’ problems) were followed by a waking state in which the impact of the problems was diminished, whereas ineffective dreams were followed by the persistence of the problems.

Of course, the critical question with which I leave you is What is the difference between and effective dream and an ineffective dream❓

This morning (and following the 80% of dreams wherein I exhibit heroic behavior) I feel like the impact of [my] problems have been diminished.

I pray that this is the case.

*Greenberg, R., Katz, H., Schwartz, W., and Pearlman, C. (1992). A research- based reconsideration of the psycho- analytic theory of dreaming. J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 40, 531–550.