What Moves Behind the Curtain?
©2010 ShatteredSwords (Used with permission)
It’s really no wonder some people are obsessed with dreams. It’s such a curious phenomenon!
Humans and other animals dream, but not every animal. Some people remember their dreams, but others don’t – why is that? Do other animals remember their dreams? If they remember, do they dwell on them? Does aversion to certain dreams keep them awake some nights?
In humans, dreaming has been linked to memory and psychosis, among many other things. Would research show similar things in other dreaming animals? For that matter, how is dreaming defined? What is required for dreaming to occur? Are the requirements different along different evolutionary paths? And is there some advantage to being a dreaming creature, or is it simply a byproduct of neural complexity?
Do you suppose aliens dream? Might they devote as much energy as we have to assigning meaning to unconscious hallucinations? What do you think aliens dream about?
Birds and mammals decidedly dream: they have REM sleep periods, just like humans. Dreaming is a byproduct of neural complexity and although its function is still not totally clear, it is connected with turning short-term memory into long-term (processing or filtering the input by selective synaptic reinforcement). We remember a dream if we awake during/just after it and then only fleetingly, unless we write it down immediately.
Aliens may or may not have the equivalent of dreaming. It will depend entirely on the substrate and organization of their cognitive apparatus.
Lovely image, by the way, as was the one from last week! Has dreaming been on your mind?
Octopus and cetaceans have very complicated brains, but enough complexity or complexity of the right type for dreaming? And do animals dream during hibernation or torpor?
I’ll let the artists know their work is appreciated by a scientist. I expect they’ll be delighted!
Dreaming is always on my mind because I dream so much and so vividly. Due to recent events, the subjects and tones of my dreams have changed so much that it’s distracting. But in a good way. But the two most recent images themselves are actually what inspired me to write the posts I paired them with. I love art as idea generator.
I very much liked all the images you’ve chosen. The one of the dead as living underwater — I don’t recall if I commented on that one. An interesting and haunting change from the dark dry lands of many mythologies, closer to the drowned city of Ys.
As for dreaming, I suspect that any species whose nervous system is like that of birds and mammals will dream. Which means yes for cetaceans, but maybe for octopuses, despite their obvious intelligence. Cephalopod brains are differently organized and I don’t know if we have studied how they form memories.
Dreaming during hibernationis a fascinating question to ponder. Hibernation is not real sleep, metabolic activity is lowered to the point where some sleepers don’t awaken. Also, humans coming out of prolonged periods of anesthesia often lose memory. Which means that the consolidating mechanism is in abeyance. So I suspect hibernation may be dreamless, but that’s only a suspicion.
In the mid-eighties, Sydney van Scyoc wrote a wonderful trilogy that includes human hibernation, Daughters of the Sunstone (Darkchild, Bluesong, Starsilk). She didn’t shy from the obvious extrapolations. Highly recommended, if you can find it.