THE
HEAD TRIP: LUCID DREAMING WITH JEFF WARREN
(2007)
As a comic whose name escapes me once observed, the human
brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment
you wake up and doesn’t stop until you arrive at work. We
are all intimately acquainted with our many shades of
awareness: from wide awake and alert to day-dreamy to
dead-tired. Yet, in spite of this familiarity, we’re often
silent witnesses to the unfathomable ways of the psyche:
the Freudian slip, the emotional jag, the nightmare or even
the black dog of depression.
In his investigation of the mind’s mercurial ways, former
CBC producer Jeff Warren has penned a vivid hybrid of
philosophical treatise, science journalism and first-person
report. The
Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of
Consciousness examines
our daily cycle of awareness, from the delta-wave swells of
deep sleep to the alpha-wave “zone” sought by athletes and
artists. With its many practical tips for exploring the
brain’s capabilities, you could call it the missing manual
to the hardware in your head.
I met with the mid-thirties author at a coffee shop in
downtown Vancouver to discuss grey matters. Warren turns
out to be a fast-talking, hyperarticulate carnival barker
for the latest findings in neuroscience. In the service of
CBC Radio’s Ideas – and a subsequent book contract – the
author has clambered aboard his own wheel of consciousness
like a kid on a fairground ride. He’s been wired up in
sleep labs, serially hypnotized, outfitted in a
lucid-dreaming device and underwent a three-week, midwinter
stint in a cabin in Northern Ontario, with little more than
candlelight for company, to investigate how his sleep
patterns would entrain to Earth’s natural cycles.
As a kid, Warren used to lie in bed waiting for the exact
moment that sleep set in. Night after night, the act of
observation eluded him. He’s been fascinated with sleep,
and the mind, ever since. “The whole idea for the wheel of
consciousness, and indeed this book, came as I was drifting
off to sleep at night,” said Warren, sipping a cup of green
tea. He experienced a classic “hypnagogic” state, notable
for the parade of seemingly random images and thoughts that
preface sleep. If someone’s lucky like Warren, this may
include creative solutions to daytime problems.
The author’s reverie-inspired book concept echoes one of
the more famous hypnagogic episodes in history, experienced
by the nineteenth century German chemist Friedrich Kekule.
One night, on the edge of sleep in front of his fireplace,
Kekule had a vision of a snake swallowing its tail. He
later realized he had the solution to the molecular
structure of the benzene molecule: an enclosed hydrocarbon
ring. It turned out to be a milestone discovery in organic
chemistry.
It’s often said that answers come to us when we “sleep on
it.” As Warren notes in his book, Brahms, Puccini, Wagner,
Poe, Twain, Stevenson, Tolstoy, Klee, Dali, Dickens and
Goethe “… are all said to have been hypnagogically inspired
at one time or another.” It would be nice company to keep,
but I for one have never had any fragments of inspiration
while dropping off to sleep.
I’ve had better luck with lucid dreaming, those terrific
REM-sleep adventures in which you realize that you’re the
dreamweaver – with the option to behave like a power-mad
film director. “The lucid dream is the equivalent of
mindfulness in waking,” Warren tells me. “So when you look
around in waking, then you’ll really notice the texture of
everything, the shapes, the colours, the sounds. In a lucid
dream, you really clue into that. The insane thing is, it’s
a model of the world every bit as real as this one here. I
didn’t know that until it happened to me.”
What happened, as Warren describes in his book, is that he
encountered a dream world indistinguishable from the waking
world. “The dream was nothing like ones I remembered from
the past – everything was preternaturally vivid, full of
supercharged detail and colour. I felt as if I had atomic
vision and that I could see particles twining in the air
like dust motes. I kneeled down and ran my index finger
along the cobble-stoned street. Each stone was smooth on
top with grit collected in the grooves between the stones.
“I thought I knew what dreaming was, but it turned out I’d
been watching scratchy Super-8 home movies on the bottom
corner of an eight-storey, 15,000 watt Xenon-bulb IMAX
screen.”
I tell Warren I once had a dream in which I parked my car
in a lot full of old vehicles, all Sputnik-era tailfins and
big, gleaming bumpers. Sometime later that evening, I was
wandering around in my dream in a car lot, but all the
vehicles looked modern. It occurred to me that I had parked
my car not in this dream, but in another dream, earlier
that night.
He laughs at the anecdote and I relate another nocturnal
adventure of such astounding clarity and detail that I
recalled thinking during the dream, “Wait till I tell my
friends about this!” Yet the feeling of hyper-reality was
already fading in the morning light. Could it be, I ask the
author, that the “scratchy, Super-8” quality to dream
recollection has less to do with the dreams themselves than
some function of the mind that retroactively dims them
down? Is there some neural tweak that preserves our ability
to make the distinction between daytime and nocturnal
worlds, perhaps to ensure our sanity?
“That’s a great question,” Warren says with enthusiasm,
pausing. “Do you remember what you had for breakfast
yesterday?”
“Uh, no.”
“Do you remember where you had it?”
“I do, but only because I usually have it in the same
place.”
The washed out quality of dreams is a function of
fragmentary recollection more than anything else, says the
author. “When I think back, I’m not in there,” Warren
explains. “It’s the difference between memory and immediate
experience.” On top of that, he says, short-term memory
doesn’t function as well during sleep.
“When we think of our dreams, we imagine them as these
washed out, grainy things, but that’s only our memory of
it.”
The most appealing aspect of lucid dreams is that there are
simple exercises to coax them into being, although success
varies from person to person. Warren travelled with his
girlfriend to a lucid dreaming seminar in Hawaii, held by
sleep researcher Stephen LaBerge, where would-be lucid
dreamers were given a straightforward, if metaphysical,
rule of thumb. Throughout the day, they were to ask
themselves if they were actually dreaming rather than
awake. The theory is that if you get into the habit of
asking yourself this in the waking state, the habit will
carry over into the dream world. And if you reach lucidity,
it doesn’t take long to prove to yourself it’s a dream, and
not back in the waking world asking weird questions.
(Digital clocks are supposedly difficult to make out in
lucid dreams, as is text in books and newspapers. Also,
light switches don’t seem to work for some reason.)
Once you’ve done a few tests and know you’re dreaming, the
sky’s the limit. You can fly, dispatch large predators with
a wave of a hand, storm the heavily fortified temple of
French stewardesses, whatever.
The
HeadTrip relates
some fascinating laboratory research into lucid dreaming.
In his research at Stanford University, Laberge’s subjects
were hooked up with sensors to record their rapid eye
movements (REM), indicative of their eyes tracking dream
objects. When the sleeping subjects became lucid in their
dreams, they followed previously given instructions,
signalling their awareness by a precise pattern of
left-right, left-right eye movements. They use a different
pattern of eye movements to signal their moment of
awakening back in the lab. On a few occasions, some
experienced lucid dreamers weren’t actually waking;
instead, they were “waking up” in a dream-lab
indistinguishable from the “real” one.
“One of the core insights of cognitive neuroscientists is
that all we ever experience of reality are simulations
created by our brains, Warren writes in The
Head Trip. Our
nervous systems build a model of the world based on the two
streams of data. The first stream is the obvious one:
sensory data. This comes in, all broken up, through the
eyes and other sense organs, and then it gets routed by the
thalamus up to higher levels of the cortex for model
assembly. Thus, the world we see out there is more
accurately a model that gets built in here. But this is
where it gets tricky: this sensory data isn’t just
assembled, it’s also interpreted. And that interpretation
relies on a second stream of data: not what we see, but
what we expect to see, and sometimes even what we want to
see.”
Laberge and other sleep scientists believe this commingling
of internal and external worlds leads to an extraordinary
conclusion. We are always dreaming, by definition: our
expectations and projections play a larger role in the
waking world than we’d probably like to think. It’s eyes
wide shut, 24/7. This notion is either liberating or
unsettling, depending on your point of view. For Warren, it
brings to mind a short story by the Argentinean master of
magical realism, Jorge Luis Borges. In The
Circular Ruins, an old
sorcerer slowly dreams another man into existence and
releases him into the world. At the end of the story, the
sorcerer “… relaxes with relief, with humiliation, with
terror… that he, too, was but appearance, that another man
was dreaming him.”
There is much of sleep and dreaming we still don’t
understand. Even the “normal” eight-hour, unbroken period
of sleep turns out to be more of a cultural standard than a
pre-wired necessity. The fast-talking author explains,
sipping his tea: “I think the eight-hour crunch of sleep is
one kind of an expression of a larger kind of cultural
need, of championing a certain kind of rational waking
activity that gets things done. It’s part of our culture
running helter-skelter through the world.
“Other cultures have different kinds of attitudes and their
sleep patterns seem to reflect that,” he says, pointing out
the Mediterranean habit of siesta. In his book, Warren
notes that eight hours of consolidated sleep is really one
option among many, adding, “We likely do ourselves a
disservice when we insist on its universality.” And therein
lies a fascinating scientific discovery.
Centuries ago, Western sleep cycles were pretty much set by
sunrise and sunset. Candlelight and fireplaces allowed our
ancestors to play a bit on the margins, and the low light
intensity didn’t interfere with the production of
melatonin, the sleep-initiating hormone produced by the
pineal gland. But the introduction of electric light
represented a radical break from the past, and it did more
than turn our evenings into dreamlike fantasias of burning
filaments. It turbocharged capitalism, with work hours and
leisure time compressing sleep into unbroken eight-hour
blocks.
When sleep researchers in Maryland introduced their
subjects to the normal, midwinter light conditions in the
Northern Hemisphere, free from artificial sources of light,
they discovered an interesting thing. Initially, the
subjects would fall asleep earlier in the evening, but
sleep for up to 14 hours. After paying off their “sleep
deficit,” their sleep would return to an eight-hour
stretch, but it was now in two parts, punctuated by a
lengthy period of waking, of approximately three to five
hours. The researchers discovered this period of nocturnal
awareness had its own unique neurochemical signature. The
high levels of prolactin in the blood accompanied a dreamy,
relaxed state of mind in which hours passed by like
minutes. It’s not a place we moderns go often.
The sheer thought of it terrified Warren. “If I had to sit
and stare at the ceiling for six hours every night, my mind
would tear through the inside of my skull like the
Tasmanian Devil,” he predicted. But when he put himself to
the test, occupying a cabin for a three-week stint up
north, he began to fall asleep earlier and found himself
awakening in the wee hours into this sanguine state of mind
for the first time in his life.
Sleep researchers have discovered this is the answer to the
puzzling references in medieval literature to a “first
sleep” and “second sleep” – the evenings of ancient
Europeans were once divided into portions, and they would
frequently rise at night to talk with family or sit and
muse under the stars.
Warren quotes sleep researcher Thomas Wehr, who mused of
ancestral people waking from their dreams and pondering
their significance in the dark: “It is tempting to
speculate that, in prehistoric times, this arrangement
provided a channel between dreams and waking life that has
gradually been closed off as humans have compressed and
consolidated their sleep. If so, then this alternation
might provide a psychological explanation for the
observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with
the wellspring of myths and fantasies.”
In his research, Wehr found that people entrained to
natural cycles vary at the time they awake at night. He
speculates that this is an adaptation that allowed tribal
people to function as a collective of eyes, with unbroken
awareness throughout the night. Does this also mean that
they can also salvage dream material with greater facility
than we do? Warren suspects this is so, citing his own
experience of voluntary isolation in a cabin up north as
personal confirmation. “You’re able to go back online and
think about the things that happened in the dream and bring
them back into the dream,” he says. “There’s sort of like
this dialogue between the two states. You can think about
the kind of cognitive flexibility it gives you.
“Indigenous
cultures often have rooms full of people, with perhaps a
fire going and several animals around,” Warren notes. In
his book, he quotes anthropologist Carol Worthman, who
disparages the Western bed as a “machine” for sleeping.
“You’ve got a steel frame that comes up from the floor, a
bottom mattress that looks totally machine-like, and all
these heavily padded surfaces – duvets and pillows and
sheets.” It’s arid and controlled, defined by a
“decontextualized person.” Although we are not without
contact in our hi-tech sleep machines, it “… has been
partially mitigated for Americans by the evolution of bed
size, from twin, to double, to queen, to king.”
There is much more in Warren’s book on other states of
consciousness – the daydream, hypnosis, the “zone” of
athletes and artists and the “pure conscious event” of
meditators. The author is not big on genetic determinism;
the idea that we’re trying to run advanced cultural
software on brains that stopped evolving 40 thousand years
ago. To counter this persistent notion, he champions
“neuroplasticity,” a term favoured by brain researchers who
are discovering the innate potential of the human brain to
alter its own state.
In the early twentieth century, the human brain was
compared to a telephone switchboard. Over time, it’s been
seen as an “enchanted loom,” a computer and even a
hologram. Yet when it comes to states of consciousness,
we’re trafficking in metaphors for largely unknown
territory. We have plenty of maps, but as semioticians
famously remind us, the map is not the territory. And
although it sometimes seems like the big-brained, hairless
ape was a bad evolutionary bet, The
Head Trip argues
convincingly that we have barely begun to explore the
gelatinous gift inside our skulls.
Geoff
Olson
