Sleepworking
For centuries sleep was viewed as an annihilation of consciousness. Now scientists regard the sleeping brain as “an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play—and to work—during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms known as deep sleep.”
I’ve long suspected that writing actually gets done in your sleep, and what you do when you’re awake is basically transcription.
“Now, a small group of neuroscientists is arguing that at least one vital function of sleep is bound up with learning and memory. A cascade of new findings, in animals and humans, suggest that sleep plays a critical role in flagging and storing important memories, both intellectual and physical, and perhaps in seeing subtle connections that were invisible during waking — a new way to solve a math or Easter egg problem, even an unseen pattern causing stress in a marriage. The theory is controversial, and some scientists insist that it’s still far from clear whether the sleeping brain can do anything with memories that the waking brain doesn’t also do, in moments of quiet contemplation.”
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
October 24th, 2007 at 03:45
I still vividly remember Dr. Agnes Bueno (the famous psychiatrist), ever the Freudian disciple, in her lecture when she said that we don’t sleep and dream but we sleep TO dream. Dysfunctional sleep/dream is concomitant to, sometimes a cause of many a mental pathology. It’s as essential to life as breathing, drinking, eating and copulating. We dream every time we sleep; we just don’t remember them all the time. Sleeping (and dreaming) is when there’s no super-ego to censor the id and that’s when we get to be who we really are – all defense mechanisms, repression and suppression thrown out the window. It’s the only way we can make sense of all the crazy and fucked up stuff we go through in our waking hours. The cliché is true: we truly make a better decision after we have “slept through” the problem. Without dreaming, we’d all go bonkers.